They rely on this lizard to heal their pain. Now it’s endangered.

ByEduardo Franco Berton

Photographs BySara Aliaga Ticona

Published October 26, 2023

• 12 min read

La Paz, BoliviaOn a sunny morning in the Bolivian Andes, Victoria Flores herds llamas and alpacas through snowy wetlands and crystal-clear natural springs that bubble from the earth. Suddenly, an olive-colored lizard pops up from its lair.

The six-inch-long reptile, called a jararanko—which translates to “lizard” in the Indigenous Aymara language—climbs onto a rock, basking in the sunlight. While it’s distracted, Flores leans down and catches it, smashing the animal to death with a stick.

“Sometimes the jararanko is scary—it chases you and bites you,” says Flores, who is Aymara, and kills the animals legally for use in traditional medicine.

She will use the animal’s ground-up remains as a “lizard patch,” a supposed healing method to treat muscular ailments.

Back at home, she’ll grind its meat in a stone mill and mix it with wild herbs such as wichullo, black kettle, and arnica, until it turns into a pasty green mass that she places on top of her injury. We “patch ourselves up because here there is no pharmacy, no medicines, none of that. So, we use the jararanko,” she says.

But soon, there may be none of the lizards left, either.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists Liolaemus forsteri, or the Forster’s tree iguana, as endangered, according to the Red Book of the Vertebrate Wildlife of Bolivia. 

Native only to Bolivia, where it’s called jararanko, the reptile dwells in the high valley that surrounds the city of La Paz, between elevations of around 13,400 to 16,200 feet.

Besides its collection for use in traditional medicine, the species is also imperiled by habitat loss due to mining and development.

Bolivian law allows Indigenous nations to kill the animal for traditional medicine as long as it’s used for subsistence purposes, within their ancestral territory, and with practices prior to the Spanish invasion. 

Bruno Miranda, a biologist with Bolivia’s Network of Researchers in Herpetology, adds there’s no scientific study to date that supports the lizards’ medicinal properties.

In fact, “you can expose yourself to certain infectious agents that can be harmful, or that can cause certain types of zoonotic diseases,” such as salmonellosis.

“So, it seems to me that these practices should be re-evaluated in current times,” Miranda says.

Black-market reptiles

Jararanko as an ingredient in traditional Andean medicine has deep roots, dating back to pre-Columbian times. (Read about the biggest global raid of illegally traded reptiles.)

“We learned it from my grandfather. When we hurt ourselves, he healed us like this,” says Flores, who uses this same practice, called zootherapy, with her children today.

Her main concern, she says, is outsiders coming into her valley to capture jararankos. “They carry them in drums supposedly for sale, for medicine, maybe on the 16 de Julio Fair.”

As I wander the weekly popular flea market, sprawling across about 200 blocks in the city of El Alto, the smell of smoldering charcoal sends an aromatic scent into the air.

Throughout the 16 de Julio market, one of the largest in Latin America, I counted 25 live jararanko lizards on sale at four different stalls.

“You can’t take pictures!” a woman yelled as I put my cell phone closer to a glass box containing the live reptiles.

At the entrance of the traditional medicine center Kallawaya Ametra, a sign advertises medical treatments for “dislocations, fractures, fissures, detachments, and others.” Those include coca leaf treatments, celebrations to cleanse evil spirits, and rituals to venerate spirits that protect communities. Inside, Eleodoro Soto Huacatite welcomes me at his desk.

Soto is a healer from the Amarete community (locally known as Kallawayas), in the nearby city of Charazani, known for its ancestral medicinal uses. “Our grandparents, before the time of the Incas, worked with traditional medicine, all-natural. I have been working for almost 44 years in this small stall.”

When I ask about jararanko, he says “the lizard has a healing property that is astringent—it absorbs bruises and regenerates fractures or fissures.”

He then describes grinding the lizard into a paste, as Flores does, and patching it on an injured area for 24 hours. “The pain is gone by the next day.”

A popular practice

Soto acknowledges the law against killing jararankos, except the permitted use for traditional medicine for subsistence purposes within the ancestral territory. But he doesn’t agree with it.

“I don’t know why the Parliament decided that it is forbidden to use animals. The lizard saves lives, because if you have a fracture somewhere far from the city where there is no [medical] center, how do you save yourself?”

And even if there were such facilities available, “in cities where modern health services are more accessible and specialized, many people continue to go to traditional healers, showing the cultural acceptability of such practices,” according to a 2011 study on zootherapy.

Overall, zootherapy in Latin America is understudied, especially considering its widespread use, the authors write.

Zootherapy “not only poses a challenge for conservation, but also represents a serious threat to the health of many human communities.”

Cracking down on wildlife crime

For Rodrigo Herrera, an environmental lawyer from La Paz who has worked on several wildlife-trafficking cases in Bolivia, the law sets clear limits.

“Any wild animal that is being traded can be rescued and the trader must be penalized,” he says.

“Society has to be aware and stop demanding these types of products. Because there is no certainty that these ointments made with wild animals will relieve any kind of pain.” (See 10 intriguing photos of reptiles.)

In 2015, following a complaint by the Ministry of the Environment, the police and Public Ministry raided a stall selling jararanko parts and ointment at the 16 de Julio Fair. The vendor violated the constitutional exception to harvesting jararanko “since he was selling the parts to people outside the Kallawaya nation, [and therefore] it was no longer for his subsistence, but for profit,” Herrera says.

Herrera, who served as the plaintiff on behalf of the Ministry of the Environment’s case against the vendor, said during the subsequent trial there is no ethnological evidence that determines the city of El Alto was part of any original Indigenous nation. The vendor was sentenced to three years in jail, Herrera says. 

In December 2021, authorities removed 61 jararanko lizards from local markets, which were eventually taken to Vesty Pakos Biopark, a wildlife rehabilitation center. In 2012, the biopark received 560 jararankos confiscated under similar circumstances, says park veterinarian Fortunato Choque.

With the increased policing, sellers have changed the way they sell the reptiles, for instance displaying five or 10 animals while keeping the rest inside their stall, Choque says. 

What’s more, they “no longer sell entire animals. They crush them and sell them as cream.”

Raúl Rodríguez, the national director of the Forestry and Environmental Protection Police (POFOMA), said that many vendors are “low-income people who see a way to earn some money through indiscriminate hunting and subsequent commercialization.”

Part of the solution, Miranda says, may be environmental education, specifically in the communities where this species is being poached. ‘’I believe that working with children in education, is essential, to teach them respect for their own environment.’’

Part of the ecosystem

Back at the wetland with Flores, the llamas and alpacas of Victoria Flores continue to graze peacefully. Sitting next to her aguayo (a traditional multicolored Andean bag), she reaffirms the importance of jararankos in her life.

“I would tell the authorities not to ban it. I’m not saying this to sell the product—the jararanko actually cures.”

Miranda, who has studied L. forsteri for five years in the Bolivian Andes, disagrees.

He’s seen direct evidence of poaching in areas where rocks were strewn about in the search for the jararankos. Notably, these areas also had fewer of the reptiles.

“They are part of the ecosystem,” Miranda says. “You just have to appreciate them.”

The National Geographic Society supports Wildlife Watch, our investigative reporting project focused on wildlife crime and exploitation. Read more Wildlife Watch stories here, and send tips, feedback, and story ideas to [email protected]. Learn about the National Geographic Society’s nonprofit mission at natgeo.com/impact.

This story was produced with support of the Internews Earth Journalism Network and the National Endowment for Democracy.

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