An unoccupied kindergarten building has been transformed into a shelter for street dogs near the new Mexico City international airport, under construction in Zumpango de Ocampo on the outskirts of Mexico City.
The Doggies of Santa Lucía shelter, run by the army, was set up after the airport’s architects and workers noticed a large number of stray dogs wandering near the construction site.
The shelter can host up to 50 dogs that will receive medical attention, food and shelter.
“The shelter’s objective is to give the dogs a temporary home and to adapt them to live with humans and other dogs so they can be adopted by a family,” said Second Lieutenant Carla Medellín, a veterinarian.
Not all dogs that arrive at the shelter are intended for adoption. Specialists and veterinarians will also look for dogs that can work at the Santa Lucía airport by detecting Covid-19 patients or even drugs.
“Dogs can help us as medical alert dogs. They can detect cancer, hypertension, early diabetes or Covid-19,” said Pamela Díaz, an architect at the airport. “Mainly at the airport, they will provide a way of carrying out fast tests.”
Morena governors and governors-to-be met with the president and senior officials this week in Mexico City.
The federal government will concentrate its anti-crime efforts on the 50 municipalities with the highest rates of insecurity.
That’s the message President López Obrador conveyed to ruling Morena party governors and governors-elect at a meeting on Wednesday at the National Palace in Mexico City.
The government has already made improving the security situation in 15 highly violent municipalities a priority, and has achieved some success.
Murder rates are down in nine of them – Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Celaya, Culiacán, Benito Juárez (Cancún), San Pedro Tlaquepaque, Irapuato, Iztapalapa and Salamanca, but up in six – León, Cajeme (Ciudad Obregón), Acapulco, Guadalajara, Chihuahua and Morelia, according to recent government data.
Alfonso Durazo, governor-elect of Sonora and the federal government’s security minister between 2018 and 2020, told reporters outside the National Palace that “the need to strengthen some actions to improve the fight against insecurity” was one of the main topics of discussion at the meeting with the president.
“Concentrating efforts in the 50 municipalities that today have the most serious [crime] statistics, particularly in intentional homicides, was spoken about,” he said.
According to crime monitoring website elcri.men, the 50 municipalities with the highest per-capita homicide rates in the 12 months between June 1, 2020 and May 31, 2021 are located in 12 states: Baja California, Sonora, Michoacán, Quintana Roo, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Chihuahua, Morelos, Guerrero, Colima, Tamaulipas and Jalisco.
Tecate, Baja California – considered Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) country – has the highest per-capita rate with 189.9 homicides per 100,000 people followed by Caborca, Sonora; Zamora, Michoacán; Tulum, Quintana Roo; Fresnillo, Zacatecas; Cotija, Michoacán; Jacona, Michoacán; Apaseo el Alto, Guanajuato; Valparaíso, Zacatecas; and Apaseo el Grande, Guanajuato.
Durazo said the president and the Morena governors and governors-elect agreed to join forces in the fight against crime and work together on other issues to “provide the best results.” Once the governors-elect take office later this year, Morena will govern exactly half of the country’s 32 states.
Durazo, who was security minister during the two worst years on record for homicides in Mexico (2019 and 2020), said the federal government’s security strategy – the so-called hugs, not bullets approach – will not change as authorities attempt to combat crime in the country’s most violent municipalities. The focus on addressing the root causes of violence – things such as poverty and lack of opportunity – will not change, he said.
López Obrador has publicly maintained confidence that the government’s social and welfare programs will succeed in lowering violence but homicides remain at near record levels, although federal officials have celebrated a 2.9% decline in the first five months of this year.
Strengthening the National Guard, combatting corruption and improving police training were cited by Alfonso Durazo as other areas that require attention.
Durazo said that while the country waits for the security strategy to “bear fruit,” authorities “have to act in other areas.”
He cited strengthening the National Guard, combatting corruption and improving police training as examples.
Probed as to whether additional National Guard troops would be deployed to the 50 municipalities with the worst security situations, the incoming governor told reporters that the discussions didn’t “reach that level of detail.”
