EL PAÍS offers the América Futura section open for its daily and global informative contribution on sustainable development. If you want to support our journalism, subscribe here.
On the night of November 3, 2018, a US maritime surveillance plane captured a suspicious vessel in an area of the Pacific Ocean common for cocaine transport, 50 nautical miles southwest of Costa Rica. The Coast Guard Cutter Campbell boat approached the coordinates and, after a chase with fast boats, they were able to shoot the engines of the Cool Runnings X boat to stop the crew with their 600 kilos of drugs; They were four Colombian and two Costa Rican fishermen who had long since been made unemployed by the closure of the shrimp company following a 2013 constitutional ruling that outlawed the destructive method of trawling.
The captain was a wise man of the sea, a resident of the Fray Casiano neighborhood, one of the most precarious and dangerous in Puntarenas, the main port city on the Costa Rican Pacific coast. He had always told his family that he would do one last service for the “gentlemen” and he was already retiring, but that day was his final. It was useless to throw the white packages into the sea. Everything was recorded from the air and four months later the five agreed to have committed the crime of possession and international transport of drugs, for which the captain and his partners received a sentence of almost nine years.
Imprisoned in the Puntarenas prison, hot and stinking of garbage with stagnant water in the surrounding area, the captain has already served half his sentence and his family has spent much of the money they could obtain before being captured at sea. The good thing, if that can be considered positive, is that he is with neighbors or colleagues who also fell into criminal networks when fishing stopped giving them what they needed to survive. “That is full of men like that, who had to leave their families abandoned and that probably when they leave they will return to bad activities, because what is left for them,” says Miguel Sanchez, a lawyer from Puntarenas who worked as a teacher in that prison.
There are some of those who know the sea best in the mountainous country that often betrays its coastal name and leaves coastal populations behind, despite the good international image due to the promotion of an environmental “blue agenda” (the one related to to the management of marine and coastal ecosystems) that in recent months, with the entry of a new Government, appears conditioned to the wealth that can be generated.
Safety, conservation and productivity are the tasks that put Costa Rica in a dilemma, which has not yet assumed itself as a marine country, with 51,030 square kilometers of land surface, but with a marine surface 10 times greater. Few more than a few scientists know that the largest volcanic mountain range in Costa Rica is not made up of mountains with their forests photographed millions of times by tourists, but rather the mountains of the Cocos Submarine Mountain Range, almost 800 kilometers long. Any schoolchild knows that the country borders Nicaragua to the north and Panama to the south, but only the sharpest would include Ecuador and Colombia, neighboring waters. The idea that the seas of small Costa Rica are home to 3.5% of the planet’s marine biodiversity is hardly taking hold.
“The country still hasn’t found the formula to adequately manage this great resource,” concludes Marco Quesada, a Costa Rican marine biologist and vice president of Oceans at Conservation International’s Americas Division. The pulse between environmental protection and marine exploitation, especially fishing, is cyclical. Apart from the use of tourism and the need to exercise sufficient control against criminal activities such as the illegal transfer of species or drug trafficking. Only sometimes does the trip go wrong, like that November 3rd.
“The key is to understand that the surveillance of the seas is an activity that is transversal to conservation and productivity, to sustainable use,” adds Quesada, who disdains the exclusive debate between protecting and exploiting. This is precisely the duel in which political discussions in Costa Rica have stalled after the Constitutional Court ordered in 2013 stop trawling until there are no scientific studies that show the possibility of exploitation with reduced impact.
In Puntarenas, where the shrimp companies that practiced this method operated, the news fell as an affront from the authorities in San José, complacent with the banners of environmental organizations, especially foreign ones. Employment sources plummeted and social deterioration increased, partly reflected in the province’s murder rate, which has doubled in the past five years. The tourists do not arrive and the possibilities of recovering jobs are far away. Only some fishermen who were affected by the trawling method supported the restriction, but they acknowledge that the Government had to promote alternatives and these have not yet arrived.
“It is a historical issue in which Costa Rica has been left in debt,” Heiner Méndez, president of the Costa Rican Fisheries Institute, acknowledged to EL PAÍS, to whom President Rodrigo Chaves has given the rank of Minister of State as a sign of a greater priority in the development of the industry, while the figure of Vice Minister of Seas and Waters that the three previous administrations maintained has been eliminated.
Haydée Rodríguez, former Vice Minister of the Seas and international consultant on maritime governance, regrets the positions of the new authorities and the reduction of options for the State to exercise balanced sovereignty in environmental, development and security matters, beyond what the program does patrol agreement with the United States. “I would not only say that the ocean agenda has slowed down, it is that we have changed lanes towards ideas of use as was proposed 30 years ago,” he commented before pointing out that representatives of the fishing sector have occupied spaces in Costa Rican delegations in international talks. on marine protection.
They seem to agree with the environmental accusations. “It is not about protecting for the sake of protecting,” warns Méndez, who is committed to protecting in a productive way, a lukewarm point that allows meeting the economic needs of coastal populations and also international opportunities for economic cooperation. Although environmental groups in the country are distrustful due to the numerous allusions by the authorities about the need to obtain wealth from natural resources, foreign policy maintains the emphasis on the “blue agenda.”
Costa Rica along with France, leaders of the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People (HAC) intend to take advantage of a United Nations biodiversity conference in December to forge an international commitment to declare wilderness areas Protected at least 30% of their land and ocean surface by 2030.
The risk for Costa Rica is declaring protected areas and not being able to protect them, as happens on land with some national parks that are used as warehouses or routes by drug trafficking groups. It is when the knowledge of fishermen in distress is valuable for the transfer of drugs, as Méndez acknowledges, noting that they are a minority, without there being a census of the fishing fleet in the country. Only 1,800 licenses are registered for small scale, about 350 for large or medium fleets, 500 for tourism and less than 200 for sport fishing.
Meanwhile, hopes are low in the territories. “We do not exist for them (the politicians or the authorities). It’s like we live outside the country. We only exist when someone pulls out a ‘white shark’ (package of cocaine); There they look at us and they send us the police, the coast guard, the judiciary and everything they can,” lamented Manuel Fernández, a fisherman in Golfito, a town south of the Pacific coast, last March during this year’s presidential campaign.
#Sustainability #fishing #cocaine #crossroads #maritime #Costa #Rica