Mexico Gets Tough in Turtle Wars

Racing his Jeep down a deserted beach by moonlight, Francisco Vadarez suddenly spotted the giant turtle tracks. He skidded to a halt, hoping he had arrived before the hueveros, or egg poachers.

Following the weaving turtle tread to a sand-covered nest just up from the water, the marine biologist dug down with his hands and found them: 96 pingpong-ball-sized eggs, left minutes before by a 3-foot-long olive ridley marine turtle.

Vadarez gingerly placed the still-warm eggs in a plastic bag for re-nesting at a government enclosure on this stretch of virgin coast 50 miles south of Puerto Vallarta. As he did so, he said simply: “We won.”

Vadarez had not only helped to conserve an endangered species; he had beaten poachers to an egg cache that feeds a thriving illegal pipeline stretching from beaches up and down Mexico’s Pacific Coast to fish markets like the giant Nueva Viga in Mexico City, where turtle eggs are sold under the table to restaurants and cantina owners. Patrons covet the eggs as a delicacy and as a purported aphrodisiac. They eat them raw, sprinkled with salt and lime juice or dropped in a glass of beer.

Mexico is trying to protect the turtles with tough new measures--including sending soldiers to patrol beaches during nesting season--that cut the poaching of eggs and reduce adult turtle kills. As a result, the once-decimated species is staging a comeback, environmentalists say.

Vadarez’s find represented a small victory in the government’s stepped-up war on traffickers of not just turtles but about 50 endangered wildlife species in Mexico, from jaguars and macaws to snakes and tarantulas.

But conservation measures have hurt communities that a few years ago were living off the then-legal exploitation of marine turtles and other species. It’s not easy to sell local citizens on a dimly perceived environmental benefit, when the alternative can put food on a poor family’s table.

“A mature turtle is worth $50 to a poacher for its meat, skin and eggs,” said Tobias Contreras, an environmental planning director for the government. “And it takes him an hour of work in the cool night air to get one. To earn that much in another way, he’d have to work two weeks at minimum wage harvesting watermelons in the hot sun. What would you prefer?”

Until 1990, the Mexican government permitted limited marine turtle kills, a mini-industry that kept perhaps 1,000 fishermen busy on the Pacific Coast, operating in government-supervised cooperatives. Numerous small coastal towns lived partly from the income generated by turtle meat, eggs, shells and skin. Those who didn’t sell the eggs ate them as a dietary staple.

Half of the 700 inhabitants of La Gloria, a village five miles inland from here, lived on the turtle economy, said Aurelio Garcia, a local fisherman.

“It was a strong business here, especially after the 1970s when people began to come from outside the town to buy turtle eggs. Everyone here used to look for them,” he said.

But out-of-control poaching, fed by foreign demand for skins and shells and the growing predilection of Mexicans for turtle meat and eggs, led to wholesale slaughter of turtles and forced the government to finally step in with a ban in 1990.

Today, the turtle business begins with local poachers who typically lurk on horseback, accompanied by dogs that sniff out turtle nests. The poachers gather eggs and then sell them to middlemen for about 15 cents apiece. By the time the eggs reach fish markets or restaurants and cantinas, they fetch $1.50--a nice profit for the underground distributors who truck them to Mexico City and elsewhere.

Turtle skin finds its way illicitly to shoe and handbag manufacturers in Monterrey and Chihuahua, which then smuggle the goods made from it into the United States, say U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials.

The marine turtle, probably the most exploited endangered animal in Mexico, has become the centerpiece of the nation’s efforts to protect its endangered animals and plants--and a symbol of the difficult trade-off between environmental protection and subsistence for the poor.

Even animal advocates here profess ambivalence about enforcing the laws in extremely poor areas where the animal trade provides a rare means of subsistence.

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Such a place is Matehuala, a dusty stretch of highway north of San Luis Potosi that was famous for years as an open-air market for birds and reptiles, including eagles, owls and snakes caught in the surrounding desert. In March, 200 federal agents swooped down on Matehuala and confiscated 450 animals and skins.

“It’s not enough just to say you can’t exploit these animals. You have to study ways of helping the people replace it with something else, to fill the economic vacuum,” Contreras said.

Mexico’s crackdown includes tougher laws, more environmental inspectors, better training and more resources for turtle camps like Playon de Mismaloya, which is one of 65 special turtle nesting reserves in the country.

A law signed by President Ernesto Zedillo last December put teeth in the enforcement by imposing penalties of up to six years in prison for poaching protected animals. The list includes the seven marine turtle species that nest on nearly 200 Mexican beaches.

