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Chile’s Atacama desert is one of the driest places on Earth, a surprisingly cool environment, sucked clean of moisture by the cold ocean to the west. This arid, golden landscape is home to many rare species of cacti, which attract professional and amateur botanists from around the world keen to make discoveries and experience the thrill of naming a new species.
But they are not the only ones prowling the sands: Atacama has become a hotspot for succulent smuggling.
The parallel market in plants is growing and rare cacti are in high demand. It is a lucrative cross-border trade. Individual specimens – particularly those that are visually attractive or interesting – can sell for tens of thousands of dollars.
But the trade has a huge negative impact on biodiversity, and has become the frontier of a novel legal approach to conservation: suing criminals not just for smuggling but to restore the wider damage they have done to ecosystems.
In February, Andrea Piombetti and Mattia Crescentini were found guilty of illegally importing and exporting cacti by the public prosecutor of Ancona in Italy. They were given suspended sentences of 18 months in prison and a €25,000 (£21,000) fine; and one year in prison and a €18,000 fine respectively.
Their conviction followed a large-scale investigation in 2021 – Operation Atacama – during which law enforcement agencies discovered cacti in the Eriosyce and Copiapoa genera at a home in Ancona and traced them back to Chile. These endangered species are particularly sought after by collectors.
The two men had posted the cacti from Chile to contacts in Greece and Romania, who redirected packages to Italy. The intention was to sell the plants on to a network of buyers across Europe and Asia. They also illegally sold cacti directly to customers in the US and Japan.
Piombetti alone had uprooted more than 900 cacti during repeated trips to the Atacama desert. Piombetti and Crescentini could not be contacted for comment.
These activities are illegal under Italian laws that apply the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (Cites), which aims to ensure that no wild species “becomes or remains subject to unsustainable exploitation”. It lists rare succulents among the plants under its protection.
Cactus expert Andrea Cattabriga, president of the Associazione per la Biodiversità e la sua Conservazione (ABC), says succulents in the Atacama desert are already under threat from the climate crises and mining, and poaching is exacerbating those problems.
As well as harming particular species, the illegal trade in cacti damages the wider ecosystem, including the insects that rely on their flowers for nectar. “The collection of a few specimens can really affect the species that could face extinction,” says Cattabriga. “But each living form in the desert is important because it is a very selective environment where biodiversity is very complex.”
Cattabriga helped investigators identify the species and get them sent safely back home to Chile.
He then became involved in the legal case, entering a civil claim alongside the criminal one with the support of the NGO Conservation Litigation. They argued that poaching and smuggling damaged ABC’s work in cacti conservation, making it harder to protect species in the wild and to promote sustainable legal production in nurseries. This is known in legal terms as “moral harm”.
The court agreed, ordering the criminals to pay the organisation €20,000 (£16,000) to further its conservation work, as well as legal costs. Cattabriga said this would be used to fund cacti research projects, including some in Chile.
The case, part of a growing trend of biodiversity litigation, is one of the first successful claims of its kind. And conservationists around the world are hoping it will not be the last.
Blair Atwebembeire, an environmental lawyer in Uganda, is exploring similar lawsuits linking environmental and wildlife laws, to try to tackle poaching of pangolins – the most trafficked animal in the world. “Any remedy that looks at a deeper solution that restores the environment is key … as opposed to only looking at one animal that has been killed or one tree that has been cut down.”
Lovish Sharma, legal adviser to the Wildlife Trust of India and an advocate at the high court of Delhi, is trying to raise awareness of existing legal provisions in India that allow parties to seek compensation for damage done to the environment.
He says there have been some successful cases involving wild boar and deer hunting, although compensation was low. “The difficulty is how to attach monetary value to a species? It should be proportional to the harm caused. We are developing scientific reports which would be tabled before the judicial officers at the time of conviction, so that they have a better understanding of how to compute the damage.”
Conservation Litigation, which is keen to support these claims, wants to set a strong precedent that people who harm an ecosystem can be held responsible for restoring it.
“This isn’t about making money,” says co-executive director Dr Jacob Phelps, principal investigator at Lancaster University’s conservation governance lab. “It’s about taking actions to recover.”
Rika Fajrini, of the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law, says Indonesia is one of many countries that approach wildlife trade violations primarily through criminal punishment, “which fails to make offenders bear the true cost of their crimes”.
“The Italian case highlights that harm to wildlife is also harm to the environment – one that requires restoration, not just punishment of offenders,” says Fajrini.
