by Tim Cahill
Every few minutes she stopped. Her lungs, designed for breathing in the buoyancy of the sea, were compressed by the weight of her body. She exhaled. The throat pumped and she inhaled. It sounded, eerily, like the amplified breathing of a man surfacing after two minutes underwater.
It took her twenty minutes to select a nesting site. Settling herself into the sand, she curled one of her back flippers and flung sand almost directly over her head. Within minutes, her head and carapace were covered in thick, clinging sand. She stopped to draw a few ragged, tearing breaths. Her body was tilted down at a slight angle, the backside sunk into the hole.
The television lights exploded in the night, but the turtle, driven by instinct, was oblivious. The body contracted, the head sank into the sand, and two strong cords strained in her neck. She was scratched and raw there where some male’s claws had dug into her during copulation. The cloaca contracted and a moist white egg dropped eighteen inches into her nest. Another followed, then another. She lifted her head to draw another breath and then the contractions began again.
“She’s crying,” someone said. Tears were rolling out of her eyes and tracking down the sand that clung to her face. No matter that the tears are only a way of eliminating salt from the system: the mother’s labored breathing, the seemingly painful contractions, her tears had turned the filming into a wrenching emotional experience.
A hundred or so eggs were laid, two or three at a time. The back flippers curled more delicately than one would have thought possible, and the mother spread sand over her eggs in a gentle, loving gesture.
At this moment, the Mexican biologists approached the lights. Producer/director John Wilcox shouted to a translator, “Tell those people to please stay out of her track.” The plump woman exploded. “We speak perfect English,” she said. “We are biologists. We have a right to study this animal.” Bob Nixon jogged over to talk to her.
Having covered her nest, the turtle lifted herself up onto the tips of all four flippers and fell on the sand, packing the eggs and disguising the nest. She repeated this ludicrous dance a dozen times or more, then, backing away, she flung more sand over the area with her front flippers. Satisfied, she started back out to sea. I followed her down with a flashlight. When the first wave hit her, she seemed to relax. The sand came off and her sea color shone in the light. The backwash pulled her out a few feet, a second wave hit her, and she was gone.
The question of how many turtles there were out there haunted me. The biologists—the people who were supposed to know—had been willing to argue over one animal.
ABC’s charter plane was ready at the Puerto Ángel strip when word came in from Escobilla that there were turtles in the breakers. It was a sign that had preceded other arribazónes. I elected to pass on the flight and stay another night on the beach with Bob Nixon, assistant cameraman Gordon Waterman, and Juan José de la Vega.
The night was mild, a gentle breeze blew in from the sea, and the moon was in its final quarter. This had to be the night. That day there had been turtles in the surf.
Our group built a fire. The marines built one of their own and another was started by the biologists. They were measuring out ropes which would be used to encompass a certain area. Stakes had been driven into the ground all along the beach to divide the area into like sections. The biologists would count the number of turtles nesting between the ropes and multiply by the number of stakes for an estimate of the total number of nesting turtles. Clearly they expected the arribazón.
A few marines stopped over for a drink of mescal. We had filled several soft-drink bottles with that white, searing liquor at the nearest cañtina. The marines were happy. This would be the night. We sang some songs.
We shared our mescal with a local man who had lived 150 yards from the beach for ten years. As little as five years ago, he said, each arribazón took seven or eight days. There were four a year and the beach was black with turtles. Now, he said, there were fewer turtles. Too many had been killed by PIOSA. He thought there would be no arribazón.
I ate some sandy peanut butter on Bimbo bread, drank more mescal, and walked the beach. It was seven, eight, nine o’clock. In previous years the turtles had begun coming in directly after sunset. Still, there were songs from the campfires.
