Caught in the Middle

This article originally ran in the 2007 online edition of Flux, the magazine of the University of Oregon's School of Journalism. It placed 6th in the In-Depth category of the 48^th annual William Randolph Hearst Foundation's Journalism Awards Program, helping me earn a spot in the National Writing Championships held each year in San Fransisco. Flux also published a slide show of the images I shot to accompany the story.


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Impoverished fishermen in the Galapagos struggle to stay afloat

Puerto Villamil feels like a seaside ghost town, though plenty of people live there. A maze of sandy streets radiates from the cluster of bars, restaurants, and shops huddled near a quiet harbor on Isabela Island, Galapagos. Small, unpainted concrete-block cottages mingle with empty, weed-filled lots. Old outboard engines and other maritime trash fill many yards. The wrecked corpses of pangas — small fishing boats — sprout everywhere like invading species. Anti-littering slogans written by fishermen in Spanish decorate most of them: “No Botar Basura El Mar” — Don’t Throw Trash in the Sea. Few people outside the small South American country of Ecuador realize people live in the Galapagos and fewer understand the plight of the islands’ fishing community.

Galapagans are some of Ecuador’s poorest people and the islands’ fisheries cannot support their growing numbers. Scientists and environmental groups are pressuring Ecuador to save the ocean ecosystem, but few outsiders seem to notice the fishermen’s need for jobs to replace the collapsing fishing industry.

The fishermen and their families, reserved but friendly, smile at the few passing tourists but say little. The international media portrayed a different, violent image of Galapagos fishermen during strikes against fishing quotas that erupted in 2000. Scientists and environmental groups, worried about the dangers of over-fishing, fought to close the lucrative local sea cucumber and lobster fisheries that many Galapagos fishermen depended on. The fishermen protested, saying that environmentalists cared more about animals than about impoverished Galapagan people struggling to survive. During the strikes, fishermen took park employees hostage, vandalized park property, and killed endangered Galapagos giant tortoises.
Many Galapagos tourists go to Santa Cruz Island. Some visit San Cristobal. Almost none make it to Isabela, home to most Galapagan fishermen. These endangered fishermen aren’t as interesting as the rare species that attract tourists to the islands.

Above: A tour guide explains the natural history of the Galapagos to a group of tourists on the uninhabited island of Bartolome.

The Galapagos, with its exotic animals and romantic link to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, may be the ideal ecotourism destination. For some wilderness lovers these remote tropic isles evoke visions of primeval grandeur unlike any other. But these parched, windswept outcasts in the Pacific Ocean are a destination of last resort for Ecuador’s poorest citizens. Efforts to conserve the islands’ unique natural heritage depend on the people, most of whom harvest the ocean for a living. An effort by fishermen to replace commercial fishing with more sustainable sport fishing tourism has been hijacked by powerful businessmen with their own agendas.

The philosophies and methods of sport fishing are different from commercial fishing. The main reward for sport fishing is the challenge of the catch, rather than financial gain, as it is for commercial. Some Galapagans want to use their hard-earned knowledge of local waters to guide sport fishermen from all over the world, searching for the fishing vacation of a lifetime. Instead of harvesting ocean creatures for sale in domestic and foreign markets, locals say they would help tourists catch fish for reasons other than their value on a dinner plate. Many sport fishers, or anglers, practice catch-and-release fishing. After a hard fight and a quick photo, fish ideally go back into the water to fight again another day. Released properly, most fish survive and the ocean ecosystem remains healthy. In theory, sport fishing could be a sustainable practice in the Galapagos if the right rules were put in place. But part of the problem lies with those who make and enforce sport fishing regulations.

Recognizing a need to protect unique and threatened natural treasure, the Ecuadorian government passed landmark conservation laws in 1998 to preserve the Galapagos Islands and the ocean around them. Commercial fishing, which had decimated some local species, was regulated and limited to island residents. But under-enforcement of fishing regulations and a flood of economic refugees to the islands increased the pressure on the marine ecosystem, and the cycle of over-fishing continued.
Global environmental organizations also used the Galapagos to campaign against over-development and environmental degradation. Europeans and Americans donated millions of dollars to the groups, which pushed to limit fishing and development of the islands. But locals said their needs for economic opportunity and healthy living conditions had gone ignored. Fishermen continue to defend their traditional fishing while searching for new economic opportunities.