“But obviously … the actions could imply a greater use of force, it will depend on the recruitment process that the National Guard is carrying out,” Durazo added.
Others said that López Obrador urged them to personally attend to security issues and participate in the federal government’s early-morning “peace building” meetings.
“[The agreement] is that we’re going to work on an issue that interests and plagues all of us,” said Rubén Rocha, governor-elect of Sinaloa, home state of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of Mexico’s most powerful criminal organizations.
“On security matters, we’re going to work in coordination, that’s the fundamental agreement.”
Indira Vizcaíno, governor elect of Colima, said that federal and state security statistics were reviewed during a lengthy meeting at the National Palace. Two municipalities in the small Pacific coast state, Manzanillo and Armería, are among the 50 most violent municipalities, according to the data compiled by elcri.men.
“Naturally we were speaking about what [security] strategy will have to be implemented,” Vizcaíno said before acknowledging that Colima is one of the most violent states in the country on a per capita basis. Homicide, femicide and kidnapping rates are all high in the state, she said.
“So without a doubt working together [with the federal government] in a coordinated way is essential for us,” Vizcaíno said.
Of the 50 most violent municipalities, 26 are located in states that are already governed by Morena or will be by the end of the year.
Guanajuato, Mexico’s most violent state, has the highest number of municipalities on the list with 11. The Bajío region state, where the CJNG, the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel and numerous smaller criminal groups are vying for control, is currently governed by the National Action Party. López Obrador has described the security situation in the state as “complicated.”
Mineralogist Andrés Manuel del Río discovered the element vanadium in Hidalgo in 1801, but Swedish scientist Nils Gabriel Sefstrom got the credit 29 years later.
This year marks the 220th anniversary of the only chemical element ever discovered in Mexico to date — vanadium.
Spanish-born scientist Andrés Manuel del Río made the discovery in 1801, but due to a controversy over whether or not it was a new element, he never quite got full credit throughout much of history.
More recently, del Río has gained posthumous recognition for his achievement — including an annual prize named after him, which is given to Mexico’s top chemist. As for vanadium itself, it has been used in the modern era to make stronger steel and more durable cars, even helping to pave the way for the nuclear age.
The story begins in the late 18th century, when del Río came to Mexico, which was then part of the Spanish Empire. After receiving a first-class education across Europe, del Río went to Mexico at the behest of the Spanish crown as a faculty member who would assist the new Royal School of Mines, housed at Mexico City’s new Palace of Mining.
“[He was] sent to New Spain because he was the best mineralogist in Spain,” said Omar Escamilla, an archivist at the Palace of Mining. “The School of Mines in Mexico was the most important for the whole Spanish crown since silver was a very, very important natural resource to sustain [it]. The best people were sent to Mexico City in order to open the School of Mines.”
Vanadium crystals. Del Río named the element panchromium in reference to it turning colors when heated. LuYago/Shutterstock
It was in that capacity that del Río received a mysterious sample of ore from Zimapan, Hidalgo, in 1801. He initially concluded that it was a kind of brown lead. Yet, he eventually posited that it was a new element, first terming it erythronium then panchromium because it turned many colors when heated.
A few years later, in 1803, he gave some of the ore to the celebrated German botanist Alexander von Humboldt to take to Europe. Von Humboldt shared it with a respected colleague, French chemist Hippolyte Victor Collet-Descotils. Ultimately, Collet-Descotils concluded that del Río’s find was not a new element.
“There was no reason to doubt [del Río’s] initial conclusion that it was a new element,” said Rocio Gómez, a professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University who gave a talk about del Río while at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. “This is a man who studied mineralogy extensively for decades.”
Later, in 1830, Swedish scientist Nils Gabriel Sefstrom discovered a sample of copper ore from the Eckersholm Mine in his home country and proclaimed that it was a new element. He named it vanadium, after the Norse goddess of beauty.
