Update (January 19, 2024): Wonderful news! Colombia’s environmental agency Corporación Autónoma Regional del Valle del Cauca (CVC) fined experimenters Sócrates Herrera and Myriam Arévalo more than $281,000 after finding them responsible for lacking the necessary permits to capture, confine and experiment with monkeys. The CVC’s ruling also held that “cruelty to animals” – a crime whose investigation and prosecution is not within the CVC’s jurisdiction – had been committed and that the monkeys rescued from the dilapidated facility will not return to their abusers. Now the Special Prosecutor for Animal Cruelty must bring charges against these fraudulent and cruel subjects!
Update (July 5, 2023): VICTORY! Thanks to PETA’s damning and detailed 18-month investigation, the National Institutes of Health revoked the eligibility of laboratories run by the notorious experimenters Sócrates Herrera and Myriam Arévalo to receive money from the agency. These torture chambers disguised as science centers should never have been funded with a single cent of US tax dollars – let alone millions – in the first place. Read more.
Update (May 23, 2023): GOOD NEWS! Colombia’s environmental agency, the Corporación Autónoma Regional del Valle del Cauca, has just charged the ice cream users at the center of PETA’s damning 18-month investigation with the following crimes:
- Not having the necessary permit to catch squirrel monkeys
- Not having the necessary permission to experiment on monkeys
- Not having the necessary permission to use animals or obtain any product from them
- Committing “harm to wildlife”
This welcome development follows a Colombian Supreme Court ruling last month that upheld a lower court decision allowing authorities to continue caring for the 108 small monkeys rescued from this torture facility. In ruling against the experimenters, the court stated that continuing to experiment on monkeys for years without having the necessary permits was “completely unjustified.” It is too totally indefensible that the National Institutes of Health has not done its job and apparently continues to fund these api users.
The criminal investigation by the Colombian Office of the Attorney General is ongoing.
Urge the agency to stop funding the trial leaders NOW by taking action below!
Update (April 28, 2023): A court in Colombia has just upheld a lower court ruling allowing authorities to continue caring for the 108 small monkeys rescued from this torture facility. In ruling against the experimenters, the court stated that continuing to experiment on monkeys for years without having the necessary permits was “completely unjustified.” It is also completely unjustified that the National Institutes of Health has not done its job and apparently continues to fund these api users. Call on the agency to stop funding them NOW by taking action below!
Update (April 4, 2023): ANOTHER WIN! Yesterday, local authorities seized 180 mice – the only remaining animals still imprisoned at the Caucaseco Scientific Research Center, the filthy, dilapidated torture facility exposed by PETA. The mice, which would have been used in experiments funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), are now recovering at the newly opened Animal Welfare Center in Cali, Colombia.
Witnesses say that before their rescue, the mice lacked sufficient water, and our investigation showed that some had resorted to cannibalism. Former employees claim that the mouse population exploded because experimenters had failed to separate males from females. As a result, up to 30 mice were collected in boxes designed for a maximum of five.
This rescue—along with the previous PETA-requested seizure of 108 monkeys—is the largest animal rescue in Colombia’s history.
It’s an outrage that the NIH seems to still be banking on this place. But that’s likely not the only overseas mess the agency is pouring US tax dollars into. The NIH gave billions of tax dollars to foreign labs to conduct experiments on animals, but never verified that those labs met even minimal standards of animal welfare, according to a recent published report by the US Government Accountability Office on which PETA was consulted.
The malaria experimenters who run Caucaseco told the NIH that everything about their facility was great, but the monkeys they imprisoned died of infected wounds while confined in their own waste.
Urge the agency to stop funding this hell NOW by taking action below!
Update (March 20, 2023): It’s a huge win that we’ve worked hard to achieve! Authorities from Colombia’s environmental agency Corporación Autónoma Regional del Valle del Cauca (CVC) have seized more than 100 baby owl monkeys, which were kept in appalling conditions, from the dilapidated laboratory at the center of PETA’s damning 18-month investigation.
The monkeys had been forced to live amidst their own waste in rusty cages inside a makeshift outdoor pen and are now recovering from several serious injuries and illnesses at CVC’s Wildlife Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre.
The attack came after the CVC ordered the lab, misleadingly known as the Primate Center Foundation, to end all experiments on monkeys following a recent inspection prompted by our probe. CVC found unconditional suffering and the filthy, apparently illegal conditions we first exposed, as well as the unexplained disappearance of 21 monkeys. Among other horrors, inspectors discovered a dead baby monkey and a monkey missing an eye.

The Colombian Office of the Attorney General is now investigating the owners of the lab for apparently illegal experiments and trapping of monkeys, as well as for animal welfare crimes.
Meanwhile, officials in Colombia have taken further action by temporarily closing the entire campus of the Caucaseco Scientific Research Center, which includes the Primate Center Foundation, and by fining its owners, declaring that the campus lacked the necessary permits to operate and was “not safe for humans or animals.”
Shamefully, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has handed over millions of taxpayer dollars to the couple running this operation – and truth be told, it appears the agency is still funding them.
Please add your voice to ours by taking action below to call on Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who oversees the NIH, to order the agency to stop funding these drug abusers.
Originally published on January 1, 2023: