First Mission to La Amistad International Peace Park, Costa Rica

Our Global Conservation team recently traveled on a scouting mission to La Amistad International Park, Costa Rica, as a first step to initiating a Global Park Defense program.

La Amistad International Park (Parque Internacional La Amistad, PILA) is a transboundary protected area and World Heritage Site that is shared between Costa Rica and Panama. Covering 401,000ha of the Talamanca mountain range, it is the largest nature reserve in Central America. It is an incredible biodiversity resource for both the region and the world, harboring about 20% of Central America’s and 60% of Costa Rica’s species diversity.

PILA is known to contain a wealth of rare species like jaguars, five other cat species, Baird’s tapir, the resplendent quetzal, and the endangered barenecked umbrellabird. However, most of the park’s steep and difficult terrain remains unexplored, and species are being discovered here on a regular basis.

This amazing landscape is being threatened by hunting, illegal extraction of resources, forest fires, land tenure issues, and the propagation and trafficking of illicit drugs. GC is working together with the PILA Authority and the Costa Rican National System of Conservation Areas (SINAC) to begin a Global Park Defense Program.

Given its large, unbroken expanse, La Amistad is a crucial protected area for wide-ranging species like jaguars.

The March 2021 scouting mission was carried out by: Max Villalobos, Director of IDEHS, GC’s Global Park Defense partner in Costa Rica; Francisco “Paco” Asturias, Director of FundaEco Petén and Director of the Mirador Park Rangers, Guatemala; and Greg Brown, Global Park Defense specialist and founder of the Wildlife Protection Agency. They aimed to assess the current situation of protection in the park, to improve the capacity of La Amistad rangers to organize patrols using SMART systems, and to strengthen the community ranger program. 

The team discovered that PILA faces poaching, illegal logging, and an extreme shortage of staff for patrolling the park and responding to threats. An emerging pineapple industry along the park’s borders is also a threat, along with smallholder farming and cattle ranching.

All of these contribute to loss of habitat, resulting in escalating conflicts between jaguars and livestock and between peccaries and farmers. Weak cell and internet service interfere with the ability to respond efficiently to illegal activity.  

Pineapple plantations (foreground) abutting La Amistad's vast forests (background). Photo by Max Villalobos.

During the mission, the team found an illegal logging operation. Rangers arrested the loggers and confiscated their equipment and timber.

Global Conservation donated critical equipment including 2 laptops, Garmin InReach GPS Units, smartphones for SMART patrols, and cellular trail cameras. Greg Brown provided basic training on the use of GPS units and trail cameras.

The equipment that Global Conservation donated to PILA staff for Global Park Defense.

Priorities for implementing a Global Park Defense Program in PILA:

1. Extend contract of 16 volunteer rangers.
2. Gather more data with camera traps and recon missions.
3. Complete trail camera, GPS, and SMART training and standardize their use.
4. Design a camera trap network based on coverage and accessibility.
5. Provide 10 more cellular trail cameras, 15 standard trail cameras, and 2 more GPS units.
6. Map cell service availability throughout the park.
7. Provide a drone to extend the range of PILA’s limited staff.
8. Provide firearms training for rangers covering safety, maintenance, and shooting.
9. Procure equipment for extended patrols, including hammocks, packs, and flashlights.
10. Improve knowledge of zone 5.
11. Improve tourist infrastructure.
12. Re-establish joint patrols with Panama.
13. Establish a fund to compensate ranchers for livestock lost to jaguar attacks, and encourage reporting of jaguar and white-lipped peccary sightings.
14. Provide satellite internet for remote bases, and an internet signal booster for the main office command center.
15. Obtain flyover or satellite imagery on zone 5 to identify trails, deforestation, or possible hunting camps.

Endangered white-lipped peccaries in PILA.

Implementing Global Park Defense in La Amistad is critical for protecting declining populations of jaguars and endangered white-lipped peccaries, as well as conserving some of the most unique habitats in Central America. 

We caught up with Greg, Paco, and Max to find out more about La Amistad and their scouting mission.

GC: What makes La Amistad so special?

MAX: There are a few things. Firstly, La Amistad protects unique ecosystems that are only found in the highlands. In Central America in general, we don't have many highlands, so those ecosystems are unique. One of those is the tropical paramo, a type of alpine grassland full of unique species. In fact, these mountains contain a huge number of endemic species, found nowhere else on Earth. All those ecosystems evolved for thousands of years, separately from the paramos in North America and the paramos in South America. The next similar ecosystem that you can find is in the Andes, actually. Because these high mountains are surrounded by lowlands, this area has experienced thousands and thousands of years of isolation. That allowed many unique species to evolve.