When others learned of the discovery, they remembered del Río’s earlier find — including von Humboldt and another German scientist, Friedrich Wohler. The latter compared Sefstrom’s findings with del Río’s previous findings and found them to be the same.
Despite the fact that del Río had made the initial discovery, Sefstrom got the credit — and his name for the new element stuck.
Archivist at the Palace of Mining, Omar Escamilla. Facebook
By then, del Río had left Mexico. The War of Independence had upended his life.
In the years preceding the war, he had established a precedent-setting ironworks in Michoacán, but it burned down in 1809; the war led to the destruction of the remnants.
After Mexico achieved independence, many intellectuals were expelled for presumed ties to the Spanish crown. Although del Río was not accused himself, he left in 1829 out of solidarity with his colleagues and found a home-in-exile in the U.S.
“He decided to go to Philadelphia because it was a very intellectual, forward-thinking city,” Escamilla said. “He made some friends there in Philadelphia. Some of the friends wanted to call [the new element] Ríonium because of him.”
By 1834, del Río had returned to Mexico and remained there for the rest of his life. He taught mineralogy as a professor at the Royal School of Mines until his death in 1849. According to Escamilla, del Río was initially upset with Humboldt for not coming sufficiently to his aid in trying to prove his discovery of a new element, but the two reconciled later in life.
In the next century, researchers kept finding new uses for vanadium. It contributed to the steel and automotive industries — and indirectly to the nuclear age.
An 1831 issue of the Monthly American Journal of Geology and Natural Science objected to del Río’s lack of credit for discovering vanadium. archive.org
Joel Lubenau, a former advisor to heads of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission and an ex-national security consultant, said that vanadium worked well as an alloy with steel. A Pennsylvania-based business headed by two brothers, James and Joseph Flannery, used this to their advantage when teaming up to help produce cars for Henry Ford.
“Metal fatigue was a big issue when automobiles started becoming more available,” Lubenau said, noting that incorporating vanadium “made the steel more resistant” and lighter in weight overall. He called the Flannerys “fortunate enough to link up with Henry Ford,” who “was also interested in vanadium steel … It all worked out very well for them.”
The Flannerys’ headquarters were in the Vanadium Building in Pittsburgh, graced by a stained-glass window depicting the element’s Norse goddess namesake holding a plaque bearing the element’s name, among other imagery. The window currently is preserved at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh.
According to Escamilla, vanadium is one of three elements discovered by a Spaniard, with the others being wolfram/tungsten in 1784 and platinum in the 20th century, and it is the lone element discovered in the Spanish territories of the New World. Escamilla added that del Río’s find was “really an early discovery,” with just 20 to 25 known chemical elements at the time.
“There has been a push over the last few decades in Mexico to have him credited side by side with Sefstrom,” Gómez said, adding that many research bodies “would put Andrés Manuel del Río and Nils Sefstrom side by side. Unfortunately, shared credit did not happen until, of course, del Río had long since passed.”
As another means of honoring del Río, the Chemical Society of Mexico awards an annual prize to scientists in his name.
A major gate at the Palace of Mining bears del Rio’s name.
“He’s one of the notable persons in Mexican mining history,” Gómez said. “He really put Mexican mining in a global context.”
Rich Tenorio is a frequent contributor to Mexico News Daily.
Julio César Cu suited up and ready for a swim in sewage.
Most people would prefer not to think about it but one 62-year-old man has “swum” in it for more than half his life.
Julio César Cu is Mexico City’s chief – and only – sewer line diver, meaning that he spends a lot of his time immersed in viscous, smelly sewage.
On a typical day, Cu is submerged in the stuff – which is supplemented by medical and industrial waste – for 20 minutes to four hours as he carries out maintenance work and removes objects and other matter that could block the system.
Toys, domestic appliances, condoms, car parts, dead animals and even human bodies are just some of the things he has encountered since becoming a diver for Mexico City’s water and sewer utility in 1983.
