In addition, wildlife advocates also point to the failure of the South African Police Service to renew a contract for DNA testing of rhino horn evidence, among other government inactions. Also suspicious is the sidelining of some of the most effective anti-poaching personnel, including specific rangers, investigators, and prosecutors. Often, as detailed by Al Jazeera’s The Poacher’s Pipeline investigation, they have strategic contacts embedded in law enforcement and government bureaucracies, guaranteeing a degree of protection for their illicit dealings.īy Susie Ellis International Rhino FoundationĮxperts point to the abrupt closure last year of South Africa’s special “rhino court,” in Skukuza, as a likely example of syndicate influence. Those traders have connections with buyers in Asia and oversee the shipment of horns out of Africa. Rhino horn syndicates are multilevel criminal networks, with poachers and couriers managed and paid by regional bosses who mastermind and direct operations, receiving the rhino horns and supplying them to national-level traders. It creates a highly incompetent, corrupt, and dysfunctional landscape that these criminal networks then capitalize on-with the loser being the rhinos.” Crosta believes that “Poaching syndicates have government officials in their pockets. Over the last four years, he has led an undercover investigation on rhino trafficking and poaching in South Africa. “It is difficult to convey the scale of the problem,” says Andrea Crosta, executive director of Earth League International, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit dedicated to fighting wildlife crime. In recent years, it seems, the anti-poaching battleground has expanded, as criminal networks appear to be infiltrating South Africa’s judicial and bureaucratic structures. Poachers have killed more than 8,200 rhinos in South Africa during the past decade from 2012 to 2017, Kruger’s white rhino numbers fell from 10,500 to about 5,100. Kruger is home to two rhino species: about 500 black rhinos, which have a pointed lip for browsing on shrubs, and the more numerous white rhinos, with a squared lip for grazing on grass. The poachers are infiltrators from Mozambique, which abuts Kruger’s eastern border, as well as impoverished local villagers who sell horns to criminal networks that smuggle them to Asian countries-mainly China and Vietnam-to be sold for use in traditional medicines or made into bracelets, carvings, and trinkets. Kruger, which encompasses land in Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces, has long been a key target of poachers who kill rhinos for their horns, says Johan Jooste, former head of special projects at SANParks, the agency that administers the country’s preserves. Urgent dispatches are no surprise to these rangers, members of a special operations unit. It was October 2016, and I’d come to Skukuza, a SANparks post inside Kruger, to see how anti-poaching operations are carried out in the famed 7,500-square-mile preserve, where about 30 percent of the world’s estimated remaining 18,000 wild rhinos live. “Go now! The spoor is fresh!” Sandra Snelling, an operations manager for South African National Parks (SANParks), exclaimed, sending a squad of rangers on their next mission: tracking the poachers who had just killed a rhino in Kruger National Park.
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