Update (January 19, 2024): Wonderful news! The Colombian environmental agency Corporación Autónoma Regional del Valle del Cauca (CVC) fined experimenters Sócrates Herrera and Myriam Arévalo more than $281,000 after it found them responsible for lacking the required permits to capture, confine, and experiment on monkeys. The CVC’s ruling also established that “animal mistreatment”—a crime whose investigation and prosecution are not within the CVC’s jurisdiction—had been committed and that the monkeys who were rescued from the decrepit facility will not go back to their abusers. Now, the animal cruelty special prosecutor must bring charges against these fraudulent and cruel experimenters!
Update (July 5, 2023): VICTORY! Thanks to PETA’s damning and detailed 18-month investigation, the National Institutes of Health rescinded the eligibility of the laboratories run by infamous experimenters Sócrates Herrera and Myriam Arévalo to receive money from the agency. These torture chambers masquerading as science centers should never have been funded with a single cent of U.S. tax dollars—let alone millions—in the first place. Read more.
Update (May 23, 2023): GREAT NEWS! The Colombian environmental agency Corporación Autónoma Regional del Valle del Cauca has just charged the monkey abusers at the center of PETA’s damning 18-month investigation with the following crimes:
- Not having the required permit to capture squirrel monkeys
- Not having the required permit to experiment on monkeys
- Not having the required permit to use animals or obtain any product from them
- Committing “harm to wildlife”
This welcome development follows a Colombia high court’s ruling last month upholding a lower court’s decision that allows authorities to continue to care for the 108 tiny monkeys rescued from this torture facility. In its decision against the experimenters, the court stated that continuing to experiment on monkeys for years without having the required permits was “totally unjustifiable.” It’s also totally unjustifiable that the National Institutes of Health hasn’t done its job and is apparently continuing to fund these monkey abusers.
The criminal investigation by the Colombian Office of the Attorney General is ongoing.
Urge the agency to stop funding the experimenters NOW by taking action below!
Update (April 28, 2023): A court in Colombia just upheld a lower court’s decision that allows authorities to continue to care for the 108 tiny monkeys rescued from this torture facility. In its decision against the experimenters, the court stated that continuing to experiment on monkeys for years without having the required permits was “totally unjustifiable.” It’s also totally unjustifiable that the National Institutes of Health hasn’t done its job and is apparently continuing to fund these monkey abusers. Urge the agency to stop funding them NOW by taking action below!
Update (April 4, 2023): ANOTHER VICTORY! Yesterday, local authorities seized 180 mice—the only remaining animals still imprisoned at the Caucaseco Scientific Research Center, the filthy, ramshackle torture facility that PETA had exposed. The mice, who would have been used in experiments funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), are now recovering at the recently opened Animal Welfare Center in Cali, Colombia.
Witnesses say that before their rescue, the mice lacked sufficient water, and our investigation revealed that some had resorted to cannibalism. Former employees allege that because experimenters had failed to separate males from females, the mouse population exploded. As a result, up to 30 mice were crowded into boxes designed for a maximum of five.
This rescue—along with the earlier, PETA-prompted seizure of 108 monkeys—is the largest animal rescue in Colombia’s history.
It’s an outrage that NIH is apparently still bankrolling this place. But it probably isn’t the only overseas mess the agency is pouring U.S. tax dollars into. NIH gave billions of tax dollars to foreign laboratories to conduct experiments on animals but never verified whether those labs met even minimal standards of animal welfare, according to a just-released U.S. Government Accountability Office report that PETA was consulted on.
The malaria experimenters who run Caucaseco told NIH that everything about their facility was great, but the monkeys they imprisoned were dying from infected wounds while confined amid their own waste.
Urge the agency to stop funding this hellhole NOW by taking action below!
Update (March 20, 2023): It’s a massive victory that we worked hard to achieve! Authorities from the Colombian environmental agency Corporación Autónoma Regional del Valle del Cauca (CVC) have seized more than 100 tiny owl monkeys, who were being kept in horrific conditions, from the decrepit laboratory at the center of PETA’s damning 18-month investigation.
The monkeys had been forced to live amid their own waste in rusty cages inside a makeshift outdoor pen and are now recovering from numerous serious injuries and illnesses at the CVC’s wildlife rescue and rehabilitation center.
The seizure came after the CVC ordered the laboratory, misleadingly known as the Primate Center Foundation, to end all experiments on monkeys following a recent inspection prompted by our probe. The CVC found unmitigated suffering and the filthy, apparently illegal conditions that we first exposed as well as the unexplained disappearance of 21 monkeys. Among other horrors, inspectors discovered a dead baby monkey and a monkey who was missing an eye.
The Colombian Office of the Attorney General is now investigating the owners of the laboratory for apparently illegal experimentation and capture of monkeys as well as for animal welfare crimes.
Meanwhile, officials in Colombia have taken further action by temporarily shutting down the entire campus of the Caucaseco Scientific Research Center, which includes the Primate Center Foundation, and by fining its owners, stating that the campus lacked the necessary permits to operate and was “not safe for humans or animals.”
Shamefully, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has handed over millions of taxpayer dollars to the couple running this operation—and, true to form, it appears that the agency is still funding them.
Please add your voice to ours by taking action below to urge Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, who oversees NIH, to order the agency to stop funding these monkey abusers.
Originally published on January 1, 2023:
