How Mexican fishing refugees are fighting hunters
It has been He left the beach two hours of divers. By reaching their designated GPS points in the Gulf of Mexico, their boat engines are whispered from roar. As pairs, they enter the Celestún fishing shelter area, one of the largest in Mexico. Their ritual is absolute: place on the fins, adjust the vests and hoses, clean the visits, and load the tanks and the weight of the oxygen. For the next few minutes, their lives depend on that they have carefully prepared their dives in this place.
They are looking to restore fishery or on the verge of collapse. Founded in 2019, the shelter covers 324 square kilometers and is supported by the Yukatan submarine community, a group of community divers and fishermen, supported by the Mexican Institute for Research in Sustainable Fisheries and the Society and Civil Association. Their method mixes local knowledge with scientific strictness.
The problem they face is a global issue: excessive fishing and environmental degradation destroys the oceans’ biodiversity that many countries lack the will or resources to deal with. In 2024, because sea level temperature broke full -time records, Nature’s World Fund Live planet The report shows that over the past 50 years, the maritime population has declined by 56 percent of the world. More than one -third of the current marine population is over -disclosed.
In Mexico, more than 700 sea species have been fishing in 83 fisheries that support 200,000 Mexican families. The analysis of the Mexican National Fishing Charter by IMIPAS shows that 17 % of the country’s fishery is deteriorated, 62 % are exploited at their maximum sustainable level, and 15 % have no information about their status. When the non -comprehensive oceanic protection analyzed the same data, he found that 34 % of Mexico’s fisheries were in poor condition, “says Esteban García Peña, coordinator of ocean research and general policies.
Part of the problem is that, according to the Mexican law, no one is obliged to take care of the country’s fisheries health. The general law of the Mexican fisheries does not oblige the government to take charge of this responsibility. The oceans have requested to change the matter, and in the face of legislative unwillingness, even in 2021 against the Union Congress, claiming that human rights abuses were such as access to a healthy environment and food. This is an inspiration for the revival of worse Mexico fishing areas, solely not to be analyzed or approved by Congress, and the project was frozen.
In the face of this uncertainty, societies have taken things to their own hands. Although the government is not obliged to protect and restore the country’s fisheries, people can request that asylum areas will create and reuse marine ecosystems. And so today, there are shelters in Baja California Sur, Quintana Roo and Campeche that have more than 2 million hectares in total and directly or indirectly 130 species.
“When the first proposal was put forward, it seemed crazy,” says Alicia Poote, a researcher at IMIPAS and head of the aquaculture and fisheries research center in Yukalptin. “Some people think it closes this sea, but it’s not. It works in a region with a stable and community supervision.”
Many limitations
The day before the supervision begins, the Celestún team gather under a large palapa. Jacobo Caamal, a scientific diving expert, will review the project for the next few days. He jokingly offers practical recommendations using coconuts to show how seafood and seafood measures.
They talk about seafood, because although it is not part of Mexico’s stomach, its fishing has made a lot of benefit to the beach. In the Chinese market, these creatures can earn more than $ 150 per page. Addiction to drugs on ecinoderm has directed ways that are harmful to the ecosystem and to the health of fishermen, such as diving using a harmful HookahA prefabricated diving device that works on gasoline and pumps oxygen into the tube to the divers below the surface. Health towels sometimes stand as an oil filter, while mint tablets are bitten to reduce taste. In Celestún, no one denies the risk of diving with this device. Many know someone who had an accident or died of pressure.
By 2012, the area was abundant cucumber, but its violations of its closed seasons brought the species to the threshold of extinction. The divers began to hunt deeper and deeper to hunt them. The situation was unbearable. Then, a group of fishermen called on IMIPAS researchers to create an area where the sea could have the opportunity to recover.
