The Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs of the U.S. Department of State announces an open competition for organizations to submit applications to carry out a project to reduce incentives for drug, flora, and fauna traffickers to profit from undetected and uncontrolled ranching and deforestation in the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve and Tawahka Anthropological Reserve. The project will build institutional alliances, capabilities, and sustainability to ongoing wildlife and forest protection measures and create links with law enforcement to bring perpetrators, often members of transnational criminal organizations, to justice.

Together, the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve and the Tawahka Anthropological Reserve, comprise some two million hectares of pristine and biodiverse jungle managed by members of the indigenous Miskitu, Mayangna, Tawahka, Pech, and Garifuna communities. These forests are in the most remote parts of Honduras with extremely limited government presence leaving one of the most biodiverse parts of Central America open for transnational criminal organizations to operate.