Coming across dead bodies, however, is not the hardest part of the job, Cu told the newspaper Milenio just before undertaking a new mission.
‘It’s a dream job,’ says Julio César Cu.
“The most difficult thing is completely losing visibility at a depth of 10 centimeters,” he said while kitted out in a helmet and his specialized, heavy-duty diving suit, which was imported from Norway and prevents wastewater from coming into contact with his skin.
“I’ve tried lamps and other [lighting] devices but … I can’t see anything. Down there, my eyes are my hands and other senses.”
Cu started working as a draftsman for the water utility in the early 1980s but joined its industrial diving unit as a 23-year-old in 1983 and has continued as a diver for the past 38 years. He was already a trained diver when he joined the team and had enjoyed swimming from a young age.
But diving in a natural body of water and diving in Mexico City’s garbage-clogged sewers are oceans apart.
“Diving as a sport is dangerous because we enter a world that is not ours. In my work, the danger increases because tree trunks come along, nails come along, glass comes along and everything else that the drains suck up,” Cu said.
He explained that he is unable to swim like ordinary divers and instead has to drag himself along the sewers. Sometimes he is lowered into the sewers inside a protective cage. He faces the constant risk of a foreign object perforating his suit and his skin below but says he thrives on the danger.
“The fear in this job is latent, it’s always present in one way or another. Working with that sensation helps me to be more attentive to my work,” he said.
While Cu is the only sewer diver, he works with a team consisting of three other people – two assistants and a person known as a tender.
The assistants are responsible for managing the tubes connected to Cu’s oxygen tanks, while the tender uses an electronic console which monitors his depth and how much oxygen he has left.
Despite the dangers and difficulties he faces, the 62-year-old has described working in the sewers as his dream job. It is one that has not only given him an intimate knowledge of Mexico City’s dark underbelly but also the opportunity to help solve missing person cases.
“The police have asked for our help when there were accidents or searches for a [missing] person. I believe that’s the most impactful thing [I’ve done], to look for a person, find him and recover [his body],” Cu said.
Two of his former industrial diving colleagues retired and one was killed in the line of duty, leaving him on his own while blindly navigating the murky sewers of the capital.
“It’s just me who’s left here. Why do I stay? Because I like my job, I value it and I really like knowing that part of what I do benefits Mexico City.”
The Tlalpan school during rescue efforts after the 2017 quake.
A court has sentenced a man to 208 years in prison for the criminal homicides of 26 people, most of them children, who died when a school collapsed during a powerful earthquake that struck Mexico City in 2017, authorities said on Wednesday.
The Mexico City Attorney General’s Office said it had shown that the man described as the project director had guaranteed the structural safety of the school in Tlalpan, a southern district of the capital, without carrying out the required testing and despite irregularities in construction.
The man, identified in media reports as Juan Mario Velarde Gámez, had signed off on a renovation of the school in which an apartment was added to the roof of one wing. The additional weight was identified as a factor in the building’s collapse.
The court also ordered Velarde to pay 377,450 pesos (US $19,000) to each of the victims’ families.
Nineteen children and seven adults died when the privately owned Enrique Rébsamen school collapsed during the 7.1-magnitude quake, the most deadly in Mexico in a generation. At least 369 people died in the capital and surrounding states.
Mexican prosecutors said at the time they had opened a probe into the potential criminal responsibility of the owner and private inspectors for the collapse.
The Pacífico brewery in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, has been without water since July 9 after local authorities cut the supply due to a payment dispute.
Water authorities in the city advised the brewery at the end of May that it owed almost 138.4 million pesos (US $6.9 million) for water usage and just over 31.6 million pesos (US $1.6 million) in unpaid connection fees. Pacífico claims that it is up to date with all its payments.
The newspaper Milenio reported that the Grupo Modelo-owned brewery previously received a letter from the same authorities on April 20 advising it that it had an outstanding connection fee owed to the Sinaloa government. That letter didn’t specify the amount owed.
The brewery said it subsequently received “several verbal threats” that its water supply would be cut and consequently sought an injunction against suspension of water service.
