From Scientific American…
If you use cocaine and need a reason to quit—or one to avoid starting in the first place—think conservation. The national parks of Guatemala and other countries have become the preferred haven of drug traffickers who usurp protected areas and burn the forest to serve their own purposes and the demands of their customers, according to Roan McNab, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) country director for Guatemala.
“They systematically destroy and sabotage forests so they can put in landing fields,” McNab said at the WCS State of the Wild conference on April 15. The landing fields enable them to move drugs—particularly cocaine—north by plane to feed American habits.
Similar misuse of parklands has plagued Colombia since at least the 1990s, and the Sierra de la Macarena National Park there is home to some 13,000 hectares (32,100 acres) of coca plantations, according to field data compiled by the illegal-drug monitoring U.N. body the Sistema Integrado de Monitoreo de Cultivos Ilicitos. As a result, officials have targeted the park for herbicide spraying from airplanes. Of course, this indiscriminately kills both coca and forest vegetation as well as poses a risk to the area’s frogs and other amphibians.
In Guatemala, drug traffickers clear a new landing strip on average once every six months to avoid being caught. read full article…