Rare Plants Pilfered in Mexico, Sold in U.S. : Cactus Smuggling--A Prickly Problem

They grow in Mexico and are smuggled into the United States in car trunks, laundry bags and inside the panels of trucks.

“I’ve even heard stories of Mexicans tying plants to their waists and swimming across the border,” said Douglas Fuller, a botanist for the World Wildlife Fund in Washington. “I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Fuller was not referring to marijuana, Mexico’s biggest and most publicized illegal cash crop.

He was talking about cactus plants.

The Wildlife Fund says that unscrupulous dealers and collectors are smuggling as many as 20,000 rare and endangered Mexican cacti into the United States every year, and that several thousand more are illegally exported directly from Mexico to other countries where the demand is even greater.

In the United States, the plants--many of them smaller than a baseball and known as “living rocks”--often are sold from the backs of trucks to dealers and collectors who prize them in the manner of connoisseurs of art or china.

The pilferage, wildlife experts say, is virtually wiping out several species of cacti in the wild. These plants are found naturally only in remote canyons in Central Mexico, although they are grown artificially in U.S. nurseries.

Federal and international laws prohibiting the collection of endangered cacti for other than scientific purposes have been on the books for 10 years. But the only cactus thieves arrested in the United States have been landscapers who occasionally pluck the larger, more common species from federal lands in Texas and Arizona.

Except for the conviction last year of a Texas man, U.S. Justice Department officials admit, the laws protecting endangered cacti have not been enforced.

The delay, however, is over, according to Don Carr, chief of the Justice Department’s Wildlife and Marine Resources Center in Washington. He said he has told federal fish and wildlife agents “in fairly strong language” to spend less time with endangered animals and start cracking down on cactus thieves. Conservationists say they have lobbied for such a policy for years.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s first covert investigation into illegal cactus smuggling resulted in the seizure this month of more than 200 rare plants from a home and two nurseries in the San Fernando Valley and the desert community of Littlerock, near Palmdale.

In addition, agents posing as collectors and dealers in rare cacti are currently involved in six more investigations throughout the United States, Carr said. “The effort is really just getting under way,” Carr said. “There’s no doubt we’re starting from a point in which the trade has gone virtually unpoliced, in which unscrupulous dealers have plainly run amok.

Sending a Signal

“We are, however, firmly resolved . . . to reverse that trend and send the clearest possible signal. . . . We have to start getting involved with the preservation of all living species, whether it be the snail darters in the water, the condors in the sky, the grizzlies on the ground or the cacti in the desert.”

The allure of the rare Mexican plants in the United States is restricted to about 10,000 avid collectors, said botanist Faith Campbell Thompson of the Wildlife Fund, a nonprofit conservation group based in Washington.

The demand is considerably greater in Europe (primarily Germany) and especially Japan, where horticulture is a national passion. About a third of the Mexican cacti brought into the United States are shipped in boxes to foreign countries “within weeks,” Thompson said.

Because the rarer plants are difficult to keep alive once taken from the ground and replanted, Thompson said, “I suspect most of them simply die.”

The cacti smuggled into the United States do not resemble the garden variety seen in most nurseries and supermarkets. The recently seized species go by the scientific names Aztekium ritteri, Ariocarpus agavoides and Obregonia denegrii, but are all commonly called “living rocks.”

Known as ‘Hobbyists’

Living rocks are round, some have thorns and often can fit in one hand. John Cooper, co-owner of Cooper’s Cactus and Succulents in northern San Diego County, said only the most enthusiastic collectors--”they like to refer to themselves as hobbyists”--find the species attractive. The casual cactus lover prefers the common flowering type.

“I can put hundreds of Mammarillarra zeilmanianas, a common species known as the flower queen, on my benches and go through all of them before I sell a single living rock,” said Cooper, past president of the California Cactus Growers Assn.

An oddity about cactus smuggling is that even the rarest species are legally grown from seeds in U.S. nurseries and can often be purchased for $5 to $25, although the unique size, shape and color of some plants can boost the price to $500, according to Fish and Wildlife Service Agent Bill Bartee.

But many of the rarest cacti are difficult to cultivate. New Mexico botanist Steven Brach said it takes at least five years for the A . ritteri, or “Aztec cactus,” to grow one inch high and a quarter of an inch in diameter.

Prefer Wild Plants

Experienced collectors usually prefer plants grown in the wild and can distinguish them from nursery cacti. A wild cactus, exposed to wind and sand, generally has a rougher texture and a more unusual shape and may not be as colorful, Brach said. The artificially propagated plant is greener and smoother because it is watered and fertilized.

Picking out Aztec cacti grown in a nursery, he said, “is like a Miss America pageant where all the contestants weigh 400 pounds.”

