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Conservation and Ranger Team (in Peru)
Photo: Philip Bethge / DER SPIEGEL
In early June 2022, British journalist Dom Philipps and indigenous expert Bruno Pereira were murdered in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, presumably because they had worked to protect the rainforest.
At the same time I was doing research in nearby Peru.
There, too, lumberjacks, gold panners and drug dealers are advancing on the last intact forest areas, sometimes with violence.
The danger is ever present.
Example of drug trafficking: Peru is the second largest cocaine producer in the world.
Rainforest is illegally cut down to grow the plants.
The goods are transported away via illegally constructed airstrips in the jungle or the few roads in the region.
Porters carry the cocaine up the mountains on foot
Porters even carry the cocaine up the mountains on foot, my companion, the conservationist Hauke Hoops from the Frankfurt Zoological Society, told me.
As we drove down the eastern flank of the Andes on serpentine roads, heavy SUVs were waiting at the side of the road.
They would take over the goods, said Hoops, it was not advisable to stop here.
The cocaine dealers are dangerous.
Since 2020, almost 20 indigenous local politicians have been killed in Peru in the context of cocaine trafficking.
And yet people like Hoops or the game warden Miguel Sacaro, whom we later met in Peru's Manu National Park, don't stop working to protect nature.
Sacaro belongs to the indigenous Matsiguenka ethnic group and protects the land of his ancestors.
Rangers like him, especially those from the local population, are irreplaceable in nature conservation.
However, they are often underpaid, poorly equipped and poorly trained.
Not only does this limit their ability to protect wildlife, it also puts them at risk themselves.
The British Thin Green Line Foundation reports that more than 1,000 game wardens have died in action worldwide in the last ten years.
Many of them were killed by commercial poachers and armed militias.
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Conservationist Hoops, Editor Bethge (in Peru)
Photo: Private
In order to solve the world crisis of nature negotiated at the beginning of December at the UN Biodiversity Summit in Montreal, Canada, it is therefore particularly important that money and aid get to where they are most needed: in the communities on the edge of the wilderness and among the infantry the nature and wildlife conservationists.
To me, they are the true heroes of diversity.