Mexico Program

Defenders' Mexico Program tackles a full array of threats in biodiversity-rich Mexico. Defenders is recognized as a national leader for conservation in Mexico, with an emphasis on parrots, sea turtles, and mangrove forests.

Parrot Conservation

In early 2007, the Program released a major report, The Illegal Parrot Trade in Mexico: A Comprehensive Assessment. The report describes the brutal conditions and large casualties suffered by parrots in the massive illegal trade and proposes comprehensive policy solutions. It is one of the most detailed studies ever written on any illegal wildlife trade sector, and it has received high praise and media attention.

Sea Turtle Conservation

Six of the world’s seven species of sea turtles use Mexico’s beaches for nesting and they are all in jeopardy. Defenders is working in a number of ways to protect them.  A bus-stop ad campaign against the trade and consumption of sea turtles featured prominent soccer stars as spokespeople. Defenders continues to host our award-winning weekly radio show, Supervivencia (“Survival”), which spotlights the plight of these endangered reptiles among many other environmental issues. A five edition series of comic books on the human health risks of eating sea turtle meat was distributed throughout Mexico and Latin America (45,000 copies).  Our turtle species identification guides also have been widely distributed.

Defenders has conducted numerous sea turtle conservation workshops under grants or contracts with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Commission on Environmental Cooperation, and others. These are hands-on gatherings with fishers, officials, and outside experts, conducted all along the Mexican coast, to demonstrate how to prevent fishers from catching sea turtles and how to free them unharmed if they do.  We also distributed thousands of turtle-safe hooks, special hook removal tools, and vast quantities of other educational materials at these workshops.