Sport fishing blossomed worldwide as a comparatively profitable and environmentally friendly enterprise to commercial fishing. Many Galapagan fishermen wanted to follow suit and develop sport fishing locally, but rich, well-connected businessmen from Ecuador’s mainland muscled in on the action. Locals began to fear they would be left out of the sport fishing market and forced to continue commercial fishing, as sport fishing is illegal in the Galapagos Marine Reserve until regulations are developed. But mainland-connected sport fishing boats prowl the islands unchecked by Dirección General de la Marina Mercante y del Litoral, the Ecuadorian naval force charged with protecting the reserve’s boundaries.

The cool, cobalt Pacific Ocean surrounding the Galapagos burgeons with bio-diversity. Several ocean currents converge near the islands and stir up a rich sea of nutrients, feeding an ecosystem spanning microbial plankton to the whales that first brought fishermen to the waters in the late 1700s. More than 300 species of fish thrive in the turbulent waters, including such prized angling species as marlin, swordfish, wahoo, snook, and red snapper.

In the early twentieth century, Ecuadorians began exploiting the abundant ocean, first chasing bacalao (groupers) and other rockfish, then lobsters, and finally sea cucumbers and sharks. These fisheries boomed at first, drawing more people to the Galapagos and increasing pressure on the fish. Each fishery in turn collapsed as the target species disappeared. Since there is little fresh water on the islands, it is almost impossible to farm anything, and many settlers have relied heavily upon the ocean to sustain themselves.

The streets are deserted after dark in Puerto Baquerizo Moreno, capitol city of the Galapagos. Salsa music and dirty, yellow light leaks out of corner bars and cheap seafood joints. Gesticulating rapidly over a table heavy with empty beer bottles, French expatriate Vincent Gravez explains the sport fishing controversy plaguing the Galapagos. The remains of shrimp and whitefish stew lay forgotten in a ceviche bowl. Gravez, an aquatic ecosystem ecologist, has worked on the sport fishing problem since 2004, organizing and managing business for the fishermen.

“With incomes, everything is solved,” the bald, intensely blue-eyed Gravez says, referring to the over-fishing currently decimating sea cucumbers and sharks. “Most of the fishermen are more conservationist than most of the people who pay the environmental groups’ membership fees.”

Gravez says the fishermen sometimes fish illegally to survive, but they also criticize foreign-factory fishing boats that raid the Galapagos to vacuum up sea cucumbers and shark fins to sell in Asia. The market for shark fins is so lucrative that even tourist boats are caught illegally fishing the marine reserve for the prized Asian delicacy. 

“They know shark fishing is bad,” Gravez says of the fishermen. “They are not proud of it. They are also afraid of going to jail, but they have no other options. There are two thousand people on Isabela and no tourism.”

At first locals were excited about sport fishing, Gravez says, until an illegal big-game sport fishing tournament organized in 2005 by the mayor of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno changed their views. Outsiders from Ecuador’s mainland brought customers to the tournament on self-contained luxury yachts. According to disgruntled locals the big-game anglers didn’t even drink at the bars or buy beer. Instead they brought their own alcohol and didn’t contribute more than a pittance to the local economy.

Above: An endangered Galapagos giant tortoise resting at the Galapagos National Park’s tortoise breeding center on Santa Cruz Island.

After the tournament, Gravez says fishermen felt that sport fishing was an elite sport they couldn’t break into. They worry that big-game anglers would look down on uneducated locals without fancy boats and good English.

Gravez is working to help the fishermen develop another model of sport fishing tourism, one based on local communities. But not everyone wants them to succeed.

Hidden behind a high stucco wall and a wooden gate, the hotel Casa Pilón stands in sharp contrast to Puerto Villamil’s general disarray. The white walls are freshly painted, and the tile floor gleams. Nothing in its appearance sets the Casa Pilón apart from the dozens of new hotels springing up all over the Galapagos. Felipe Trujillo, Casa Pilón’s owner, reclines in the hotel’s empty dining room. Trujillo is suspected of illegal sport fishing in the Galapagos but has evaded the law.

History of the Galapagos: The Galapagos Islands were officially discovered in 1535 by the Bishop of Panama, Tomás de Berlanga, and were annexed by Ecuador in 1832. As many as 100,000 tortoises were killed between the late 1700s and throughout the 1800s by whalers and fur seal hunters who frequented the islands. It wasn’t until 1986 that conservation rules were put into place to protect the land. Promise of tourism and commercial fishing brought new people to the islands after the Galapagos National Park was established in 1959. In the nineties, population skyrocketed partly because of a financial crisis in Ecuador. The limit of tourists allowed in the Galapagos went from 12,000 visitors a year in the sixties to 150,000 in 2004 due to the economic value of tourism.

