The expedition planned to erect a series of GPS markers in the Tawahka Reserve that would help the Honduran government establish a protected zone in Moskitia, which has been battered by illegal logging. According to the US-based Environmental Investigation Agency, Honduras suffers from one of the highest deforestation rates in the world. From 1990 to 2010 Honduras lost an average of 363,584 acres of trees per year, more than a third of its total forest cover. Much of the logging has been done illegally, the trees cut without permits in the frontier-like stretches of Moskitia, where black-market timber syndicates have free range.

In order to slow the rate of illegal logging, the 2007 mapping team was on a two-part mission. First, they would establish and demarcate a zona nuclea, a protected, logging-free zone that encompassed the heart of the Tawahka Reserve. The second phase consisted of training and equipping the local Indigenous inhabitants of the deep forest with GPS technology, so that they could accurately track the whereabouts of illegal loggers operating in their midst and then report them to national law enforcement authorities.

Word of the team’s mission had leaked out and the expedition was attracting unwanted attention even before it left the mountain town of Catacamas…continue The Last Song of Mario Guifarro here.