Lt. Col. Faye Cuevas is a decorated war veteran with 19 years’ experience in military intelligence. Now, she is using her skills to stop wild elephants from being poached.
Cuevas calls herself “the accidental conservationist.”
In addition to being a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, she is also a lawyer and an intelligence expert.
This unique background makes her the perfect person for the job. She said combatting elephant poaching is a war in everything but name.
“We call it elephant poaching, we call it illicit trafficking, but if you start to really untangle how poaching happens, how poachers are armed, how they’re connected into larger networks and how those networks can move ivory and horn on a global scale, who protects them, who provides logistics, who ensures that permissive environment if you will—who ensures their freedom of movement across I mean incredibly long distances—that it resembles war in anything but name,” said Cuevas.
Elephant poaching involves the cyberspace and a global criminal network, so it can be necessary to apply security approaches to traditional conservation methods.
In the U.S. Air Force, Cuevas worked on collecting intelligence and using it to predict and prevent the next bomb attack. She thinks the same process and skills can be applied to conservation.
Rangers and conservation groups on the ground collected tons of information. Linking this data up could help form a bigger picture, and prevent a crime.
Working with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), Cuevas introduced a smartphone app to do just that: tenBoma.
It allows information to be entered and read in real time, rather than being written up in reports at the end of a day’s patrolling.
Cuevas hopes it can effectively supplement the work of conservation groups.
TenBoma is currently being tested in the Tsavo Conservation Area in Kenya.
There’s already been a decline in elephant poaching there in recent years, thanks to nonprofit groups working with the Kenya Wildlife Service in the area.
Supporters of tenBoma hope the app will improve that trend even more. There are plans to expand the concept into other conservation areas.
“We’ve really worked on specific cases that I cannot go into details that has reduced crime in the areas that we are operating, so we’ve seen the success of this. And that’s one reason why there’s excitement in the team with the uptake of this technology, because we’ve seen results,” said David Karanja, Kenya Wildlife intelligence officer.
Why is this an important battle to fight for Cuevas?
“You know my youngest daughter is six years old, and at the current rate of elephant decline, at about 8 percent a year, which roughly equates to about 28,000 elephants—then my 6-year-old daughter won’t have an opportunity to see an elephant in the wild before she’s old enough to vote. Which just is unacceptable to me because if that is the case, then we have nothing to blame that on, but human apathy and greed,” she said. “It is a war that we have not won, but I would say it is a war that we are winning. And if we can continue with the same momentum, that we can ultimately win the war.”
Cuevas has run tenBoma out of Washington, D.C., for one year. She has now moved her family to Kenya’s capital Nairobi.
There, she can be closer to the problem—and more closely involved in trying to stop it.
