On March 27 Mexico was added to a short blacklist of countries with which no legal wildlife trade should take place by the Secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). This is the first time Mexico has been sanctioned under the Convention since joining in 1991, and the blanket recommendation to suspend trade in all species was centered around a failure to enforce laws protecting two: the vaquita marina porpoise and the totoaba fish, both the focus of decades-long conservation efforts. Over the last decade, the vaquita population has precipitously collapsed by a stunning 98 percent due to totoaba poaching!
The dramatic CITES decision coincides with the restart of totoaba poaching that is lethal to the vaquita. With the re-opening of China’s economy after the Covid-19 lockdown, this totoaba poaching season is shaping out to be disastrously intense. Not since the winter of 2019-2020 before Covid-19 shut down China’s borders, has there been so much totoaba poaching frenzy on the Upper Gulf waters and so much peril for the vaquita, one of the world’s top extinction-risk species, found only in a small part of Mexico’s Upper Gulf of California.
The vaquitas, air-breathing mammals, die when entangled in illegal underwater fishing nets, such as those used to catch the totoaba or shrimp. When the totoaba fish arrive in the Upper Gulf in the spring to spawn, Mexican fishers illegally catch them for their swim bladders, valued as a delicacy in China and known as “money maw,” also used for financial speculation. Large bladders can fetch several thousand dollars locally. The huge-mesh nets used to poach many totoaba at once are the deadliest type for the vaquita.
The totoaba-poaching season can be deadly to humans too. Because the trafficking profits have attracted the involvement of Mexico’s notorious drug cartels, the totoaba poaching is typically marked by violence.
Ominously, this year’s totoaba poaching season threatens to wipe out important success and hope. At the end of 2022, there was good news about the struggling vaquita. Although biologists estimated only about 10 individuals surviving – yes, that’s only 10! – this tiny number is still more than they expected given that the population halved from 2017 to 2018.
Moreover, there had been success in thwarting shrimp poaching that also threatens the vaquita. In summer 2022, the Mexican Navy studded the seafloor of the vaquita’s most protected range with hooked structures. When shrimp fishers went into the zone in the fall, their nets were snagged by the hooks.
But, unlike the shrimp nets, some totoaba nets are not bottom-set, so that the Navy structures may not pose a deterrent.
The totoaba, like vaquita, is a CITES-protected species. But in March 2022, after years of lobbying, Mexican totoaba farms were given a CITES license to export the meat of the farm-raised totoaba. Exports of the totoaba bladder remained prohibited, and the licensed farms were obligated to destroy the bladders so they could not leak into the illegal trade and further fuel China’s demand.
The recent CITES sanction ends the legal exports of the farm-raised totoaba meat as well. The decision was not based on the fresh reports of totoaba poaching.
Rather, the sanctions stemmed from Mexico’s preexisting failure to prepare and submit an adequate “compliance action plan” to CITES to protect the vaquita and adhere fully to the CITES legal requirements for the totoaba-meat export.
If Mexico satisfies “the letter” of the CITES law, the sanctions will be quickly lifted, Mexico will get away with little economic loss.
But the Secretariat’s decision could be a strong signal to countries which in November 2023 will consider whether Mexico made “sufficient” progress implementing its action plan. Trade sanctions will once again be on the table, and this time the focus will be on how diligently Mexico is addressing the “spirit”, not just “the letter” of CITES enforcement requirements.
Thus, countering and prosecuting totoaba trafficking will be key elements of the upcoming November decision. Unless Mexico acts resolutely against the unfolding totoaba poaching now, it may be slammed with tough sanctions without the prospect of getting them easily removed.
The Committee will be looking for actions far beyond Mexico scaling up the development of vaquita-safe fishing gear, an effort on which the Mexican government has relied to claim it is doing its best to protect the vaquita. But prior gear swamp efforts fell flat as fishers continued using the lethal gillnets even after they claimed to have handed them in, sometimes buying new gillnets with government compensation for alternatives.
Any more upcoming sanctions won’t come out of the blue. The CITES Secretariat’s enforcement division has put considerable effort into supporting Mexico to achieve better compliance: In October 2021, for example, it organized a multi-country meeting of dozens of law enforcement officials and experts to strategize on collaborative action to crack down on international trafficking.
