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 in the country’s recuperation.

Marcos Hidalgo
In 2016, agronomist Marcos Hidalgo created a nongovernmental organization to study and protect South America’s only species of bear, the spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus) of the tropical Andes region. A former staff member of Venezuela’s parks agency—the National Parks Institute (Inparques)—Hidalgo is currently a professor of ecology at Venezuela’s University of the Andes. Research conducted by his organization, Oso Andino Guaramacal, helped lay the groundwork for the creation on Aug. 1 of Venezuela’s 44th national park—Ramal de Calderas, a 500,000-square-kilometer (193,000-sq.-mile) protected area that straddles portions of the western states of Mérida, Barinas and Trujillo.

To study the elusive spectacled bear, Hidalgo typically uses 12 camera traps that were donated by Idea Wild, a U.S. nonprofit that helps equip biodiversity conservation projects in developing countries.

“It is a real challenge to do conservation in [Venezuela],” Hidalgo says. “It is hard to move around because we work in areas that are hard to access, and it is not easy to find four-wheel-drive vehicles and fuel. We do it because we can count on help from park guards and local guides that know the mountains, and because we’re committed.”

The spectacled bear is listed as in danger of extinction in Venezuela, mainly because its habitat is disappearing as land is cleared for large-scale agriculture. Hidalgo acknowledges that deforestation has accelerated in recent years because more Venezuelans are relying on wood as fuel for cooking in the absence of other fuels. Still, he pronounces himself “100% optimistic that the new national park will be a great contribution to the protection of the species.”

María Fernanda Puerto-Carrillo
Since 2007, biologist María Fernanda Puerto-Carrillo has led a jaguar-conservation project known as Sebraba. Working in a region of Venezuela just south of Lake Maracaibo, she goes house to house on behalf of the jaguar (Panthera onca), trying to convince ranchers and owners of African palm oil plantations that the large cat’s survival is crucial to the area’s ecosystem.

She is doing so with $1,500 in donations, plus 50,000 euros she received as a winner of the 2020 Future for Nature Award, an international prize given by the Dutch foundation of the same name. The prize money has allowed her to buy camera traps for jaguar-monitoring.

“About 80% of the forest in this area has been cleared and used for agriculture for 50 years,” she says. “All that remains in good shape is the 3,500-square-kilometer (1,350-sq.-mile) Ciénagas of Catatumbo National Park and a contiguous protected area. We’ve done population studies and estimate that some 120 jaguars live there. This is not a viable population in the long run because it is isolated. The animals are generally hunted when they leave the protected area.”

Humans also face inordinate danger in the region, inhabited as it is by Colombian guerrillas who rejected the peace agreement that the government struck in 2016 with armed insurgents. As if that weren’t enough, Puerto-Carrillo says the region south of Lake Maracaibo is now frequented by armed pirates who rob members of fishing communities.

Says Puerto-Carrillo: “Local residents have asked me why I protect jaguars when there are people dying of hunger and violence, and I respond that I’m not only caring for the animals, but also fighting for a healthy ecosystem of clean water and air to improve the lives of people.”

Clemente Balladares
In 2001, biologist Clemente Balladares began studying how to protect the hawksbill turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata) in the Gulf of Paria, the semi-enclosed Caribbean water body located between Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago at the mouth of the Orinoco River. On its shores, hawksbill nests are being plundered by residents of the region not only for turtle eggs and meat, but also for their shells, which are used to make jewelry and other products.

Balladares got to know the gulf as a representative of Venezuela’s Environment Ministry who was sent to investigate complaints of sea turtle poaching and trafficking. In 2003, he organized a project to preempt the poaching. His 20-member team scoured five of the gulf’s beaches for Hawksbill nests, which they brought back to a laboratory they had set up in Macuro, a town in the state of Sucre. When hatchlings emerged, they were released into local waters.

“It is a work of strategy,” Balladares says. “We try to get to [the nests] before the poachers, and it has worked well for us. In 2003 we estimate that 88% of the nests were robbed, and in 10 years we have lowered that share to 7%. In our best year, 2012, we released 14,000 turtles. Poaching began to increase again in 2016 because we couldn’t make as many trips due to lack of funds.”

In its early years, the project was adequately funded by the Environment Ministry. “Everything worked pretty well,” Balladares says. “I was able in one year to make 20 trips from Caracas to the Gulf of Paria, a remote region that takes 12 hours by road and two [hours] by boat to reach. And we had 20 people working. But around 2011 the money ran out.”

Balladares continues to work for the ministry, which Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro renamed as the Ministry of Popular Power for Ecosocialism. But the turtle-protection work is almost entirely funded by donations from foreign conservation nonprofits such as SEE Turtles and the Marine Conservation Action Fund (MCAF), a program of the New England Aquarium in the United States. The annual budget is $25,000, Balladares notes, but he says he is only attracting funding to cover half that amount.

The shortages don’t only concern money. Balladares says that these days when he travels to the town of Macuro, he brings his own gasoline and generators from Caracas due to fuel scarcity in outlying areas. MCAF Director Elizabeth Stephenson lauds the dedication of conservation scientists such as Balladares.

