Mexico CitY: From live snakes that smugglers stuff with packets of cocaine to the white tigers drug lords keep as exotic pets, rare animals are being increasingly sucked into Mexico's deadly narcotics trade.
Drug gang leaders like to show off rarities like sea turtle skin boots and build ostentatious private zoos at their mansions.
They also reap additional profits by sharing routes with animal traffickers who cram humming birds into cigarette packs and baby monkeys into car air conditioning ducts to be sold to underground pet traders in the United States.
Mexico's raging drug war killed some 5,700 people last year and some cartel leaders have even been rumoured to throw rivals to their big cats as food.
The global illegal trade in live species and animal parts - used for luxury accessories, Asian medicine or folk remedies like aphrodisiacs - is estimated to be worth up to $20 billion (Dh73.4 billion) a year, Interpol has said.
The big profits available from selling wildlife on the black market - where a certain type of endangered South American macaw can fetch $90,000 and a predatory python around $30,000 - are added incentive to Mexican gangs moving other contraband.
"You can sometimes make as much profit, if not more, than drug smuggling with less consequences, because law enforcement is not paying attention and if you are caught the penalty is just a slap on the wrist," said Crawford Allan, the North American head of wildlife trade watchdog group Traffic.
China and the United States are the largest markets for banned pets and animal products, making the US-Mexico border a busy corridor for the smuggling of many rare species from across Latin America and other parts of the world.
"There is some evidence the same people are trading in both [drugs and animals]," Allan said in Mexico City, where Traffic is helping train inspectors to spot banned animal shipments. In a major 2007 sting operation by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the largest of its kind, undercover agents spent three years infiltrating a ring smuggling endangered sea turtle skins from the shores of southern Mexico to as far north as Chicago.
Illegal drugs turned up on both sides of the border over the course of the investigation, US Fish and Wildlife agent Nicholas Chavez said.
In the US, marijuana was seized at one of the raided warehouses filled with animal skin boots. On the Mexican side, smugglers offered to ship cocaine along with the hides of turtles whose numbers are rapidly dwindling in the wild.
Bags of liquid cocaine, transparent and only barely visible due to its slight yellow hue, have been found floating in or lining plastic bags containing live tropical fish. In one shocking case at Miami's international airport, some of the 312 boa constrictors found in a 1993 shipment from Colombia were surgically implanted with condoms full of cocaine weighing a total of 36kg. All the snakes ended up dead.
- $20b is the estimated annual global trade in live species and animal parts
- $90,000 is the cost of a certain type of endangered South American macaw sold in the black market
- 5,700 people were killed last year in Mexico's raging drug war and some cartel leaders have even been rumoured to throw rivals to their big cats as food.
