Killing of jaguar pushes species’ survival in Argentina’s Gran Chaco to the brink

Quiterio Ramírez’s voice is heavy with anguish at the other end of the phone: “When I saw the jaguar hanging there, the truth is that I cried, but what are we going to do about it? We already lost it.” His voice breaks, and it becomes apparent that tears are welling up in his eyes.

In late July or early August (the exact date is uncertain), a jaguar was hunted and skinned near the community of Estanislao del Campo, in Argentina’s northern department of Patiño, Formosa province, part of the semiarid Gran Chaco landscape. For Ramírez, what he was feeling now for the jaguar would have been unthinkable just a few years ago: sadness, pain, and now outrage over the loss of a male specimen of the Gran Chaco’s top predator, an animal that he now considers part of his landscape and his world.

“El Tipo,” as the locals called this big cat, didn’t even have enough time to receive a real name. It had been recorded by camera traps in February 2024, and again in April. But just months later, it was shot and skinned by a group of hunters who later posted photos of their “trophy” on social media.

Scientists from the Jaguar Project, a conservation program for the species that has been working in the Argentine Gran Chaco for a few years, identified El Tipo as M7, since it was the seventh individual jaguar (Panthera onca) detected in the region. This dramatically low number alone shows the critical state of survival of the so-called American tiger in the region.

Biologist Agustín Paviolo from the Jaguar Project, who’s also a founding member of the Atlantic Forest Research Center (CeIBA), says there should be no doubts about the significance of the loss of a jaguar in the Gran Chaco. “The impact is tremendous because we have very few individuals. We are not even sure whether the rest of the ones that we know of are alive,” he says.

According to Paviolo, also a researcher with Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), the other individual jaguars that researchers know about in this area are “a pair that we recorded about five years ago in Formosa and we do not know if they are alive, another who was captured two years ago and we have not seen it again. Theoretically, there would be seven males [now six] and a single female jaguar that was recently released by Rewilding Argentina in El Impenetrable National Park. This very much reduces the possibilities of growth of the population; there are too few.”

The jaguar is considered endangered in Argentina, but in the Gran Chaco, one of four areas in the country where the species still survives, it’s listed as critically endangered. Its main range in the country extends from the mountainous Yungas jungles in the northwest to the Atlantic Forest in the northeast, with an estimated population of about 300 jaguars, according to government data. There are also about 20 individuals in the Iberá Wetlands, including some that were reintroduced starting from 2022 and their successive litters.

“Until a couple of years ago, when we could only create presence maps based on visible tracks, we estimated that there were about 20 individuals in the Gran Chaco. Today, having a project team permanently on the ground and many more camera traps, I believe the population is closer to 10, or even fewer,” Paviolo says.

The Argentine Gran Chaco covers 60 million hectares (148 million acres), an area nearly the size of France, that accounts for 60% of the Gran Chaco, the second-largest forest expanse in South America (after the Amazon). Although the region has suffered high rates of deforestation in recent decades, it still hosts wide swaths of native forest.

“Clearing [the forest] is another big threat for the jaguar, but we are losing the species before the forest is gone, because a few hundred individuals still could live there under current conditions,” Paviolo says, emphasizing that hunting is at the heart of the problem.

A mix of culture and impunity

“Hunting is rooted within the culture of the people from the forest,” says Lucero Corrales, the coordinator of CeIBA’s jaguar conservation collaboration group. “We are talking about people who live in extremely remote places, in vulnerable conditions and with their basic needs unmet: they do not have safe shelters or access to the health care system; they are not well-fed, and their remoteness makes them feel a great [sense of] impunity.”

For these people, Corrales says, “the jaguar causes them a lot of fear, and because they have dogs and a gun, it is likely that if they encounter one, shooting it could be the easiest path to choose.” She adds, “It should not be forgotten that, within a certain male population, killing it is still considered a symbol of prestige. For that reason, we are doing most of our work there, to change the perception of the animal that the people from the forest have.”

In the case of the jaguar hunted recently in Estanislao del Campo, it was the perpetrators themselves who posted the photos to social media, showing the jaguar’s carcass and later its pelt strung between two trees. By comparing these with the camera-trap images from the Jaguar Project, researchers were able to identify the exact jaguar that had been killed, making it easier to pinpoint the location. A police investigation ensued within days, and a man identified only by the surname Cisneros was subsequently arrested as the main alleged perpetrator of the crime; three others are being held as accomplices.

“I know that area well,” says Ernesto Luberriaga, a resident of the community of Pozo del Tigre, about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from where the incident took place. “There is a part that is closed forest and another more open part, the pampa, which is surrounded by farms that were burned and deforested in the last few years to be converted into large establishments of over 10,000 or 20,000 hectares [about 25,000 to 50,000 acres].”

Luberriaga says those responsible were likely outsiders: “I don’t have them identified, but they must be settlers from nearby … the Toba Indigenous [people] from the area wouldn’t kill a jaguar, much less take photos with the dead animal.”

During his 24 years of work as a technician for the National Institute of Family, Peasant and Indigenous Farming, Luberriaga has traveled every road in Formosa and knows of similar cases that went unreported. “The people who did this this time gave themselves away. If they had not posted the photos on Facebook, maybe no one would have noticed,” he says.

The jaguar has been declared a natural monument at both national and provincial level (in Formosa). Killing the animal is a crime punishable by up to three years in jail, on top of fines, which conservationists say should hopefully have a deterrent effect. Yet even if the alleged perpetrators are punished to the maximum extent under the law, conservationists say increasing the species’ chances of surviving in the Argentine Gran Chaco requires other types of actions and measures.

