The black market for endangered birds

Laws that ban markets are sometimes the blueprints for the black markets that arise in the place of legal markets. That turns out to be the case in the black market for endangered birds.

 The NY Times has the story:

He Once Trafficked in Rare Birds. Now, He Tells How It’s Done.--After a chance encounter in Brazil, Johann Zillinger became one of the world’s most prolific wildlife smugglers. Three decades and two prison stints later, he says he has gone straight.

"In the early years, Mr. Zillinger was able to get the birds through customs in Brazil by greasing some palms. Over time, though, airport officials’ demands rose too high, Mr. Zillinger said, and he focused on eggs. Strapped to his body, the eggs would keep warm crossing the ocean to Portugal, where he would transfer them from human to conventional incubator. The hardest part, he said, was not cracking them. “That’s the 10 percent we lost, but other than that, it was foolproof.”

...

"The key to laundering animals, Mr. Zillinger said without irony, is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), a treaty adopted in 1975 to ensure that the legal trade in wildlife does not drive threatened species to extinction. Those can be traded only if they fall under one of many exceptions. The crucial exception for traffickers was captive breeding.

"Mr. Zillinger and other traffickers found that they could obtain a valid CITES document to disguise smuggled animals as captive bred. They simply needed to claim that they were, and, after all but the most incredible claims, officials would issue paperwork declaring wild, trafficked birds to be born in captivity. CITES officials have admitted that such documents were wrongfully issued."

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And here's the report on CITES corruption, from TRAFFIC.org:

Addressing corruption in CITES documentation processes