Jaguar Tourism and Conservation in Brazil’s Pantanal Wetlands

Diego Viana was never supposed to save the jaguars. If anything, he was meant to kill them.

His great grandfather had made a living by hunting the big cats in Brazil’s remote Pantanal grasslands. This was nothing personal; it was business. The Pantanal is the world’s largest tropical wetland, stretching across 42 million grassy, swampy acres, many of them in Brazil. Here, some of the country’s most iconic animals roam free: the anaconda, giant anteater, giant otter, South American tapir, and—perhaps most notably—the…