The aims of the project is to assess the level of trade in primates in Latin America, with the special concern to the species native for this part of the world, and to encourage the proper authorities and institutions to combat the illegal trade, which is one of the important threads to these animal species.

We will monitor the internet trade in five Latin American countries (Argentina, Ecuador, Guatemala, México and Uruguay) on primate’s native of Latin America (capuchins, marmosets, titis, squirrel monkeys and others). These countries were chosen for their different levels of internet development, demographic, and for their geographic location, so we have one country for North America, one for Central America and three countries for South America. The research will be done in the form of two detailed surveys of the web pages in each of these countries, with the Google searching machine and by checking main advertisements and auction services in these countries. We will also contact some of the sellers to assess the origin and the legal status of the specimens offered. This will be done to evaluate the scale and the methods of this trade. This task isn’t easy, because the illegal sellers get very suspicious when you ask them more than a couple of questions. Usually they stop answering questions and just disappear. We will use elements of the same method as when doing the monitoring in Ecuador (www.catcahelpanimals.org/docs/ecuadorreport2009.pdf), but modified for other scale and scope of the surveys.

The results will be published in a printed report that will be sent out to the management and enforcement authorities working on the CITES in these chosen Latin American countries and also to the internet trade service providers. We will also send our report to the proper management and enforcement authorities all over Latin America and Interpol. The media will also be contacted. Some reports will be sent to some Universities. We will also distribute this report during the CITES CoP16.

CATCA will launch a national and international media campaign to raise awareness among the general public about the traffic on primate species and we will have a special webpage with the results of this project in our CATCA website.