Last ditch effort: New attacks imperil environmental activists
Seen here are Sea Shepherd supporters Tracie Willis and Izaac Camacho. Sea Shepherd has been the target of four attacks for defending the vaquita porpoise since January 2019, and Willis has filed charges for assault after having received death threats from suspected exotic bird traffickers. Click to enlarge. Photo: Courtesy Tracie Willis.
Continuing a disturbing trend, a fresh round of threats and attacks against Mexican environmentalists and wildlife defenders were racked up in the first months of this year. Particularly noteworthy were aggressions against persons defending protected species.
On March 4, World Wildlife Day, a naval clash erupted in the Gulf of California when an estimated 20-25 skiffs swarmed two ships belonging to the international marine mammal advocacy organization Sea Shepherd. Before being repelled, the attackers hurled lead weights, rocks and (unsuccessfully) Molotov cocktails at the Sea Shepherd vessels.
Together with Mexican federal authorities, Sea Shepherd monitors illegal gillnet fishing blamed for driving the endemic vaquita porpoise to the brink of extinction. Only a handful of the small cetaceans are believed to remain alive in the Upper Gulf.
The March 4 incident was the fourth time since January 2019 in which Sea Shepherd's ships were attacked by purported gillnet fishers, including a February confrontation in which gun shots were reportedly directed at a Sea Shepherd boat. No injuries have been reported until now.
According to the Mexican Attorney General for Environmental Protection (Profepa), the use of firebombs and the involvement of underage assailants were noticeable developments of the latest attack.
The dire situation of the vaquita, attributed to totoaba fish poachers who utilize gillnets that scoop up all manner of creatures, has elevated the vaquita’s survival to a matter of national security, La Jornada recently reported.
According to the Mexican daily, the nation’s Interior Ministry has become involved in an issue that has international ramifications since the lucrative totoaba, sometimes called the “cocaine of the sea” because of the high price the fish’s swim bladder commands, is smuggled through the United States to its final market destination in China.
In regards to the vaquita, Mexico must also live up to its obligations under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
On the Pacific coast, wild bird defender Tracy Lyn Willis filed charges with Nayarit state and federal law enforcement authorities after two men allegedly assaulted her at home in Sayulita Jan. 12, punching her in the face and inflicting knife wounds.
Willis, founder and former president of the environmental advocacy organization Ser Su Voz Sayulita, said during an interview that she had been engaged in an escalating confrontation over the past year, punctuated by death threats made against her, with a man who sells birds near Sayulita. Willis and members of Ser Su Voz Sayulita blamed the January attack on a "bird mafia" that specializes in selling protected parrots and other birds.
"We have touched, rattled the cage of, the exotic bird trade in Sayulita," Willis contends.
While no arrests were immediately made after the reported assault, Willis obtained a protective order from the Nayarit state government. According to the bird defender, police patrols were stepped up around her home in the aftermath of the violent attack.
While violence against Mexican environmentalists is nothing new, both the target and location of the aggression against Willis, a foreign born resident and well-known restaurateur, were unusual.
Situated just north of Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific Coast, Sayulita has emerged as one of the trendiest resort destinations in Mexico, drawing legions of surfers and others seeking peace and serenity. But rapid development of the so-called Riviera Nayarit is generating a host of environmental problems, including inadequate wastewater treatment and disposal and habitat destruction.
"We're trying to turn Sayulita into a green town," Willis affirmed. "We're starting with the parrot. He'll change the consciousness of this town."
Although a 2008 reform to Mexican wildlife law prohibits the capture of parrot species for consumption or commerce, the commercial trafficking of parrots and other exotic birds persists across Mexico. "It's huge," Puerto Vallarta Bird and Nature Festival co-founder Nancy Holland, summed up the wild bird pet market.
In 2013 Semarnat, Mexico's federal environmental agency, reported that 77 percent of captured parrots perished before reaching their final buyers, with 50-60,000 such deaths chalked up annually.
The inhumane conditions in which birds are often trafficked was once again highlighted in March when the Mexican National Guard alerted Profepa of the discovery of 12 young green guacamaya birds packed into two wooden boxes abandoned in the Mazatlán International Airport.
Violation of the parrot protection law is punishable by up to nine years in prison, according to Profepa.
In the southwestern state of Michoacán, meanwhile, environmentalists and human rights advocates suspect efforts to protect migratory monarch butterfly habitat from illegal loggers were connected to the January disappearances and deaths of Homero Gomez, a former logger and promoter of the El Rosario biosphere reserve where monarchs winter, and Raul Hernandez, a butterfly sanctuary guide.
Gomez was found dead in a Michoacán well Jan. 29, while Hernandez's body was recovered Feb. 3 in another location of the state.
The Mexican Center of Environmental Law (CEMDA) along with dozens of Mexican and international environmental and human rights organizations called the deaths murder and demanded an "exhaustive investigation" by the Michoacán state prosecutor's office leading to the punishment of culpable parties. So far, no one has been charged in the deaths of Gomez and Hernandez.
Separately, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization noted that the El Rosario sanctuary where Gomez worked was made a World Heritage Site in 2008.
The monarch butterfly’s epic annual migration from Canada and the United States to Mexico has inspired international conservation initiatives involving the three nations and encouraged seasonal ecotourism in Mexico as an alternative economic development strategy.
"This is a shock," said the Environmental Defense Fund's Eric Holst of the deaths of Gomez and Hernandez. The coordinator of the U.S.-based environmental organization's monarch butterfly preservation project, Holst said a visit he made to Michoacán reinforced the importance of conserving the monarch butterfly’s Mexican forest habitat while fomenting ecotourism.
In assuring the success of the trinational movement to conserve the monarch butterfly, "everything that the folks do (in Mexico) is critical," Holst added.
Threats, harassment and violence against Mexican environmentalists were the subject of a new report released in late March by CEMDA. According to the Mexico-City based non-profit, 39 attacks were registered against Mexican environmental defenders in 2019. Although the good news was that incidents were down in comparison with prior years, the bad news was that 15 of last year’s attacks were murders.
Previously, CEMDA had logged 460 attacks against environmental defenders between Jan. 1, 2012 and Dec. 31, 2018. The pattern of incidents over the years has encompassed homicide, forced disappearance, illegal privation of liberty, kidnapping, criminalization, intimidation, defamation, burglary, robbery, stigmatization, and inappropriate use of force.
Of the 2019 cases, 40.5 percent of the incidents implicated government officials, including the National Guard, local prosecutors and state police.
Even as the ink on the new CEMDA report was drying, the killing of another Mexican green advocate made the news. Isaac Medardo Herrera, an attorney and activist in Morelos state, was reported shot and killed by two men who knocked on his door the evening of March 23. Medardo had been actively protesting a housing development slated for a wooded area of Jiutepec.
Besides the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mexico’s official National Human Rights Commission joined in the widespread condemnation of the murder, urging an “exhaustive investigation” and reiterating the autonomous government agency’s “concern” over the lack of adequate government protocols and strategies to protect human rights defenders which, in Medardo’s case, involved an environmental defender.