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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | December 2005 
Daunting Shell Game
 Sean Mattson - Express-News
La Gloria, Mexico — The poachers rode horses across a starlit beach. The man trying to thwart them followed.
Toño Romero had a score to settle. Poachers beat him to four of five clutches of sea turtle eggs the night before. He wasn't about to let that happen again.
This nation banned turtle hunting and egg harvesting 15 years ago, but federal law enforcers depend on people like Romero to keep the endangered creatures safe.
Unarmed and alone, Romero defends 18.6 miles of the country's Pacific coast against about 20 poachers who make bundles of cash by selling turtle eggs, widely believed to be an aphrodisiac, and meat on the black market.
"He's on the bluff," said Romero, pointing into the dark.
He spotted fresh horse tracks in the sand, radioed his base at La Gloria Turtle Camp and pushed his all-terrain vehicle into high gear, whipping along the beach.
"There are four of them tonight."
He never caught up with them. But that night he saved two nests out of three.
Romero, a former fisherman, has been having a rough year.
During the July to December 2004 nesting season, he and a single assistant managed to limit poachers to only 27 percent of the 3,000-plus olive ridley sea turtle clutches laid along this stretch of the Jalisco coast. It was a record.
This year, poachers claimed at least 40 percent of the clutches. Word evidently had spread that Mexico's navy and environmental protection officers had stopped backing up Romero.
"This year (the number of saved clutches) dropped because we don't have the support of armed forces," said José Antonio Trejo, a biologist with the University of Guadalajara who oversees the turtle camp, named for a nearby fishing community. "They don't do their job."
With a 24-year success story, the camp is in danger from more than just lackadaisical authorities. The University of Guadalajara is considering pulling its miniscule $2,500 annual budget for the camp. It's less than a fourth of the funds needed to keep it afloat, with the rest coming from Mexican corporate donations and camp visitors.
This has left Trejo scrambling to figure out something that has eluded environmentalists from the Brazilian rain forest to Florida's Everglades: How to make species preservation more profitable than exploitation.
"People need to know that the turtles are worth more alive than dead," Trejo said.
It won't be easy. This year, poachers have plundered more than $30,000 worth of eggs from La Gloria beach. That doesn't include the unknown number of turtles killed for meat, which fetches almost $7 per pound.
Romero earns about $430 a month. On a good night, a poacher can make $150 or more.
Back from the brink
A generational attitude change toward sea turtles began in La Gloria in 1982 when a handful of University of Guadalajara students founded the turtle camp. It took three years for the university to begin funding the camp. Volunteer fishermen like Antonio Avalos Suarez worked to supply them and help them collect eggs for supervised incubation. "We brought them fish so they could eat," said Avalos, 72, an ex-bracero who picked cotton in the Rio Grande Valley in 1959.
Like practically everyone in La Gloria, he grew up with turtle meat and eggs as part of his diet. Avalos changed his diet for two reasons: turtles became scarce and the high-cholesterol eggs and meat were bad for his health.
He also began feeling sorry for the turtles.
"It's sad because they start to cry and a tear comes out when they kill them," Avalos said.
Emigdio Balderas Reyes, 60, a farmer and a civil protection officer, similar to a firefighter, said life is much better in La Gloria these days.
"There's more work," he said. "He who doesn't eat doesn't want to."
Still, a new generation of hueveros, as egg poachers are called, has emerged in La Gloria and nearby Cruz de Loreto.
Rene Hernandez, 22, a shrimper who is seasonally employed at the camp, has cousins in Cruz de Loreto who sell eggs. They regularly taunt him for his work and complain about it.
He said hueveros are in it for the easy money. Standing beside his ATV at 2 a.m. while waiting for a female olive ridley to finish laying eggs, he laughed at the suggestion that poachers might be called huevones, a mildly derogatory term for lazy people also derived from the Spanish word for egg.
When La Gloria Turtle Camp started keeping track in 1985, some 200 clutches per year were saved. The number has increased to last year's record of 2,150.
Legal standoff
The eggs are collected by Romero, Hernandez and other volunteers and "planted" at the camp to keep them safe. Olive ridleys lay an average of 98 eggs per clutch, Trejo said. About 60 percent hatch, but only between one and four per 1,000 hatchlings matures.
La Gloria's turtle population pales in comparison to the thousands of olive ridleys that nest in the state of Oaxaca, where a massive authorities-backed conservation effort has been launched in recent years.
Still, the disparity shows the potential for recovery if the ban on turtle hunting is enforced. Ironically, conservation efforts have kept poachers employed.
"The very same poachers tell me that if we weren't here, the turtles would have been finished off," Trejo said.
He said the most frustrating part of his job is the crummy prosecution of the few poachers who are caught by authorities.
To be jailed, poachers must be caught in the act and arresting officers must follow a number of strict guidelines, lest the judge toss the case, which Trejo said happens more often than not.
Hueveros also have legal contacts.
"We take longer to get back to the camp than it takes for them to get out" of jail, Trejo said of the times he's gone to Puerto Vallarta to give statements on arrests he has witnessed.
"Just like there are lawyers for drug traffickers, there are lawyers for hueveros," he said.
Penalties for exploiting endangered species in Mexico are harsh on paper. Fines range from $1,100 to $11,000 with jail time of up to nine years. |
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