For years, Mexico’s enforcement efforts have veered between uneven and inadequate. Tragically, the one bright-spot enforcement accomplishment – the arrests of leading Mexican totoaba traffickers – was recently botched in prosecution.
Supported by information from Mexico’s Financial Intelligence Unit that had detected “unusual banking operations between China and our country,” the Mexican Navy made a series of arrests of leading totoaba traffickers: eight in November 2020 (although a judge shortly dismissed charges against two for lack of evidence); three in May 2021; six in November 2021 and another in May 2022. Among those arrested was Sunshine Rodriguez, an Upper Gulf firebrand widely seen as a top totoaba trafficker, a frequent organizer of protests against government enforcement efforts, and a man with significant social following among the totoaba fishers and their communities.
Moreover, in 2021, Mexico amended its criminal code to stiffen penalties for organized crime involving totoaba, with sentences of 5 to 15 years imprisonment.
These arrests and tougher penalties led CITES in March 2022 to praise Mexico for its “notable progress” in addressing organized crime groups involved in totoaba trafficking and encouraged the government to “build upon this positive momentum going forward.” The Secretary of the Navy proudly announced on January 3, 2023 that Mexico had dismantled the Upper Gulf’s totoaba poaching ring known as Cartel del Mar.
But the February 2023 trial of Sunshine Rodríguez, the biggest prize among the arrested, turned into a fiasco. All three witnesses for the prosecution failed to appear at the hearings for fear of retribution. The wiretap evidence demonstrated only that Sunshine Rodríguez was “an orchestrator of social conflicts,” and police officers admitted on the stand that none of the recorded conversations “directly implicates him in totoaba trafficking or any illegal activity.” Sunshine was found innocent of all charges and flew home on a friend’s private plane. In subsequent interviews he claimed to have been a political prisoner. He was the first of the detainees to be tried, and the prosecutorial collapse does not bode well for subsequent efforts.
Speculations abounded that the prosecution’s failure could have been due to more than incompetence. Although Mexico’s Attorney Generals Office (FGR) identified environmental crime as a top priority in its 2020 Criminal Prosecution Plan, focus on organized crime in natural resources and environmental matters by the Organized Crime Prosecution Division (FEMDO) has been minimal. Worse, at the very end of 2022, just a few weeks before the trial’s start, Mexico’s supposed austerity measures led to abrupt dismissals of federal prosecutors focused on environmental crime, including those who had been working on the totoaba organized crime investigation for years and had been widely praised for their commitment. Those dismissals were not publicly announced.
Under the Lopéz Obrador administration, Mexico is ranked one of the world’s worst countries by the Global Organized Crime Index. There are “dramatic levels of corruption and dramatic levels of infiltration of the cartels into judicial and law enforcement institutions in Mexico.” My research on China-linked wildlife poaching and trafficking in Mexico has found that “the Sinaloa Cartel now plays a critical and dominant role in brokering arrangements between Chinese buyers and local totoaba poachers.” While Mexico’s fisheries regulators are widely alleged to be riddled with cartel-linked corruption, it would be of grave concern if the corruption rot spread also into the very offices responsible for prosecuting organized crime.
The CITES trade sanctions finally got the attention of the Mexican government. A high-level Mexican delegation flew immediately to Geneva to work with the Secretariat to amend its compliance action plan to be in compliance. The Mexican government also pointed finger at China which after some highly visible raids in 2018 and 2019 dropped its law enforcement efforts against retail markets though large seizures still regularly take place in Chinese ports, suggesting retail markets remain undiminished. The concerning increase in net-fishing for other croaker fishes around the world to supply the China’s appetite for croaker swim bladders points to the same trend. Like in the Gulf of California, it ensnarls and endangers other dolphins and porpoises, such as most lately around Papua New Guinea.
However, the persisting totoaba bladder demand in China cannot be an excuse for Mexico to remain lackadaisical about law enforcement within its territory. Mexico must get serious about enforcement against environmental crimes, including the protection of the vaquita. And it must ensure that corruption does not eviscerate its environmental protection accomplishments.
* Vanda Felbab-Brown is a senior fellow in the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence in the Foreign Policy program at The Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Twitter: @VFelbabBrown
