Dr. Ángela Maldonado
Fundacion Entropika – Leticia, Colombia
Ángela Maldonado has dedicated her life to the conservation of our planet and stopping illegal wildlife trade. She is on the board of Fundacion Entropika, an NGO working for the long-term conservation of the Colombian Amazon through community led education and research.
Maldonado used to keep a television playing cartoons next to her computer while she worked. This small comfort helped her as she undertook the tough job of documenting environmental crimes in the Amazon, including the smuggling of illegal timber and wildlife, tourism agencies holding wild animals in captivity, and experiments being conducted on monkeys.
Maldonado grew up in Bogotá, her country’s capital. Over twenty years ago, she visited the Amazon for the first time and it changed her life. At the time she was studying business administration and travelled there to free a Woolly monkey that she had helped rescue from smugglers.
Since her first encounter with the rainforest, Maldonado’s life took a sharp turn and she became an expert in the conservation of primates. For this, she lives in the shadow of constant threats and can only be in the same place for a short period of time. A few years ago, Maldonado received a death threat that she would be killed, alongside others who worked for Entropika, the NGO Maldonado co-founded. Humour is one of her strategies to deal with psychological stress.
The primatologist has spent more than ten years documenting the abuse of nocturnal monkeys, winning the Whitley Award in 2010 and National Geographic’s Awards for Leadership in Conservation in 2020.
The scientist compared the conservation status of populations in sites exposed to different levels of hunting. In this participatory research, hunters and expert biologists form the work team. With the results, they provide recommendations for the sustainable use of wildlife to indigenous peoples, the Colombian Park System and the environmental authorities of Colombia and Peru.
During their work, they discovered the existence of international trafficking in night monkeys for malaria research. The animals have been illegally taken from Peru and Brazil to Colombia. In 2008, Maldonado initiated an investigation that quantifies this trade and the status of wild populations of night monkeys.
To mitigate this traffic, the primatologist filed a popular benefit lawsuit against the biomedical laboratory that steals these monkeys, the Colombian Ministry of the Environment and the regional environmental authority of the Amazon. In 2014, she won the legal case.
This set a historical precedent in Colombia with regard to the sustainable use of biodiversity and the application of environmental legislation. Ángela Maldonado is the heroine ecological activist of the Amazon.
Website: Entropika
Video 1) Introduction
Video 2) Woman Who Combats Wildlife Trafficking (Spanish with CC)
