Venezuelan crisis doesn’t deter these four

Clockwise starting at top-left: Marcos Hidalgo, María Fernanda Puerto-Carrillo, Clemente Balladares, Yurasi Briceño.

Latin American conservationists have their hands full in the best of times, given the region’s chronically weak environmental enforcement and its perennial problems of illegal land clearing, poaching, wildlife trafficking and poorly regulated extractive projects. The challenge has only intensified amid Covid-19 and its socioeconomic impacts. But in few countries is the uphill species-preservation battle as steep as in Venezuela, where the pandemic has amplified a decade-long socioeconomic crisis driven in large part by the country’s political dysfunction. The picture is undeniably grim, but not one without hope considering the extraordinary Venezuelans who somehow continue working to safeguard vulnerable animal species amid the country’s co-occurring crises of food and fuel shortages, deteriorating health care, hyperinflation and more. Here we describe the work of four conservation scientists, all pushing in their different ways against colossal odds toward a similar goal—to make habitat protection a central ingredient... Read more →