Dissension Even Within the Family
by Nathan Senge
Financial compensation is crucial for all fishers asked to abstain from fishing. Without it, even their family members can go astray.
Like many other fishers, Hubert Mendéz’s first impression of NOS was that “they were here to screw everybody over.” But as he and NOS co-founder Alejandro Robles began working to get a permit to extract some Cocolate shell together, and Alejandro lent him his panga boat to do a preliminary survey of the area, they began to build some trust.
After the survey was complete, they both agreed to shut down the Cocolate fishery for two months before opening it again for fifteen days. In those two months, Hubert struggled to find other work. He asked Alejandro if NOS could provide some income for some of the fishers while they agreed not to fish, and Alejandro agreed they could help by making two maps of Spiritu Santu island. This built more trust between them, and it was at this point that Hubert first told Alejandro that he wanted to restore the Callo de Hacha clam and Catarina scallop fisheries, but that they would need to devise some way to get fishers some income until the fisheries were restored.
“When I made the maps of the island,” Hubert recounts, “they [NOS] didn’t believe me. They said I was exaggerating, so I took them out to the island with me, where we also mapped where sea turtles were. Alejandro saw them there and said it was not possible but he picked one up. I told Alejandro he could take them if he wanted to but he said he didn’t want that—he wanted to restore them. Again I told Alejandro I wanted to take action and restore the Catarina and the Callo de Hacha, and that I wanted to do it with the Manglito community fully involved. If we paused fishing the clams and the scallops, they could rebound just like the sea turtles.
I wanted to restore those two fisheries in the Ensenada with my palomia—that’s what you call your friends, or your crew. That was the main issue: how to do it with the entire palomia so no one felt left out and got angry. NOS wanted to set this all up in just one day, but Guillermo [Mendéz—Hubert’s brother] and I told them it would take a long time to build up enough trust with the community and get this all going.
So we did the first survey of over 170 quadrants and then by the end of 2011 we invited nine fishers to get involved to do a second survey. Then another group of fishers surveyed 10 more quadrants. The idea of getting them all involved was for them to realize that they were all completely killing the whole population of clams and scallops.
For instance, we discovered, in 2011, only 60,000 Callo de Hachas, and then in 2012 there were only 40,000. So the population was indeed decreasing. We knew it was not human error. And then with the Catarina, we had to go to the Magdalena for seeds, because we couldn’t find them at all in the Ensenada anymore, and then in 2012 we began talking about a no fishing agreement. Sam Walton gave us funding for more Catarina seeds. He gave us 200,000 seeds, and thought this a big amount, but only some of them matured, and 25,000 got stolen from that project by fishers who were not being financially compensated by NOS. So I said, Guillermo and I and a few others cannot do this alone—so by the end of 2012 we formed a group called ‘the twelve.’
After those seeds got stolen our hopes were not so good, but we were able to collect more seeds from Caliote Island. The community started to say bad things about us because we were getting paid and they weren’t. The issue of selective payment has always been a problem in this work. These dissenters said you’re only working with NOS because they’re paying you—the jealousy was intense. They said maybe if you were working with the whole community the seeds would not have been stolen. So we all started to have small meetings to try and include more and more of the community in the project. Inclusivity is necessary.
While this was going on, and with those twelve people from our group, we began to release the Catarina seeds from the previous year that we had grown in crates on the Ensenada shoreline into the bay, and we began our surveillance work.
Thankfully, some cooperatives began to arise who were also working on restoration, though there were others who were not. This was the earliest beginning of OPRE, our fishers’ cooperative dedicated to restoring the bay. But selective payment continued to be a problem. What happened was that some cooperatives who were not involved started to ask why they were not being paid, that they wanted to do this work too.
Another challenge was our failure in doing aquaculture with the Callo de Hacha clams like we did with the Catarina scallops. We brought the adults to the lab and released the seeds but they all died. We couldn’t replicate the Catarina with the Callo de Hacha. But Guillermo and I realized that, if we stopped fishing the Callo de Hacha, they would recover on their own.
These were intense meetings. Oftentimes, within about 4-5 seconds fights were ready to break out. The fishers, especially those not getting paid, did not want to agree to stop fishing the Callo de Hachas. But we managed to convince the community to do it, and we signed a no-fishing agreement, and in 2013 the population of Callo de Hachas began to rebound. By 2014 and 2015, it was clearly really working, and the population was rebounding fast.
We agreed, as part of the no-fishing agreement, to do community surveillance of the area to protect the growing Callo de Hacha population. The reason this worked was that NOS helped us with the gasoline money for our boats. Thankfully, because of this, people from outside the Manglito were willing to do this too. So we started growing our numbers of those committed to the project.
But we had many, many setbacks, and tensions peaked when Guillermo’s own son was implicated.
The fishers were increasingly noticing that NOS helped some of them economically more than others, and this began to rouse discontent. ‘Why him and not me?’ they increasingly asked. It became an ongoing problem. And then one day Guillermo and Hubert found Guillermo’s own son illegally fishing for the Callo de Hachas. They were speechless. Guillermo told his son, “Don’t you realize I’m doing this for you?” Guillermo’s son said, “I’m only seeing how NOS is helping the other fishermen and not me.” Guillermo said, “Yeah but you can talk to them and see if they can help you out.” When Guillermo and Hubert first called the authorities they didn’t know it was Guillermo’s son on the boat. So they got on the boat and told him, “We’ll cancel the call; just don’t do this anymore.” The next day, Guillermo and Hubert didn’t know how to talk to NOS about this, so they waited until the next day and then another day to talk to Alejandro and a few others about it.
This incident exposed how many fishers were feeling, that some were receiving help and others weren’t, and so NOS invited Guillermos’s son and some of the others who were not feeling included to start bringing their own palomias into the enterprise. From that point on, our numbers began to grow, and we had 30 additional new fishers on board for the 2014 and 2015 surveys. Progress was so good we even started releasing some Catarinas into the bay. Some fishers were opposed to this and wanted to sell them right away, but I said, “No, this is a long-term project to restore the entire bay. And as long as we’re being compensated enough, we owe it to ourselves and our children to do just that.”
Nathan Senge is a Writer for the Academy for Systems Change. He holds a summa cum laude B.A. in Chemistry and Physics from Dartmouth College and a M.A. in Journalism and Media Studies from the University of Colorado at Boulder.