The dollar value of the plants should not be considered a major factor in criminal prosecutions, Carr said.

“We may only be talking about $4 a plant,” he said. “The amount of money the plant draws on the market shouldn’t be our concern. The concern should be what we are doing to the environment.”

The enforcement effort came too late for the Echinocerus lindsayi or “Lindsay Cactus,” a plant native to Baja California. The species was discovered only in 1975 but the plants were wiped out in the wild in five years, according to Thompson.

Cleared the Area

“Collectors found out about it, and they flocked down to the area and collected out the entire population, which wasn’t all that large to begin with,” Thompson said.

Illegal dealers and collectors also have virtually wiped out the Aztec cactus in the wild. Douglas Fuller, a staff biologist for a private, Washington-based group called TRAFFIC (Trade Records Analysis of Flora and Fauna in Commerce), said the plant can be found only in four remote canyons just south of San Luis Potosi and about 200 miles north of Mexico City.

The species grows along steep, nearly inaccessible cliffs. but that does not discourage collectors.

“They’ll use poles to reach the plants,” Fuller said. “And if they can’t get them that way, they’ll use ropes to climb over the side.”

Several Aztec plants were among the 220 cacti seized by Fish and Wildlife Service agents March 2 from the Van Nuys home of attorney Steven Franklin Sobel; the Cactus Ranchito of Edward G. Gay in Tarzana, and Cactus Data Plants, a Littlerock greenhouse owned by Wendell Sherwood Minnich, agents said.

Protected by Treaty

The plants confiscated in Southern California are protected by a 91-nation treaty on wild animals and plants adopted in 1973. They can be exported only by permit for botanical research.

But collectors for years were able to slip by U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors along the Mexican border because the agents were either uninformed about the regulations protecting cacti or unable to distinguish the ordinary ones from the endangered ones, Thompson said.

In addition, many collectors bribe Mexican agriculture officials to get export permits mislabeling protected plants, Thompson said. Other plants are simply smuggled across.

Although the endangered species treaty went into effect in 1975, Justice Department officials said, the first prosecution for illegal plant importation did not come until last year.

In that case, Joseph Anthony, a Brownsville, Tex., dealer and collector, pleaded guilty last August to illegally exporting 25 species of Mexican cacti to Britain. He was fined $4,000 and placed on 1 1/2 years’ probation. Fish and Wildlife agents said that Anthony, 30, has gone out of business.

Not Politically Wise

Biologist Fuller said he can understand why the Justice Department may not have thought that policing the illegal cactus trade was a politically wise use of its resources.

“Say you’re the head of law enforcement and you’re not only coordinating investigations but going after Senate appropriations, too,” Fuller said. “Grizzly bears and condors are things people can relate to. You say you’ve confiscated some ‘living rocks’ and the public says, ‘So what?’ ”

Sobel, Gay and Minnich have not been arrested in the California case. But Fish and Wildlife agents said the three could face 60 counts of violating the U.S. Endangered Species Act, which incorporates the treaty regulations. Each count carries a maximum penalty of one year in jail, $20,000 in fines and court costs.

Sobel and Gay would not comment on the seizures. Minnich said he did not obtain his cactus plants illegally or sell them in violation of federal law.

“I’ve owned some of these plants for up to 20 years and they weren’t put on the lists until six years ago,” he said, asserting that the seizures were intended “to make the cactus hobbyists aware of what is endangered and threatened.”

Posed as Collector

According to an affidavit on file in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Fish and Wildlife Agent George Michael Sutton visited Minnich’s shop in July, 1985, posing as a collector. Sutton said that he purchased nine species of rare cacti, including one that cost $250, and that Minnich acknowledged having visited Mexico on several occasions to collect the plants.

Again posing as a collector, Sutton later that month purchased eight species of protected cacti from Gay’s nursery, according to Sutton’s affidavit. Gay, Sutton said, “told me he smuggled these plants across the border into the United States concealed in sacks of dirty laundry.”

Ed Dominguez, assigned to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Long Beach office, said agents also found Lophophora cacti at each of the locations searched. Lophophora is popularly known as peyote and is classified by the government as an illegal narcotic because it is sometimes chewed for its hallucinogenic effects.

Notified of Seizure

According to Marie Palladini, a Fish and Wildlife Service agent, state and federal drug agencies were notified of the seizures. But she said she doubts that the three would be prosecuted for violating drug laws.

There is no evidence that the collectors intended to use or sell the cacti as a drug, she said, adding: “The peyote’s value in a botanical sense is much, much greater.”

Minnich scoffed at the notion that such a rare plant would be used as a narcotic.

“Peyote is a very interesting cactus,” he said.