Narco folly: inside the crumbling Honduran zoo built by a drug cartel

In the early morning, a team of young biologists drives off to start their shift at the Joya Grande zoo. They are tasked with supporting the remaining zookeepers in repairing damaged cages and helping to improve the living conditions of the animals once legally and illegally imported by “the previous owners”: Central America’s most powerful drug traffickers , the Cachiros.

“We are here to restore what we can and try to keep a zoo together that was not designed or built by professionals,” says Lourdes Alvarado, a wildlife management technician and leader of the team of biologists from the Honduran National Institute of Forest Conservation (ICF). “Our only focus is to ensure these animals live dignified lives in captivity.”

Joya Grande – “the Great Jewel” – was once the pride of the infamous Cachiros cartel, a criminal organisation that began to monopolise the shipment of drugs through Central America in the early 2000s.

At the height of their dominance, the Cachiros controlled about 90% of the clandestine airstrips used for aerial drug trafficking across Honduras and made an estimated $1bn (£780m) a year .

With this cash pile, the Rivera Maradiaga brothers, Javier and Devis– considered the heads of the Cachiros – obtained a licence in 2010 to open the Great Jewel and import animals from around the world.

The zoo sits in a remote region of Honduras, a three-hour drive and a labyrinth of dirt roads away from the main route connecting the cities of San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa. The location leads experts to believe that the zoo was never intended for the public but built as a way for the cartel to obtain licences to import and keep the animals and launder money.

The zoo is also characteristic of narco-culture, according to Oscar Estrada, a Honduran journalist and author of Tierra de Narcos (Land of Narcos).

“Narcos are usually fascinated by predators such as lions, tigers, crocodiles and so on, as these are the kings of the jungle, and they see themselves as these animals in a totemic sense,” Estrada says. “They don’t see themselves as demons who want to cause terror for individual pleasure.”

Builders engaged by the Cachiros tried to copy La Aurora zoo in Guatemala , but without an architectural plan or a strategy for collecting and keeping the animals. The lack of expertise becomes evident upon comparing the sizes of the cages.

The Association of Zoos and Aquariums guidelines recommend a minimum space of 185.8 sq m to keep lions and 144 sq m to keep tigers. A Grand Jewel cage intended for two lions was 32.8 sq m and a tiger’s cage was 31.5 sq m.

The tigers were the Cachiros’ most prized possessions and they had them frequently reproduce with the help of a vet flown in from Guatemala. According to Alvarado, two tigers and one lion were born with hip dysplasia due to frequent and unsupervised reproduction efforts and today suffer chronic pain.

“We were discussing the option to put these animals to sleep due to their pain, but because of a wave of false information claiming we were planning to massacre animals in the zoo, we had to cancel that,” Alvarado says. Instead, they are treated regularly to manage their condition.

Many indigenous species, like jaguars and tapirs, are so domesticated that we cannot set them free

Lourdes Alvarado, biologist

The Grand Jewel became a problem for the Honduran authorities after the decline of the Cachiros. The cartel’s downfall began in 2013 when the government started seizing its properties , worth between $500m and $800m. That was followed by the surrender of the two brothers to US authorities.

The Great Jewel was among the seized properties, and it has since been under the management of the Bureau for the Administration of Seized Assets (OABI).

According to Marco Zelaya Reyes, appointed director of OABI in February, the zoo is largely in deficit. In its 11 years of operation by the bureau, it has generated about 1m lempiras (£31,500) and cost more than 114m lempiras. The average monthly food bill for the animals is 800,000 lempiras (about £25,000).

“It is extremely complicated to run confiscated businesses created for the sole purpose of money laundering or entertainment of criminal organisations because these businesses are not auto-sustainable,” says Christian Bernundez, a lawyer for the OABI. “Without the illicit cashflow, it is virtually impossible to run this zoo because its legal income cannot cover the expenditures.”

Recently, the zoo staff denounced the OABI for halting salary payments , and said at least 13 animals had died due to the zoo’s precarious conditions. The zoo has been closed to the public until a settlement can be reached.

Management and workers have exchanged allegations, including the suspicion that the cartel still exerts some kind of control through the staff. According to Estrada, the Rivera Maradiaga brothers’ surrender may not have meant the end of the Cachiros cartel but its evolution to a more underground existence.

“After my appointment, I was notified that many of the zoo’s employees were the same ones hired by the criminal group from which we confiscated the properties, which created a huge conflict of interest in my eyes,” says Reyes. “Many employees are just waiting for the ‘former owners’ to show up again and take over.”

Zoo employees did not comment on the claims of over potential connections to drug trafficking and say their dispute with OABI was solely about salary issues. “The management from OABI just shows up and makes promises they don’t keep,” says a zookeeper who chose to remain anonymous. “We have been without pay for over two months, and I really have no idea how some people are surviving this period, but they continue working to keep the animals alive.”

In response to the conflict, the ICF launched an intervention in May , sending biologists to improve conditions for the animals and bring the zoo up to the required standard to be opened to the public.

For Mike*, a biologist attached to the ICF, the intervention is also an issue of trust. “When we first arrived at the zoo, many zookeepers decided to distrust us instantly. Many did not want to believe that our only concern was and still is the animals’ welfare,” he says, acknowledging the continuing tensions. “We cannot ask any questions about the prior owners. It is this mystery that remains.”

An added challenge for the biologists dealing with the animals is their “peculiar behaviour”, says Alvarado. “The tigers behave like cats and are used to being petted, though you should not do that,” she says. “Many indigenous species, like jaguars and tapirs (and more), are so domesticated that we cannot set them free. They were not held under typical zoo conditions.”

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The two-month ICF intervention significantly stabilised conditions within the zoo but has now ended. After negotiations, the zoo will soon open its gates again, but the future of Joya Grande is still unclear.

Reyes believes the zoo should be closed and the animals relocated due to the conditions, the costs, and the lack of vets.

“The intervention was a success, and we were able to carefully bring the body weight of the animals back to safe levels, place vaccines, and make significant repairs to the cages,” Alvarado says.

“But for now, we don’t know what will happen with the zoo and the animals.”

* Name changed