Thursday, 15 de Diciembre de 2011 08:30

Taken from El Diario del Norte

What does it do to save nine endangered turtles from the hands of sellers who sell them on the 'black market'??

This question can be easily answered by several uniformed officers who last Tuesday afternoon seized a person who was traveling in a vehicle in the sector known as Cuatro Vías., Maicao, nine turtles: four of them tortoiseshell and the other five green.

These police officers assigned to the Maicao Police Command in the Surveillance and Environmental Police units still remember how the car bomb that detonated at the Police Command in the border municipality terrified them.. However, That was not an impediment to continue with his work and through the seizure of the turtles it seems that that memory is being erased little by little..

The turtles would have been hunted in Punta Espada, Uribia, for this person, who was identified as Reinaldo Miguel Cotes Parejo, who was left at the disposal of the Prosecutor's Office when he was carried in a Toyota truck, white color, of DVA plates 539 from Valledupar, species in danger of extinction.

The liberation

After 11 Tuesday night, the Environmental Police group, by Deputy Mayor Claudia Erazo, Members of Corpoguajira and the Casa Ecológica Foundation released the turtles on the beaches of Riohacha.

This liberation was carried out with several people who were passing by First Street.

However, The release took more than an hour because the heavy turtles were dehydrated and tired., perhaps because of the torture they were victims of when they were hunted.

For this reason, the people who were in that place decided to help them and carry them so that they would be closer to the beach and thus be able to be in their natural habitat..

Many of them regretted the fact that unscrupulous people carried out these types of actions..

So much so that one of the workers at the Casa Ecológica Foundation accepted that he ate turtle a long time ago., but since he came to work at the foundation and after knowing the cruelty of which these species are victims, decided to stop eating it, having an important impact on it.

In the end, The uniformed officers had to drive the truck to the edge of the beach to load the turtles in the back.. Again, several people had to intervene to raise them and then lower them.. That's how, one by one, and at a slow pace, the hawksbill and green turtles went searching for the sea, the one that environmentalists should never abandon. Members of Corpoguajira marked them so that when they arrive in another country they know that they were rescued and released.

The happiest for this release of the nine turtles were the children who enjoyed their freedom as their own.. This is what produces the release of nine turtles that were going to be sold on the 'black market'.