A waterfall in La Amistad.

Beyond that, La Amistad is part of a huge system of protected areas that covers pretty much half of the country of Costa Rica, from the Panama border to the Central Valley. La Amistad connects to Parque Nacional Chirripó, which contains the highest mountain in Central America, as well as to Parques Nacionales Cerro de la Muerte and Los Quetzales. So this is a big group of protected areas that altogether create the Reserva de la Biosfera La Amistad. Some of those areas almost touch the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.

The view from the summit of Mt. Chirripó, Central America's highest peak.

That makes La Amistad very, very special. La Amistad is the only bi-national protected area that we have in Costa Rica; it continues south to Panama’s Parque Nacional Volcán Báru, Central America’s highest volcano. 

Finally – La Amistad is huge, and most of it is in the hills. It's surrounded by many communities, and La Amistad provides the fresh water for those communities. The San Vito Valley, Pérez Zeledón, all the water to those places came from those mountains. La Amistad is very important for the communities too.

A high-altitude wetland in La Amistad, one of many unique ecosystems in this park.

GREG: What I didn’t expect was the connectivity of the whole area. La Amistad plays an incredibly important role in the region. It’s all interconnected: in three hours, you can drive from the ocean through mangroves, rainforest, high-altitude wetlands or paramos, cloud forest, all the way up to >3,800m (~12,500ft) in La Amistad. In just a three- or four-hour drive, you pass through so many different ecosystems. That’s why we have to focus on connectivity and on La Amistad in the context of the region as a whole. We need to protect the incredible landscape diversity from the coast, through Corcovado, up to La Amistad and into Cerro Chirripó National Park, which contains the highest peak in Costa Rica. That’s the most important thing I learned on this trip.

A resplendant quetzal in La Amistad.

PACO: I want to add: yes, La Amistad is amazing. But every single rain forest or cloud forest in the world is amazing and beautiful. They sustain life on Earth, and we need to be protecting all of them. That’s my opinion. The world is suffering that much that we cannot cut one more tree in the tropical rainforest, even if it is so-called “sustainable”. To me, there’s no sustainability anymore in cutting down the tropical rainforests or cloud forests of the world. Why do we need to build big roads through the forest and cut down these beautiful, vibrant trees so that someone in New York or Italy can have a nice table? No, we should just be properly protecting the borders of all the jungles in the world. 

Another of La Amistad's unusual high-altitude landscapes.

GC: What are the biggest threats to La Amistad?

MAX: We have poachers, we have illegal logging. The loggers aren’t cutting down large patches of forest, like in the past, but are using a different strategy. They’re like leaf cutter ants, eating away at the forest little by little. One tree here, another tree there. Especially tropical hardwoods with a high value on the black market. We stopped some illegal logging operations during this mission just last week. They are harvesting tropical oaks and other incredibly valuable timber one tree at a time. But that causes problems to the ecosystem, too. 

Photos of illegal logging operations that were intercepted during the scouting mission.

There are also people illegally growing marijuana inside the park, trespassing a protected area and clearing forest to plant marijuana. Those clearings cause destruction of the vegetation, and open the area for other illegal activities like cattle inside the park. We also have people setting fires in those gaps to clear the forest. Forest fires are a problem here, because most of the time, rangers aren’t allowed to stop them until they get to the park. But once those fires get into the park, thousands or at least hundreds of hectares can get burned. 

A fire burning inside of the park.

GREG: I think the number one issue there really is staffing. They have such a lack of manpower; there’s really only 4 rangers for the entire area. Each ranger gets four or five volunteers to assist them, but it’s not enough. The lack of manpower is the number one issue there. 

Those rangers have to deal with threats like exotic bird trapping, where people trap birds and sell them down in the valley as pets to unsuspecting people who think they’re trained animals raised in captivity. Hunting, too, is a pretty big issue, and logging. They also found remnants of a fairly large marijuana farm as well a couple years ago. 

This illegal hunting camp was discovered and dismantled just outside the park during the scouting mission.

PILA is fairly accessible except for one of the five zones. Zone 5 is the largest and the most inaccessible and they know the least about it. That’s a pretty big issue as well – we need to gather some information on Zone 5; they don’t even know a lot of the threats that exist there because of the inaccessibility.

On patrol in PILA.

How do you deal with protecting places that are so remote and difficult to access?

