Critics slam Mexico’s ‘corrupt’ and ‘inhumane’ exotic animals market
Lions can be purchased legally in Guadalajara for $4,000 to $7,000. Photo by LIBERO Santuario.
Beyond the stalls lined with love potions and Santa Muerte statuettes, Mexico City’s labyrinth-like Sonora market houses thousands of caged animals.
Rows of visibly distressed kittens, puppies, piglets, lambs, goats, and giant rabbits are crammed into the tiniest of cells. Alongside them are tanks containing iguanas, turtles, piranhas, and enormous toads used for witchcraft, plus a huge variety of caged birds, including canaries, turkeys, and peacocks.
But the most exotic animals for sale are those hidden from view.
“The Sonora market is the nucleus of animal-trafficking in Mexico City,” Dr. Leonora Esquivel, cofounder of the animal rights group AnimaNaturalis Mexico, told VICE News. “You can find any kind of animal there. They aren’t all exhibited but if you have the contacts you can get toucans, monkeys, lions, etc.”
When VICE News made a discreet inquiry, one vendor pulled a tightly wrapped ball of cloth from a shelf packed with opaque tubs and cardboard boxes.
A baby Morelet’s crocodile will set you back $200 in a Guadalajara pet shop.
Unwrapping it, he revealed a meter-long Texas rat snake that had been bound so tightly it could not move. The asking price was 700 pesos, or about $40. Moments later, a police officer came strolling past, seemingly unfazed by the chaos around her and the relentless cacophony of screeching animals…
Why do millions of fish keep dying in Mexico’s Lake Cajititlán?
Nearly 50 tons of dead fish have been removed from Lake Cajititlán in the last 10 days.
Great swathes of the surface of Mexico’s Lake Cajititlán were obscured last week as hundreds of thousands of dead fish surfaced and drifted toward the shore.
Over 100 local fishermen and conservation workers have removed almost 50 tons of freshwater fish from the lake in the western state of Jalisco in the last 10 days, after Cajititlán was struck by the latest in a string of mysterious mass deaths.
The putrid smell of rotting fish hung over the lake where workers have been busily scooping the fish from the surface, then wheeling them away, prior to shovelling them into the mouths of diggers more commonly used in construction work.
More than four million fish weighing 156 tons were hauled from the same lake last September in the worst such incidence to date. In total, 290 tons of dead fish surfaced in the lake throughout all of 2014…
Click here to read this article in full at Latin Correspondent.
Desperate relatives denounce forced disappearances in Jalisco
Relatives of the disappeared demand justice at a demonstration in Guadalajara.
Antonio Reynoso was last seen alive when masked police officers dragged him out of a children’s birthday party in front of his six-year-old daughter.
His mother, Mayra Hernandez, arrived just in time to witness him being violently hauled into one of seven police cars with obscured license plates that had pulled up outside.
“They say they didn’t take him away, but I saw it. They were beating him. He was handcuffed and bleeding,” Hernandez told Al Jazeera.
Jalisco state police officers arrested four en accused of stealing cars, she said, but only three were later charged. Reynoso disappeared without a trace.
That incident took place in Guadalajara, capital of western Jalisco state, on August 30, 2013.
Two years on, Reynoso, an unemployed 23-year-old who harboured dreams of becoming a chef, has become just another statistic in a state where forced disappearances have grown increasingly common.
Maria Vazquez has searched tirelessly for her daughter since she went missing last November.
According to the Mexican government, federal and local registers, 26,029 people were missing across the country as of April 30.
Jalisco officially accounted for 2,160 of these disappearances, but analysts say the actual figure is likely much higher…
Click here to read this feature in full at Al Jazeera English.
The Tequila Files 