Trujillo is related to the former Ecuadorian president Leon Febres Cordero. Still recognized by the international press as one of the most powerful people in Ecuador, Cordero was a notoriously ruthless leader, known for wearing a pistol with his business suits.

According to a report by the Galapagos Conservancy, in May 2006, the director of Galapagos National Park, Raquel Molina, accused Trujillo and several of his associates of illegally sport fishing in the reserve. Molina said the group threatened to kill a warden in charge of a flight surveying the ocean for illegal sport fishing activity. On the day he allegedly threatened park rangers, Trujillo says he was sailing with his long-time friend, Baldemar Sanchez, vice-admiral of Ecuador’s Navy at the time. Trujillo says a Navy permit covered the day’s activities.
Trujillo says other big-game promoters — members of mainland Ecuador’s elite Salinas Yacht Club — are his best friends. He says his U.S.–based booking agent maintains a database of thirty thousand customers willing to shell out thousands per day for week-long fishing trips. Trujillo says his customers wouldn’t go out on anything less than a boat like his — a $400,000 sports boat. A sport fishing economy based on those numbers may be impossible for impoverished local fishermen to compete in. 
Because only Galapagos residents are allowed to fish under current regulations, Trujillo set up a front company with a local. Trujillo says he was very careful when making his choice, dismissing most locals as lazy and dangerous, the kind of men who waste all their money when fishing is going well.

“And now they expect to be supported,” says Trujillo, referring to the fishermen’s demand that the government assist them in transitioning to sustainable industries.

Others on Isabela want to become sport fishing guides. A cluster of bright orange, rusty-roofed buildings huddles around a set of satellite dishes in Puerto Villamil’s center. The office of Cooperativa de Pesca Artesanal Horizontes de Isabela, Isabela’s fishermen cooperative, hides in one of the buildings. Inside the dim office Maxime Cartagena sits talking with the cooperative’s manager, Mariela Beltran. 

Cartagena, weathered beyond his thirty-eight years from eight seasons at sea, is a native of Isabela. After a futile hunt for education and employment on the mainland, Cartagena came home. Commercial fishing boomed in the Galapagos while the rest of Ecuador sank into economic chaos. Now, with commercial fishing on the rocks, Cartagena is trying to get out. He is training to be a certified dive master but would rather be a sport fishing guide.

Cartagena explains through a translator that he could make money as a guide but can’t compete with the big-game promoters. There is no way he could buy a $400,000 boat, he says, though he could raise the money for a $50,000 boat. It would be hard, however, to get additional capital and infrastructure needed to participate competitively. Fishermen and some officials say that under the sport fishing regulations currently being written, permits will go to those who have the best infrastructure and most political power. Cartagena and those like him may be shouldered aside by outsiders like Trujillo with access to capital and the mainland power structure.

The International Game Fish Association (IGFA), a private international sport fishing organization, has stepped in to help develop rules for sport fishing in the Galapagos, further muddying the waters. IGFA is not an Ecuadorian stakeholder, Vincent Gravez and others note, but it sanctioned the illegal 2005 tournament put on by the Salinas Yacht Club, an affiliated organization. Local fishermen question its involvement.
The problem, says Gravez, is the current definition of sport fishing in the Galapagos. Because the focus has been on big-game fishing, people don’t realize the possibility of other types of sport fishing — fishing for species such as wahoo or red snapper, which many more anglers can afford to chase. 

Above: Carlos Alberto Vasconez, an immigrant fisherman, pilots his small panga in search of fish in the open waters of the Galapagos Marine Reserve.

Gravez wants to see alternative fisheries exploited by locals who know the fish. Local knowledge is key, he says. To be successful as a conservation effort, sport fishing must be community–based. If locals own the boats and guide the tourists, they’ll not only make a living but also make connections with a world that doesn’t even know they exist. If they own the hotels that the tourists stay in and the bars and restaurants tourists visit, they won’t need to harvest more sea cucumbers and sharks than the ocean can sustainable allow. They would be able to provide quality education and health care that the islands’ people desperately need.

“You come here for tortoises; you come here for iguanas; you come here for Darwin’s finches,” Gravez says. “But, as far as I know, the wahoo, the tuna, and the billfish are everywhere. You should come here to fish with the people.”

Sport fishing in the Galapagos, as Vincent Gravez imagines it, would resemble the halcyon days of the sport when writers including Ernest Hemingway and Zane Grey traveled the globe in search of new fishing opportunities. These writers fished with locals wherever they went, catching exotic fish on simple tackle under heroic conditions. They popularized the macho nature of the sport and its rustic charms.

“You could come back to the roots,” Gravez says. “People here are simple.”