“Wildlife laundering poses a serious risk to national and international security, causing environmental and socioeconomic harms and creating opportunities for organised crime and conflict actors.”
This is according to An Illusion of Legality: Wildlife Laundering in Colombia and Mexico, a new RUSI report by Jennifer Scotland and https://www.rusi.org/people/weeden which says rogue traders and criminal organisations − including drug-trafficking cartels and armed groups – are exploiting supposedly legitimate wildlife industries to launder illicit profits and mask the illegal origins of high-value species, including big cats, caimans, sharks and poison frogs.
This groundbreaking analysis shows how, in Colombia and Mexico, breeding farms, wildlife sanctuaries, commercial traders and seafood companies are used to disguise the extraction, transport and export of illegally harvested species, as part of a global illegal wildlife market estimated to be worth US$20 billion annually.
The report says that big cats in Mexico − including lions, tigers and jaguars − face significant wildlife-laundering risks through poorly regulated wildlife sanctuaries, which can be used as fronts for illegal trade, under the guise of rescue or rehabilitation. Large shipments of big cats from Mexican sanctuaries to overseas facilities have raised international concern, underscoring vulnerabilities created by weak oversight, limited inspections, and potential collusion between operators and corrupt officials.
In Colombia, the report identifies how the large-scale trade in caiman skins for the fashion industry has been highly exposed to wildlife laundering, with roughly one-third of exports between 1990 and 2016 reportedly illegally wild-sourced. The report finds that strict controls on the breeding of other endangered species has driven the trade underground, causing them to be smuggled out of Colombia and integrated into ‘legal’ breeding operations in other countries. Poison frogs – sourced by rural Colombian harvesters for as little as $0.50 – can fetch up to US$850 in international hobbyist markets, demonstrating how wildlife laundering benefits fraudulent breeders at the expense of vulnerable communities.
The report further describes how some armed groups have used illegal pirarucu fishing to launder drug-trafficking proceeds, moving fish across borders – sometimes alongside cocaine – to circumvent national controls. Similar criminal convergence is found in Mexico’s shark fin and sea cucumber trades, where large-scale buyers and exporters with suspected cartel links have laundered illegally harvested products into legal supply chains in the US and Asia.
Jennifer Scotland, the lead author of the report, said: “Our report shows how rogue actors and organised crime groups subvert the legal trade in endangered wildlife to further their own gains, harming biodiversity and undermining economic opportunities for local communities. To mitigate these harms, wildlife laundering needs to be taken much more seriously.”
Ruth Helena Alves da Mota, Content Partnership Manager at LSEG Risk Intelligence, which supported RUSI’s independent research, said: “The findings underscore that combating wildlife laundering requires a collective effort – particularly intelligence sharing across borders, sectors, and disciplines are critical to dismantling transnational networks and ensuring that legal markets do not become safe havens for illegal trade.”
Key Findings
- Organised crime groups – including cartel-linked actors – use legal businesses to launder wildlife. The report says: “Corporate entities… can be used by rogue traders and organised criminal groups… to exploit regulatory and enforcement gaps and launder illegally sourced species.”
- Wildlife laundering is under-detected and rarely treated as a serious crime. “Documented cases – let alone follow-up criminal investigations – remain few and far between.”
- Weak enforcement capacity enables criminal infiltration of supply chains.
“Wildlife laundering… is predominantly enabled by weak enforcement capacity and limited resources.” - Cartels exploit regulatory loopholes and cross-border asymmetries. “Opportunities for illicit actors to engage in wildlife laundering are facilitated by regulatory asymmetries, legal loopholes, informalities across the sector and limited enforcement of fishing regulations.”
Key Recommendations
- Close loopholes used by criminal groups to disguise illegal activity. “Preventive reforms could target known loopholes, including those highlighted in this paper.”
- Classify wildlife trafficking as a predicate offence for money laundering.
“By making wildlife trafficking a predicate offence for money laundering… authorities could disrupt the financial infrastructure that sustains trafficking networks.” - Strengthen international cooperation and destination-country due diligence.
“Greater accessibility of information around CITES permits would strengthen oversight… and make it easier… to detect fraudulent paperwork.” - Expand the use of technological tools to expose criminal laundering methods. “Advances in technology offer the potential to address a number of traceability and species identification challenges that facilitate wildlife laundering.”
Conclusion
Wildlife laundering in Colombia and Mexico is not only a conservation issue but a security threat that enables organised crime and conflict actors to diversify their income streams, legitimise illicit proceeds and deepen their influence across rural communities and transnational markets. By revealing how legal businesses can be manipulated to conceal illegal wildlife flows, the report underscores the urgent need for a systemic shift in enforcement and regulatory strategies. Tackling wildlife laundering effectively requires authorities to target corporate structures, disrupt financial networks, strengthen international coordination and recognise wildlife laundering as a serious transnational crime.
Wildlife laundering cases remain rarely detected, let alone investigated as organised criminal activity. Irregularities in licensed wildlife businesses are typically handled as administrative breaches, obscuring the role of cartel financiers, corrupt officials and corporate intermediaries who profit from the trade. The authors argue that unless authorities adopt a more robust, cross-border and intelligence-led approach, wildlife laundering will continue to provide criminal groups with a lucrative, low-risk revenue stream that deepens insecurity, threatens biodiversity and undermines community livelihoods.
Background
Jennifer Scotland is a Research Analyst in RUSI’s Organised Crime and Policing group, specialising in environmental crime, illicit economies and conflict dynamics in Latin America and Africa. Anne-Marie Weeden is a Senior Research Fellow at RUSI and leads the Environmental Crime Programme. An Illusion of Legality: Wildlife Laundering in Colombia and Mexico, draws on 30 semi-structured interviews with officials, experts and practitioners across Colombia, Mexico and international bodies as well as a literature review, open-source data, and right-to-information requests to Colombian authorities.
