Cabo Pulmo y El Manglito have been raised as two examples in Baja California Sur of communities that have defended and restored their natural wealth.
Judith Castro Lucerofrom Cabo Pulmo, and Hubert Mendezfrom El Manglito, gave testimony in the Summit 2022 Mission Prosperityof Sea of Cortez ForumThe company has been working for many years to try to turn them into prosperous communities.
The history of Cabo Pulmo
Daughter, sister, niece and granddaughter of fishermen, Castro Lucero shared a photographic record of Cabo Pulmo in which she exposed the history of her community with a coral reef dedicated to commercial fishing, which little by little has been depleted, from sharks, turtles, to mother pearls, due to overexploitation.
"Unfortunately that was wiped out by my family and other fishermen," he lamented.
The Cabo Pulmo reef is an area of great ecological importance due to the convergence of marine currents that made it very productive in its best times. This attracted the attention of researchers from the University of Baja California Sur, who for 10 years in the 1980s, joined forces with empirical fishermen. The result was the beginning of the fight to defend and restore the reef.
"The University did all the paperwork to request the Mexican government to decree Cabo Pulmo as a Natural Protected Area. Now (the turtles), after eating them, were part of our conservation, we had changed course," he said.
It was on June 6, 1995 when the Government decided to declare Cabo Pulmo a National Marine Park. The following four years were the most difficult because there were no productive options and now they could no longer fish in this area of more than 7,100 hectares.
A recovered reef
It has been 27 years of effort for the protection of the Cabo Pulmo National Marine Park The reef has recovered, the sharks have returned and the community has been able to adapt from a fishing village to a tourist service provider.
"It is a story that helps us to be global examples that it is possible to recover an ecosystem," he said.
Castro Lucero explained that they now have a program for public use of the reef that allows them to know how many divers each site supports per week and per month and when that number is reached, the reef is closed to keep it in good condition.
"If we allow everyone to come at the same time, to go to all the places and leave us a lot of dollars, it is like shooting ourselves in the foot, we are going to finish that and that is not what it is about," he clarified.
Castro Lucero explained that the challenge for the community is to prevent the arrival of 18 large-scale real estate projects, such as Cabo Cortés, which are authorized around Cabo Pulmo and want to settle there.
"We have been told anti-development. Development is not building hotels, development is making sure that where I am going to build my business there is a balance between health, education, social issues, human issues, a development is that, that everything goes in balance," he stressed. "We are going to continue defending this ecosystem and this community and the human part."
The case of El Manglito
The Ensenada de La PazThe Manglito area, in El Manglito, is an area that in the 1970s was very productive, abundant in fishery resources, but poor management and overexploitation caused them to be depleted, he said. Hubert Mendez.
The social leader said that after the situation hit rock bottom, NOS Sustainable Northwest approached them and proposed to stop fishing, started working with children and young people, until they gained the trust of the community.
After several meetings that did not progress and ended in discussions, they began to build a vision together, he said.
"We wanted to see a restored cove, a very healthy ecosystem, recover the wealth, good relationship with the authorities, good equipment and work sustainably," he stressed.
The first step they took was restoration, so they cleaned La Ensenada and removed 30 tons of garbage, both from the seabed and the mangrove area.
"Some monitoring, others censusing. In 2011, the first census, 60,000 tripe; 2012, 40,000 tripe, we were going backwards like crabs. We had made a verbal agreement not to fish, the elders respected it, the young people failed us and we read them the primer. In 2013, 700 thousand tripe, because we put strength into surveillance; 2014 and 2015, more than 4 million tripe."
Cultural transformation
Due to the abundance of callo de hacha, the authorities began to issue permits for its exploitation everywhere, so, fearing that the same thing would happen as in the past and the resource would be overexploited, they created the Fishermen's Organization Rescuing the Ensenada.
"In 2016 OPRE was formed, in 2017 we got the concession for 2 thousand 048 hectares for 11 resources to recover and to work them sustainably. We have our productive project which is fishing, aquaculture and tourism. Two restoration projects: monitoring of tunicate and mangrove reforestation," he said.
Méndez indicated that they have already removed more than 175 tons of garbage from La Ensenada de La Paz, the women are the ones reforesting the mangrove and they are maintaining the surveillance program to take care of the callos de hacha and to combat the tunicate that has already killed more than 90% of the callos on one occasion.
"Prosperity is not about carrying bags full of money or having a cool truck outside my house, but it is about strengthening these productive projects so that the community of El Manglito feels happy," he said.
The OPRE president stressed that it is not about men and women, but about working together to achieve a goal and pass it on to new generations, in order to move towards prosperity.