Sally, a jaguar that lived in the Pantanal in Brazil, when she was still alive in 2013. Photos like this were used to identify her body.

THE PANTANAL, Brazil — On the morning of March 29, Sally was found floating in the Cuiabá River. Lifeless and bloated, her body was slowly drifting toward Bolivia when local ranch hands pulled her ashore. In the nape of her neck were two deep, round wounds. Members of the ranch staff took photos, called the local police and waited for the authorities to remove the body. A quick autopsy revealed that Sally had likely been killed the day before, shot from above at close range with a .38-caliber handgun. She was one of three jaguars fatally shot in the Brazilian Pantanal in the first six months of this year. The isolated river delta in central-western Brazil is home to the world’s largest population of jaguars, with an estimated nine per 50 square miles. The news sent shock waves through the ranches and tourist lodges that dot the Pantanal and conservation organizations overseas, many of which have made the region’s jaguars a focus of their work. Within an hour, the jaguar was identified from photos taken in 2013 by a tourist — after whom Sally was named — showing unusual markings along the left side of her torso. Within a week, a local ranch had put up a $1,000 reward for any information related to her death. As puzzlement and suspicions grew, conservationists abroad offered to chip in. The reward climbed to $2,000. A conviction carried the possibility of a $5,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence without the possibility of parole. “Whenever we find a jaguar body, we are always suspicious,” said Alexandre do Nascimento, the military police chief in Corumbá, a small gateway town to the Pantanal along the border with Bolivia. His team is among those assigned to investigate the case. For decades, jaguars in the Pantanal were hunted by skin traders and sought as trophies by foreigners on safari. But Sally’s body was intact. Pantaneiros, or swampland ranchers, who for more than 250 years killed the jaguars that preyed on their livestock, would have been sure to dispose of the body.

Sally after she was shot, officials believe, by drug traffickers, who dislike the tourists and law enforcement officers that the jaguars attract. Authorities are now leaning toward a new set of suspects in the case: drug traffickers. The smugglers who run cocaine between Bolivia and Brazil are known to use the remote Paraguay, Cuiabá and Pirigara rivers, which cross the Pantanal. They are also believed to carry small handheld guns — the kind of weapon that fired two shots into Sally’s neck. For drug traffickers, jaguars attract tourists and law enforcement officers to the isolated rivers. The furor triggered by the discovery of Sally's body was something new in a land where the life of one jaguar has not always been worth so much. The Pantanal ranchers, once considered the jaguars’ greatest enemy, are now among their most ardent protectors. Together with conservation groups, they are starting to experiment with new strategies to protect the big cats from an emerging threat: the region’s thriving drug trade. “These jaguars are now worth more than any person here,” said Nilson Soares, who works at a tannery in Poconé, a dusty frontier town on the northern end of the Pantanal. “But everyone in this city has been on the other side of this issue, even if they won't talk about it. They can remember when jaguars moved through here as skins.”

‘Now people realize that if the jaguar dies, so does the rancher. Jaguars can eat all the cattle they want off my ranch.’ Jamil Rodrigues da Costa cattle farmer

For decades, the state turned a blind eye to the ranchers who killed jaguars in the name of protecting their cattle herds. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the global pelt trade emerged as a threat to the big cats, accounting for the deaths of an estimated 18,000 wild jaguars per year. Illegal game safaris, too, brought high-dollar tourists from around the world to ranches that offered all-inclusive hunting packages. Exact figures are hard to come by, but by the mid-1970s, the jaguar population in the Pantanal had declined significantly. In the 1980s, however, two factors moved in the jaguars’ favor. The Brazilian government, which had banned jaguar hunting in 1967, began to step up enforcement amid international pressure. At the same time, the price of beef began to fall. Many ranchers abandoned their estates during those years, and those who stayed gradually stopped viewing cattle as a reliable source of income. Today ranchers can make more money charging foreign tourists for jaguar-watching trips than they could save in cattle by shooting the jaguars. The ecotourism industry, which attracts an estimated 68,000 travelers a year, now helps subsidize the cattle industry. The region’s jaguar population rebounded. “Now people realize that if the jaguar dies, so does the rancher. Jaguars can eat all the cattle they want off my ranch,” said Jamil Rodrigues da Costa, a third-generation cattle farmer and the owner of the Porto Jofre Hotel, an ecolodge in the Pantanal. That wasn’t always the case. His grandfather, once one of the best-known hunters in the Pantanal, built a ranching estate on jaguar pelts. “In those days the local ranchers, eager to see the jaguars dead, gave him two cattle for every jaguar that he killed,” da Costa said. “But that was the Pantanal then, and things have changed a lot in the years in between.” Despite the big cats’ change of fortune in the river delta, the jaguar population in Bolivia and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere is still under threat. The species remains “near threatened,” according to the Union for the Conservation of Nature, and has lost an estimated 40 percent of its historical range.

‘[W]e have to start seeing drug trafficking as a conservation and rural development issue. They are intimately tied.’ Kendra McSweeney professor, Ohio State University