A district court judge ruled in Pacífico’s favor on May 14, granting a provisional suspension order. The judge also ruled that the brewery wasn’t required to pay the alleged debts.
Nevertheless, Mazatlán water authorities continued to seek payment and after not receiving the money it sought, proceeded to cut off the brewery’s water supply.
The suspension of service, the second the company has faced this year, poses a threat to the livelihoods of 1,500 employees and 900 other people whose jobs indirectly depend on the production of beer in the Pacific coast resort city, Milenio said.
The brewery’s inactivity could also lead to a shortage of Pacífico beer in Sinaloa and other states in which the Mazatlán-brewed beverage is distributed, among which are Baja California, Baja California Sur, Durango and Sonora.
The Pacífico brewery has operated at its current location in Mazatlán for the past 39 years. Grupo Modelo, now owned by multinational beverage company Anheuser-Busch InBev, acquired the brewery in 1954.
Michoacán Governor Aureoles waits patiently for a meeting with the president. He waited in vain.
Silvano Aureoles, outgoing governor of the violence-plagued Mexican state of Michoacán, sat on a plastic stool outside the National Palace for hours last month, waiting in vain for an audience with the president.
In his hand, he held a pile of documents he wanted to hand to Andrés Manuel López Obrador that he said supported his claim of links between the president’s Morena party and organized crime. Those ties, he said, were putting Mexico on course to become “a narcostate.”
Critics dismissed the spectacle as a political stunt by a politician whose leftist Democratic Revolution Party lost the western state in June 6 midterm elections. By contrast, Morena won 11 of 15 state elections, taking control of virtually the entire Pacific coast, which includes drug cartel bastions.
Some media commentators and opposition politicians seized on Morena’s Pacific victories, saying they suggested the ruling party had struck a deal with organized crime groups to win power in an election tainted by violence amid rising concerns about the government’s ability to deliver on promises to curb violent crime.
Experts said it was ludicrous to imagine the bosses of the Sinaloa Cartel or Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG, Mexico’s most powerful crime syndicates, ordering people to vote for Morena down the entire Pacific coast.
But they stressed that does not mean organized criminal groups were absent from the election, in which bargains are traditionally struck between powerful local crime, business and political bosses.
“The tide [among organized crime groups] has shifted in favour of Morena,” said Falko Ernst, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, a think tank focused on armed conflict, citing criminal groups in the violent Tierra Caliente area in Michoacán.
“They see them as a better bet for power because popular opinion is still on the side of Morena so for some, Morena is a more pertinent vehicle [to support] … but that doesn’t mean collusion.”
Aureoles was not convinced. “What a coincidence that they won big in … the Pacific corridor. Who let them?” he told the Financial Times a few days after his sit-in.
“It’s terribly dangerous that Morena is becoming a narco party and the president is looking the other way when the most important issue for people is security … Morena has become the instrument of organized crime,” he said.
López Obrador denies such allegations. He refused to meet Aureoles and said the governor should take his claims to the relevant judicial authorities. Aureoles has faced similar charges of links with crime groups, which he denies.
The president shakes hands with an ex-drug lord’s mother.
A recent U.S. estimate, which the Mexican president has rejected, suggested that 30-35% of Mexico is controlled by organized crime groups.
There are frequent reminders of the cartels’ continued power. Presumed CJNG members recently paraded their military firepower in Aguililla, a town in Michoacán that has become a major flashpoint.
Other brutal attacks have included one in the northern state of Tamaulipas last month in which 19 people died after gunmen apparently opened fire at random on civilians, turning up the heat on López Obrador’s strategy as the government struggles to make a dent in record homicide levels.
There were 14,243 homicides in the first five months of this year, virtually unchanged from 14,673 in the same period in 2020. Last year was the second-deadliest on record, with 34,554 murders compared with 34,681 in 2019.
The president says he will not back down on his “hugs not bullets” approach — an attempt to help vulnerable young people study and work in order to avoid joining cartels.
