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.
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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.
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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.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.
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.
Below: 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.”