“It’s incredibly challenging to work with the background of economic and political distress, [and] not having the funds you need,” she says. “I’m full of admiration for what people like Clemente can accomplish with very few resources in the most difficult conditions. They are really doing it for us, because all of us in the world benefit from there being more sea turtles. It’s physically and emotionally demanding, and it would be easy to fall into despair; but people like Clemente keep going year after year.”

Stephenson says that in circumstances such as Venezuela’s, conservation cannot occur without the involvement of communities. “You do not want to go with this mentality of, ‘It doesn’t matter that you need to eat, we’re going to save the species,’” she says. “Clemente is gifted at finding solutions, like creating salaries for people who used to eat turtle eggs or poach turtle nests, giving them jobs to help with the nursery of the hatchery, for instance. The programs that are successful and lasting are the ones that find a way to coexist with people. There are no easy answers to that. It takes time and creativity.”

Yurasi Briceño
In 2015, biologist Yurasi Briceño founded a nonprofit Venezuelan research and conservation group to safeguard the Guiana dolphin (Sotalia guianensis) and other marine mammals found in Lake Maracaibo. The lake—South America’s largest, covering 13,000 square kilometers (5,000 sq. miles)—hosts a diverse ecosystem, thanks to its connection to the Caribbean Sea and, as a result, the mixing of salt water and fresh water. But it also faces ongoing environmental threats, largely on account of oil-extraction operations that have been conducted for decades from the lake’s vast welter of production wells and pipelines.

A prime focus of Briceño’s organization, Proyecto Sotalia, is to engage in environmental education and natural-resource dialogue in the fishing communities that ring Lake Maracaibo. She and her colleagues promote conservation of the dolphin not only because the mammal and its acrobatic leaps out of the water are a tourism draw, but also to ensure protection of the broader ecosystem that undergirds the lake’s community fisheries.

The blue-gray Guiana dolphin, typically over two meters in length, ranges in Atlantic coastal waters from Brazil to Central America. Classified as near threatened by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), its protection in Venezuela is complicated by the nation’s severe socioeconomic plight, which has driven five million people to migrate from the country in the past six years. Dolphin bycatch has long been a problem, but amid Venezuela’s economic collapse, people in recent years have deliberately targeted the marine mammal as a source of food. Typically, fishers catch the dolphin in large nets, remove its dorsal muscle, then dump the rest of the carcass back in the lake.

Briceño says that at the outset of 2020, she learned of the deliberate capture of 17 Guiana dolphins by fishers in one community. “They went fishing in their boats, but because they didn’t have much gasoline they didn’t want to get too far from the coast,” says Briceño, a doctoral candidate at the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research, the country’s main state-run scientific organization. “And there is where it’s easiest to catch dolphins.” She adds that the dolphin meat was not sold but, rather, distributed among community members for free. Says Briceño: “It is a community that almost never has electricity and lacks many necessities. We spoke with [residents], but we can’t oppose the capture of these animals if people are starving.”

Proyecto Sotalia conducted 95 interviews in seven communities last year along the shores of Lake Maracaibo. They disseminated their findings this year in Frontiers, an open-access publisher of peer-reviewed scientific articles, reporting that 70% of fishers had at least once eaten dolphin meat, though all maintained it was the product of unintentional bycatch. Over three quarters—78%—said they had caught Guiana dolphins accidentally at least once in their nets, which can be up to 600 meters long, and 34% said they unintentionally catch more than one each month.

Fishing for dolphins is against the law in Venezuela, and technically is punishable even if it occurs by accident, but Briceño says virtually no fishing enforcement is taking place in Lake Maracaibo due to a shortage of government funds and personnel.

“We estimate that 180 dolphins a year die as bycatch [in Lake Maracaibo],” Briceño says.

Scientists worry not only about the threat to the dolphin’s population, but also to human health. That’s because the flesh of dolphins that frequent Lake Maracaibo register concentrations of mercury far above international standards. “The mercury comes mostly from petroleum production,” she says. “There are thousands of [oil] wells in the lake, but the majority are unused because of the decline of the oil industry and its production. There are around 25,000 kilometers (15,500 miles) of underwater pipelines and they suffer at least 10 breaks per month.”

Venezuela’s socioeconomic crisis creates existential challenges for environmental watchdogs like Proyecto Sotalia. The group depends entirely on donations from international groups, functioning on an annual budget of $10,000 and volunteer work by members. The principal funder currently is Yaqu Pacha, a German nongovernmental group associated with the Nuremberg Zoo.

“It’s easy to do conservation when people’s stomachs are full, but it seems [like] a luxury when there is hunger,” says Yaqu Pacha founder Lorenzo von Fersen, an Argentine biologist who for years studied the Amazon River dolphin (Inia geoffrensis) in Ecuador. Adds von Fersen, who moved to Germany and now heads conservation and research at the Nuremberg Zoo: “But I believe that caring for biodiversity also helps people. And Venezuelan scientists are not only good; they also have great ingenuity and creativity to overcome difficulties that a European or American [scientist] might not.”