We have a serious problem in our country because of the trading of turtle shell, that keeps going because of poor law enforcement and corruption of authorities . Here we have some important nesting areas for the hawksbill turtle from the Caribbean's population also this same area have a high concentration of juvenile specimens.
Actually i help as a volunteer of Proyecto Carey ( http://members.seaturtle.org/proyectocarey/index_english.htm ) , that is monitoring the local population in the main nesting area of the country since more than 11 years ago. We had tried to implement some campaigns to eliminate the illegal trading of the turtle shell's artifacts but without much success , mostly because of the lack of support from the authorities .
This trading is a millionaire business here and as you must guess , is not an easy task in a poor and corrupted country like ours to fight against this. Now due to the TLC (Free Commerce Treatment ) that prohibited the traffic with products from endangered species our country is facing some big fines and penalties , so finally the authorities are worried about this and are supporting the campaigns . Tourists are the main buyers of such products and tourism is the biggest industry and source of income here ( we received more than 3 millions tourist per year ) .
We need some images to illustrate the problem , specially images that show the killing of this endangered specie . Due to the lack of resources and funds ,we are not able to have a budget to pay for the right of usage of such kind of images ( that we don't find ) so anyone that can contribute with some images for this campaign will be a great help .
Best regards
Jose Alejandro Alvarez
More info about hawksbill turttle in DR
http://www.grupojaragua.org.do/nocomprescarey_english.html
http://www.grupojaragua.org.do/proyectocarey_english.htm