The government is about to add 300 inspectors to the enforcement staff charged with protecting endangered animals and plants, a 75% increase, said Ricardo Gluyas Millan, general enforcement coordinator of the environmental protection attorney general’s office.

Since the 1990 ban, marine turtle nestings and populations are up overall in Mexico. Conservation efforts have been most successful in Playa Escobilla in Oaxaca, Mexico’s turtle mecca, where annual nests are back up to 750,000 a year from a low of 70,000 in 1990, said Francisco Silva Batiz, a University of Guadalajara biologist and president of a federal commission on marine turtle protection.

The Mexican enforcement effort is drawing praise from environmentalists and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which monitors animal smuggling at the U.S.-Mexico border. In one notable success last summer, Mexico seized a truckload of 300,000 turtle eggs in the state of Oaxaca.

“They’re [making] much more effort, evidenced by training of their people, their mechanisms to regulate trade and more stability in their agencies,” said K. C. Frederick, deputy enforcement director for the service’s Southwest region, based in Albuquerque.

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The United States is the world’s biggest market for exotic animals. Avid American collectors will pay $5,000 and up for Mexican toucans and red or yellow macaws and hundreds of dollars for a Mexican boa constrictor or a Baja California king snake. Mexican tarantulas have become coveted “vanity pets” and are worth up to $40 in clandestine markets, Frederick said.

The United States also is the major destination for boots, wallets and handbags made from skins of illegally slaughtered Mexican reptiles. Marine turtle leather, soft but durable, is extremely desirable for shoes, boots and handbags.

Despite the crackdown, the government is still greatly outnumbered in what can be a hazardous, even deadly task. One government inspector was killed in 1995 in Campeche state on the Yucatan peninsula as he tried to stop poachers of red cedar trees, whose lumber is highly sought in the United States.

When he comes across poachers, who are often armed with rifles or machetes, marine biologist Vadarez--unarmed and undeputized--said he “negotiates” to get them to turn over their turtle eggs.

Nesting marine turtles are easy prey, not only because they are so slow and visible but because they need a half hour or more to lay their eggs. That gives the 50 or so poachers on horseback on bluffs overlooking the beach plenty of time to make their move. The creatures lay their eggs up to four times a year, so the opportunities for theft are plentiful.

On some beaches, immediately after a full moon, the turtles begin coming ashore during the afternoon and continue in waves until, after midnight, they number in the thousands.

The government says it is getting solid cooperation from U.S. officials in enforcing endangered species laws. Mexico, Canada and the United States are sponsoring an El Paso workshop late this month to discuss methods of identifying and controlling illegal reptile trafficking.

That cooperation includes a readiness by U.S. officials to levy stiff fines and even imprison smugglers, said John Brooks, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent who works at the San Diego border. Fines of up to $1,000 have been meted out to first-time offenders, and repeat offenders face jail, he said.

“You have to hit them hard. It’s going to take this kind of effort if people are ever going to change their attitudes,” said Brooks, adding that the most commonly smuggled animals from Mexico are parrots, rattlesnakes, Gila monsters and “scientific items” like scorpions.

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No one pretends that such trafficking will ever be completely stopped. Mexico--which boasts the greatest variety and quantity of wild animals in the world after Indonesia, Brazil and Colombia--has a rich and easily accessible trove for unscrupulous animal traders.

At Escobilla beach in Oaxaca, which borders a military base, Mexico’s sea turtles have plenty of protection. Soldiers or sailors pull nightly duty during the prime June-to-November nesting season, guarding the migrating turtles as they come ashore.

No such military support exists at Mismaloya, and annual nestings there of the olive ridley marine turtle are down to less than 4,000 from 300,000 in the early 1970s, biologist Silva Batiz said.

He tries to convince locals that rebuilding the turtle population by leaving the eggs alone could eventually allow for limited legal exploitation of the animals.

“I could see the government lifting the ban someday. But now we’re in the mode of still trying to protect them,” Silva Batiz said.

On the pristine beach at Playon de Mismaloya, the government leaves vigilance up to four university biologists, including Vadarez, because it doesn’t have the staff.

During the nesting season, the biologists patrol more than 20 miles of coastline using two vehicles donated by the British Embassy. Because of the expanse of beach they must cover, they make no pretense of saving all or even a majority of the nests. Vadarez said that for every nest he finds and relocates, poachers get three or four.

Before finding the intact nest that moonlit night, Vadarez had come across two others that poachers had visited first. They had scooped up the eggs as the mother had laid them, two by two, before she carefully covered up the empty nest and lumbered back into the ocean.

Kraul was recently on assignment in Playon de Mismaloya.