Some of López Obrador’s actions have fueled criticism of a laissez-faire approach to cartels. He released the son of jailed Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán; met and shook the hand of Guzmán’s mother; and publicly apologized for using the drug lord’s nickname. The day after the election, he said organized crime groups had “behaved well.”
“Every president tries to negotiate with the narcos … In politics, you’ve got to deal with these people,” said Benjamin Smith, a professor at the U.K.’s Warwick University in Coventry, who has recently published a history of the Mexican drug trade.
Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, co-ordinator of the Mexico and Central America program at Noria Research, a non-profit, said it was “a stretch” to say Morena was in cahoots with criminal groups “because this goes way beyond Morena,” and alliances were constantly shifting.
“If you want to stay in power, or win power, you have to talk to the local strongman — that could be a narco boss, a businessman or the mayor … You have to make deals to win elections, sometimes with the narco, and violence is at the center of the game,” he added.
Successfully dealing with that has, however, so far eluded López Obrador.
“AMLO to his credit recognizes he has got to change course” from hardline past approaches to organized crime, said Stephanie Brewer, Mexico director at the Washington Office on Latin America, using the president’s nickname.
“But where the Mexican federal government does seem to be giving up is on the strategies — building capable, civilian police forces and strengthening criminal investigations. If criminal groups can continue to operate with impunity, that will continue to be a huge driver of violence.”
Ernst of the ICG was less hopeful: “There seems to be an acceptance that this is a non-solvable problem for now.”
The youngster outside the trailer in which he and other migrants had been traveling.
A Honduran toddler who was found alone in southern Mexico after becoming separated from his father on their journey to the United States will be sent back to his country on Friday, according to officials involved in the case.
Wilder, 2, gained international media attention when he was found alone on a roadside earlier late last month in Mexico’s Veracruz state, half naked and crying, near a truck that carried migrants in suffocating conditions.
“The little one will arrive in San Pedro Sula on Friday morning accompanied by a child protection officer from Mexico,” said Lutgarda Madrigal, attorney for the protection of children in Veracruz, which was in charge of Wilder’s case.
Upon arrival in Honduras, Wilder would be reunited with his mother Lorena García, according to a source familiar with the matter who asked not to be named.
García, who is from the rural area of Copan, Honduras, told Reuters that Wilder left with her husband Noel Ladino in a bid to migrate to the United States with a human smuggler. It was unclear why the father and son became separated before Wilder was found by Mexican security authorities.
After Mexican immigration authorities circulated photos, García identified herself to Honduran officials as Wilder’s mother using a document that matched the vaccine records the boy carried.
García said she had spoken to her husband by phone but his whereabouts were still unknown.
Textitlán, Oaxaca, where two communities are in the midst of a dispute.
Residents of a small town in the Sierra Sur of Oaxaca detained 20 members of the National Guard, five police officers and at least 14 state government officials on Tuesday in an act of protest against alleged government inaction in the face of violence.
The security force members and officials from the Oaxaca Attorney General’s Office (FGE) remained in citizens’ custody in Santiago Textitlán early on Thursday.
They were detained by residents of Río Santiago, a community in the municipality of Textitlán, located about 130 kilometers southwest of Oaxaca city.
The residents say they were forcibly evicted from their homes on December 20, 2020, by armed citizens from Santiago Xochiltepec, another town in the same municipality.
Residents of Río Santiago and Santiago Xochiltepec are involved in a dispute over the allocation of resources from the municipal government.
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The Río Santiago residents have remained in Santiago Textitlán, the municipal seat, since being driven out of their homes more than six months ago. They say their homes were looted and set on fire on May 12 and that authorities have done nothing to help them or stop the violence, which has claimed at least two lives. However, the people they detained were deployed to investigate the violence they have denounced.
Much of the residents’ anger has been focused on the General Secretariat of the Oaxaca government and its head, Francisco Javier García López. However, they are now calling on Governor Alejandro Murat to personally attend to the situation.
