Orchid poachers are called “Materos”, from the word matas, or plants, and they operate in Costa Rica much like drug dealers, with similar profits. They live under the radar, changing their phone numbers frequently, and going into the most remote and dangerous areas of Costa Rica’s rain forests and jungles, in pursuit of rare and exotic orchids to sell on the black market. Orchid collectors’ obsessions for the best and most unusual plants has been dubbed “orchidelirium”, and it’s estimated to be a $6 billion dollar business worldwide.
Costa Rica has laws against the removal of orchids from the country. La Ley de Conservacion de la Vida Silvestre (Wildlife Conservation Law of Costa Rica) prohibits the removal of plants such as orchids from the forests, but does not effectively prevent people from doing it, both nationals and foreigners alike.
Orchids are pretty easy to smuggle. The bulbs are small, hardy plants which can be wrapped in damp, dirty laundry, lasting for days before being sold on the black market, usually in the USA or in Europe, where the demand for rare orchids is very strong. More than 1.1 billion orchids were bought and sold in the last decade worldwide, 99% of the sales are estimated to have been legal.

For those not familiar with these extraordinary plants, they are truly amazing in size, color, odor and design. There are orchids that look like German shepherds, vampire bats, Mickey Mouse, bugs, and one that looks completely dead. They can smell like perfume, like rotting dead meat, or have no odor at all. They can weigh up to a ton, stretching one hundred feet in length, or be so small that one needs a magnifying glass to see them properly.

People go completely bonkers over these plants. According to Britain’s Telegraph newspaper, “In the world of plants, nothing arouses passions like an orchid. Collectors beg, steal, and risk their lives in jungles and cloud forests to obtain the showiest or newest bloom in what is now a 7 billion pound business. So lucrative is it that organized crime syndicates specializing in smuggling of rare specimens have sprung up and customs officials at Heathrow are specially trained to catch them.”
Costa Rica has over 1,500 species of orchids, 20% of which are endemic, meaning they grow nowhere else on earth. The National Flower is an orchid, the Guaria Morada, a lovely purple orchid which blooms once a year, and is prized as a houseplant and a patriotic symbol. The orchid’s popularity often means that pristine forests are being picked clean of every orchid plant within reach. There have been some orchid species that have been totally wiped out, made extinct, due to illegal collection.
Carlo A. Balistrieri, attorney for the American Orchid Society explains, “There always seems to be a marketplace for smuggled orchids, even though many thousands of legal flowers tend to be healthier and more beautiful than many pulled from natural habitats. There are people who are kind of romanced by the idea that a thing’s been smuggled in … who want it no matter what.” Commercial greenhouses have had great success growing orchids, which can be bred to produce thousands, either from seed or by cloning, emerging to look exactly like the mother plant. Those orchids, however, lack the drama of ones snatched from the high trees deep within Costa Rican jungles.

Said dealer Bill Bergstrom, owner of four greenhouses in Thousand Oaks, California, “When I would go down to Brazil, I’d look at the strange, mutated orchids, the ones nobody had. It’s an extremely important thing, if you’re an orchid person, to own some of the very, very finest. And if you get a plant that nobody in the world has but you, you have done something that has put you way above everybody else.” Orchid collection is a very competitive and dog-eat-dog business, with people willing to go to great lengths to get just what they want.
There are international orchid shows, orchid lectures, and guided jungle orchid safaris. In 1973, a treaty was signed by 120 nations (including Costa Rica), Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITIES), which included whales, tigers and orchids on the protected list. Not every country signed the treaty, both Belize and Taiwan declined.
All manner of smuggling techniques are used in orchid stealing, from hiding them in suitcases, to crating them with fake paperwork attached, to false car trunk compartments. The smuggling methods are quite similar to those used by drug smugglers, including of course, bribing officials.

Jacob Phelps, an international orchid specialist says that what really worries him about this situation is “that traders and criminals are doing a much more thorough job of finding rare orchids – even finding new ones – than scientists. The traders are putting in more legwork collecting than scientists are.”
Eco-trafficking is a growing problem throughout Central America, of both native animals and plants, but it is an especially worrisome problem in Costa Rica, a country celebrated for its biodiversity and conservation efforts

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