More than 60 environmental organizations from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean have called on the region’s governments to use diplomatic action to stop Japan from beginning its annual whale hunt in the Southern Ocean this December. Japan claims that it hunts whales for scientific research purposes, which is authorized, but activists say that it actually does so for economic purposes, despite the moratorium on commercial whaling established by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1986.

The environmentalists want the Buenos Aires Group, made up of the governments of 14 IWC member countries in the region, to issue a statement on what they view as a transgression of the commission’s rules.

"This request will be positively answered by the Argentine government and, through the Buenos Aires Group, Latin America will continue to express its firm opposition to these operations,” activist Roxana Schteinbarg of the Whale Conservation Institute of Argentina told Tierramérica.