A notorious sloth cartel kingpin vanished and we tried to find him.
A notorious sloth cartel kingpin vanished and we tried to find him.
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During three years of reporting on the wildlife tourism industry, I’d become familiar with the demand in Latin America and beyond for sloths as viral video-starring pets and as photo props for tourists visiting Amazonian Brazil and Peru. I’d also seen what tourists don’t see—how these docile, delicate animals, almost always babies, are kept in small cages, often dying after a few weeks in captivity. But what I hadn’t seen was the supply side of the illegal trade in sloths—how they get from tree to cage.
I’d come to Colombia to find a man named Isaac Bedoya, described by the Colombian media as Latin America’s most notorious sloth trader. The country’s wildlife authorities estimate that he and his accomplices captured and sold as many as 10,000 sloths into the pet trade during the three decades before his arrest in 2015.
Two years later, Bedoya, despite being under house arrest, was caught selling sloths again, but for reasons that remain unclear, police didn’t pursue new charges. Since then, there have been no new press reports about his whereabouts or activities. Is Bedoya still the top trader, and if not, who has taken his place?
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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/a...s-sloth-cartel
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