DALLAS -- Austin, Texas, police weren't sure what they had stumbled upon when they stopped a Chevrolet Suburban in February 1992 and spotted boxes crammed with 70 baby Amazon parrots.
Federal agents and wildlife experts said that the pre-dawn traffic stop and seizure of the smuggled birds with a U.S. retail value of $70,000 led last month to a 20-count federal indictment in what they describe as one of the nation's largest parrot-smuggling operations.
Investigators and bird experts said the case is a microcosm of a major smuggling operation on the Texas-Mexico border, responsible for the illegal importation of more than 25,000 birds a year.
"It's the second-most lucrative type of smuggling on the border after dope. It's easy to do. There's very little enforcement of it," said James Conner Broadus, a Rio Grande Valley parrot breeder who has assisted federal agents in smuggling investigations.
"It's as difficult to stop as drug smuggling, and I don't think they get 5 percent of what comes across," Mr. Broadus said.
On April 21, a 20-count federal indictment was unsealed in Corpus Christi, Texas, charging 12 people in Mexico, Texas, Louisiana and Miami with conspiring to smuggle birds. Four others have pleaded guilty to federal charges, authorities said.
Jesus Maldonado, a Sandia, Texas, resident charged as the ringleader of the 10-year smuggling operation, was sentenced April 28 to five years in federal prison in connection with the Austin seizure.
U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor John Webb said the sentence "is one of the most severe ever handed down" in a U.S. wildlife prosecution.
It is a measure of the growing concerns about a trade that is devastating Central American bird populations, experts said.
In Mexico, smuggling has reduced red crown parrot populations by 80 percent and yellow-headed parrots by 90 percent in the past 20 years, Monterrey researcher Ernesto Enkerlin said.
"The problem is that we're so close to the U.S. border. It's just like a magnet," he said.
New York Zoological Society bird curator Don Bruning said that some birds, such as the scarlet macaw, "are essentially gone throughout Central America. They've been eliminated largely because of the bird trade."
Laws in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras ban the trade in parrots, and U.S. law bars the importation of birds illegally taken from other countries. But peasants who snatch the two or three fledglings in each nest can earn a month's salary for one chick, experts said. In the United States, experts said, one parrot commands $800 to $1,200.