GREG: First, we like to do a flyover to get a baseline. Ultimately we’d start by getting some pictures, to see if there are any large areas of deforestation or clearings, trails that hunters may be using. Then, we would set camera traps. Some parks don’t have any cell service, some parks have really good cell service. The service in La Amistad is fairly hit or miss. When I go back there I’ll design a much more extensive camera network using cellular and non-cellular units, but for right now the rangers have set up a few cameras where they know there’s cell service. So even though they can't have a constant presence there now, at least we're gathering information. It also gets them up in that area every couple of weeks to check the traps, so they can start to learn about the area. Then, they'll have an idea of areas to focus on as opposed to just guessing where the illicit activity might be. 

Greg Brown (center) shows PILA park rangers how to set up a cellular trail camera.

What else needs to happen to effectively protect La Amistad?

MAX: Right now we’re having a big problem. 12% of Costa Rica’s GDP comes from tourism. In the middle of a pandemic, that causes a lot of problems. In the last year, the government has systematically been cutting back resources and budgets. And now we're facing the situation that we don't have enough rangers in the parks. We’re in such a critical situation that the government isn’t even replenishing the people who retire. So little by little, we are losing the human resources in our protected areas. Of course, budgets for fuel, food, logistics are being cut too. 

So this is the first thing that we are facing right now. We have empty parks with no tourism, no generation of income, a low budget. We don't have rangers, but we have the infrastructure. We still have the stations. We still have the knowledge. 

We are working very hard to raise funds and hire more rangers. The other front is citizen participation. We are supporting the community park rangers program, and during this mission we were able to deploy an important group of them. Together with park officials, they achieved excellent results.

Greg Brown (left) and Max Villalobos (second from left) show PILA volunteers how to set up cellular camera traps.

Why is Global Conservation’s involvement in La Amistad so important?

MAX: What we’re doing now with Global Conservation is responding to this new situation with technology. Camera traps connected to the cellular network alert rangers to possible illegal activity in real time. GPS’s with the capacity to send text messages via satellite help improve the safety of rangers in the field. These things help to compensate for a lack of staff. It’s a great strategy. 

That said, technology alone is probably not enough. We need to get more people in the field. Right now in the mission that we’re currently executing, that’s what we’ve done. We’re training community volunteers, community rangers. We created five new patrols that will cover the whole Pacific slope of the park. And we're already finding incredible stuff – both illicit activities like logging, and also important wildlife. We’ve found more this month than we did in the last year, the whole year, because they don't have the capacity to cover the whole area. 

Rangers and volunteers on patrol in PILA.

PACO: I wish there were a hundred people like Jeff Morgan and 100 organizations like Global Conservation doing this because GC’s support goes directly to conserving the area. Costa Rica is one of the most advanced countries in terms of conservation in Latin America, but they still have a lot of problems. So GC’s help is necessary, because without that help, almost nothing will be done to conserve La Amistad.

What were the most important things you accomplished on this mission to La Amistad?

PACO: Improving the availability of equipment and communications. On this mission, we brought an equipment donation from Global Conservation, and the La Amistad staff were very happy. In some remote areas of the park, there is little or no cell phone connection. So we brought them Garmin InReach GPS units from Global Conservation. We have them in Mirador [Guatemala] too. They’re great for making contact in an emergency. Also, it’s important that GC is introducing the use of the SMART system, which is one of the most advanced patrol reporting systems. The La Amistad rangers will also get some important trainings.

Rangers and volunteers getting trained in the use of the SMART system.

The other thing is just showing support to the rangers. Sometimes, rangers are alone in the field and they don't get support from their boss, the government, anyone. When they’re alone and they face a threat and they don't have a support, sometimes they just don't act. 

But with missions like this, you empower the rangers. There are a lot of people who want to do a great job, but it’s so important to have excellent support. Without that support, you end up with a team of rangers that shows up just to collect a salary. When an organization like Global Conservation has your back, you do your job well even if your life is at risk. With this mission, we’ve started showing them that support.

Greg Brown (center) with PILA rangers and volunteers.

What makes you optimistic about the future of La Amistad?

GREG: They have great infrastructure there, along with good vehicles. That foundation will allow this Global Park Defense project to ramp up really quickly. We also have excellent cooperation and enthusiasm from the rangers, the park director, and all the way up through the conservation area managers.

MAX: You know, in Costa Rica, we are really serious about conservation and the rangers are really committed to protecting La Amistad. Plus, the community rangers are so, so great. They’re working so hard and they are helping La Amistad a lot. If we work together and more people continue to join us, we can keep this wonderful World Heritage Site protected.

The incredible team that is working hard to protect Parque Internacional La Amistad!