The need for more protected areas

One of the measures that conservationists seem to agree on is the creation and implementation of new protected areas throughout the entire Gran Chaco, but especially in Formosa province. The provincial government lists 14 areas with varying degrees of protection, but many area smaller than 300 hectares (740 acres), and two belong to the National Parks Administration. They also vary greatly in their levels of protection and, combined, cover just over 611,000 hectares (1.51 million acres), or 8.5% of the province’s total area).

“In the Bañado de la Estrella, for example, where we believe that there are still some jaguars left, there are more and more wire fences and movement of people; it cannot be considered a protected area,” Luberriaga says.

Yet this area, beside the Pilcomayo River that forms the border with Paraguay, contains more than half — 381,661 hectares (943,105 acres) — of what the Formosa government has designated as a “guarded area for the protection of the ecosystem.”

Earlier this year, the Jaguar Project published a zoning initiative showing a model of the ideal landscape in the Argentine Gran Chaco for maintaining a growing jaguar population. It highlighted the creation and maintenance of wildlife corridors to improve connectivity between core areas, some of which contain prime native forest.

“But if the corridors are not functional with respect to the animals’ safety and are only [functional] as an extension of the structure of the vegetation, they do not make much sense,” says the Jaguar Project’s Paviolo. “The jaguar that they hunted was moving through a corridor, and they killed it anyway.”

For CeIBA, this is why it has focused most of its efforts beyond the sites identified as “core areas” on maps. “We can have more protected areas, more park rangers, regulations and laws against actions like the one that just happened,” says Corrales, CeIBA’s jaguar coordinator. “But if we don’t work directly with the people to change their perceptions and their way of relating to wild animal species, especially the jaguar, we are not going to guarantee its survival.”

At least 400 volunteer collaborators

Since 2021, Corrales’s meticulous work has helped create of a network of more than 400 volunteer collaborators in the provinces of Formosa and Chaco. They’re part of a participation-based monitoring program that, among other achievements, has enabled the camera traps installed in 2024 to record several jaguars, including the recently hunted one, in the Gran Chaco.

“All those people contribute data and provide information in the territory about the presence of the species, whether that is the observation of a track, the possible predation of a wild or domestic animal by a jaguar, or any sign that could suggest the presence of an individual [jaguar] near their homes.”

Once a call comes in and Corrales and her team confirm the data, they travel to the area, install camera traps, and begin a series of visits to the local population. Every two or three months, they call on forest communities in an effort to keep up their motivation and maintain their bond. Corrales’s ongoing conversations with these collaborators allow her to appreciate the changes in their attitudes toward the jaguar — changes that are considered essential in the fight to prevent the species’ extinction in the region.

“The work that we are doing in the department of Patiño in the province of Formosa alone covers around 100,000 hectares [250,000 acres] and, initially, the people we visited said that if they encountered a jaguar, their first option would be to kill it,” Corrales says. “Today, that has changed. The children from the school love jaguars and chose the species as the focus of their science fair. And many older people called me crying when they heard one of the animals that we had recorded in their area had been killed.”

Natural instincts drove M7 toward its fate. Like all jaguars, its routine involved long treks in search of food or a female available for mating. M7 walked more than 40 km (25 mi) from where Corrales and her team were working to raise awareness. The hunters who found M7 had never spoken with the team about the need to conserve the few remaining jaguars in the Gran Chaco. They didn’t have the opportunity to change their views about the king of South America’s forests, and they made their choice accordingly.

Transforming people’s opinions of the jaguar

The killing of the jaguar in Formosa reveals the weakest part of the conservation project: the lack of resources to cover a more extensive area. “Today, each trip into the forest comes at a cost of about 500,000 Argentine pesos [$500), plus a well-maintained truck, the cameras, the batteries, the locks, the memory cards, and the leaflets that we give out to people. And we do the latter at least once per month,” Corrales says.

“We should have two or three more teams in the region to be able to multiply the effort and be more efficient,” Paviolo adds.

There’s some financial support from the Chaco provincial government, and occasionally also from the Formosa government and from WWF, through the Argentine Wildlife Foundation, but this barely covers the work of just one project team.

The Formosa provincial environment agency says it conducts environmental education in schools, with programs involving students, farmers and the rest of the community.

Ernesto Luberriaga, the peasant farming institute technician, says this isn’t enough. “The province should make a greater effort [to raise] awareness [and] create groups to monitor and search for specimens to be able to track them with GPS collars, but they aren’t doing this,” he says.

“We have to convert all the outrage and hopelessness of these days into a driving force so that all the institutions that want to participate double their efforts to save the last animals that we have left,” Corrales says.

Putting in the effort to change people’s views can pay off. Corrales recalls a visit to Jaime, the owner of a relatively small farm near Estanislao del Campo, where she’d gone after jaguar tracks had appeared in his field. When she asked his permission to place cameras there, she was met with an unwelcoming response: “‘How much are you going to pay me for this jaguar? Take that thing away from here,’” she recalls being told.

But Corrales insisted until Jaime finally agreed. Then the first few images of a jaguar captured on the farm turned the mood: first, Jaime’s son and daughter-in-law got excited, then the employees, and finally Jaime himself. When a second jaguar was photographed, Corrales says, Jaime tearfully pleaded, “Don’t take my jaguars, because they are my last ones.”

The elderly man passed away before M7’s killing. Luckily, he never found out what happened to one of his jaguars.

 
Banner image: Tañhi Wuk, “the owner of the forest” in the Indigenous Wichí language, is the name given to this jaguar captured on camera trap in Formosa Nature Reserve, a protected area managed by Argentina’s National Parks Administration. Image courtesy of the Jaguar Project.

This story was first published here in Spanish on Aug. 13, 2024.