“Whoever comes will be detained, if it is not the governor himself,” wrote FGE officials who are being held in a letter asking for Murat’s intervention.
García said the residents, who have shared videos of the people and vehicles they detained, want the state or the federal government to commit to compensating them for their losses.
He said the security force members and government officials in citizens’ custody slept in vehicles or municipal government offices on Tuesday night under the guard of residents. They are as calm as can be expected “because we’ve been in permanent communication” with them, García said.
He said the state government had offered to sit down with the disgruntled Río Santiago residents to discuss their demands, adding that’s “the only way we’re going to reach an agreement.” It was unclear whether Governor Murat planned to meet with the residents.
The National Guard said on Twitter Thursday morning that it was participating in dialogue between residents and authorities and that it hoped an agreement could be reached with the state.
“We will favor negotiation at all times so that this conflict is resolved favorably,” it said.
Fewer than a dozen vaquita are estimated to remain.
A fishing-free zone will no longer apply in the upper Gulf of California to protect the critically endangered vaquita marina porpoise, of which fewer than a dozen are believed to remain.
A fishing-free “zero tolerance” zone where the use of gillnets was prohibited had been in place in the upper reaches of the gulf – the only place vaquitas live – and was even enlarged last September but the federal government on Wednesday officially abandoned the policy of maintaining it.
The “zero tolerance” zone has been replaced with a sliding scale of sanctions if more than 60 boats are repeatedly seen in the area, where totoaba, a fish whose swim bladder is a delicacy in China and sells for thousands of dollars per kilogram, coexist with the vaquitas.
Many of the latter, the world’s smallest porpoise species, have died after becoming entangled in nets set to catch the lucrative totoaba.
The deaths continued even after the “zero tolerance” zone was established in 2017 as fishermen frequently encroached on it and authorities were unable to enforce it. Now the situation appears likely to become even worse.
Environmental experts cited by the Associated Press (AP) said the decision to scrap the fishing-free zone effectively abandons the remaining vaquitas to the gillnets responsible for their near extinction.
Alex Olivera, Mexico representative for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the new rules stipulate a sliding scale of punishments for something that shouldn’t be allowed to occur in the first place.
For example, the National Aquaculture and Fisheries Commission said it will only use 60% of its enforcement personnel if 20 or fewer fishing boats are seen in the vaquita’s Upper Gulf of California habitat where the “zero tolerance” zone was established.
“This is stupid. They are waiting to count boats in an area designated as ‘zero tolerance,’ where there shouldn’t be a single boat,” Olivera told AP. “They are letting in dozens of boats. This is the end of the concept of zero tolerance. There is just going to be dissuasion.”
The new rules “imply not protecting the vaquita,” said a conservation expert not named by AP due to a fear of repercussions.
“It appears that fisheries authorities want to drive the vaquita to extinction,” the expert said.
AP said the sliding-scale punishments “seem doomed to irrelevance” given that authorities were unable to effectively enforce the “zero tolerance” zone. The navy has worked with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to remove gillnets from the area but they have often been outnumbered and even attacked by fishermen.
The Sea Shepherd vessel the Farley Mowat has been attacked on repeated occasions, including in January this year when fishermen aboard at least five pangas threw lead weights and molotov cocktails at both the crew and military officials who were on board.
The gillnets used to catch totoaba are expensive and fishermen consequently harass conservation vessels to try to get their crew to return nets they removed. Fishermen say they have not received any compensation from the federal government for income they have lost due to restrictions on where they can fish.
Meanwhile, the vaquita population continued despite successive governments pledging to strengthen the fight against illegal fishing. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio and billionaire businessman Carlos Slim even joined the efforts to save the vaquita during Enrique Peña Nieto’s 2012-2018 presidency but in early 2019 scientists estimated that just 10 of the marine mammals remained.
Sightings of the porpoises are now very rare but experts can estimate their numbers by using subaquatic listening devices that graph the high-frequency sounds they make.