Our group talked with representatives from the Department of Fisheries and with fishermen from the co-operativa Reforma Portuaria. I was able to piece together this version of the events at Escobilla:
There are seven co-operativas, or fishing unions. PIOSA pays the fisherman by the turtle, and the fishermen are licensed by the Department of Fisheries, which also checks the union records to see that the quotas are not exceeded. Each co-op has an equal number of turtles it can catch each month. When José Lopez Portillo assumed the presidency of Mexico, he promised to develop industry. Last year fishermen from five of the co-ops, seizing the opportunity, went to a Mexico court and asked that the traditional ban on turtling during the nesting season be lifted. During other times of the year, they said, the turtles were too far out to sea and it was difficult to catch many in the small skiffs. The ban on fishing during the nesting season, they said, was depriving them of their livelihood. The judge agreed with the fishermen. The ban was lifted and the Department of Fisheries raised the yearly quota for Oaxaca.
Victor Valdez, of the co-operativa Reforma Portuaria, said that two of the co-operativas, including his own, had opposed the lifting of the ban, arguing that such untimely hunting would decimate the turtle population. Most fishermen, Valdez said, know this. But everyone is poor, and now, for a few years, a fisherman can nearly double his yearly wage, and with less work. Another fisherman said that he knew that leaders of the five co-ops, bringing suit to lift the ban, received money from Antonio Suárez and that Suárez had pressured them to bring the suit.
Juan José nodded. “Last year,” he said, “the Cosmographic Society made a film about these turtles. We interviewed the judge who lifted the ban. We asked him how many turtles there were at Escobilla. It was very clear that he knew nothing of the situation here and it was a very embarrassing piece of film for him and for PIOSA. Antonio Suárez later invited me to lunch. He wanted to ‘buy’ our film. He offered me eighty thousand pesos.” De la Vega refused, and the film was shown on Mexican television.
I passed him the mescal and stumbled through my fourth or fifth apology to him in the last few days. He waved it off with good grace. “I knew if people came here,” he said, “they would see for themselves what is happening.”
The business of lifting the ban and raising the quota is an experiment. The lab is a safety valve for that experiment. Even if the biologists decide that the Ridleys are being extirpated, officials can rest easy because the lab is supposed to put some huge, astonishing number of turtles into the sea each year. I have that statement directly from a high source at the Department of Fisheries.
We talked, finally, with some of the biologists. They had their own mescal and were excited about the arribazón, and the discussion was not as bitter as it had been earlier in the week. None of them, to a person, would answer my questions, but we talked enough for me to form some impressions. They were, I think, sincere in their desire to set reasonable quotas: ones that would eventually increase both the harvest and the number of turtles as a whole. They had been hostile because foreign conservationists put pressure on the government and the government responds by firing biologists. I felt that they truly believed that if they filed a strong enough report, the government would reinstate the ban on turtling sometime during the next four years.
I thought about the Mexican TV cameras and all those officials whose only taste of Escobilla had been seeing twenty-five thousand hatchlings at the lab. It had been very impressive. I had no great confidence that the ban would be reinstated.
It was ten o’clock and still we had seen no turtles. I wondered if the local people were right, that there would be no arribazón. The Ridley, I know, is the only turtle to nest in such great numbers, and I wondered
if it could be the numbers themselves that triggered the arribazón.
If that were so—and this theory is a layman’s guess—it might explain why there had been normal arribazónes July through September, but not in October. Each of the seven co-operativas was allotted 1,500 turtles per month, for a total of 10,500 animals. In July 10,500 turtles were taken, but by August the cumulative total was 21,000, and in September that number rose to 31,500. Now, in the first week of October, the count was rapidly approaching 40,000 animals, and nearly all of them females, laid across the killing table at PIOSA.
By midnight there were still no turtles. The songs from the campfires became louder, more brittle, drunker. There were the sounds of voices raised in anger.
I took another four-mile walk. Bob Nixon spoke with the woman biologist. She had been drinking, he said, and seemed to be very depressed, almost near tears. “If you want to see the arribazón,” she said, “go to the dump.” In the firelight, behind her glasses, her eyes glittered, wetly.
* * *
The dump is located on several low hills just southeast of the slaughterhouse. When the turtles have been slaughtered, when the twelve pounds of good meat have been stripped from the bone and the leather has been stripped from the head and chest, the remains are dumped onto these hills like garbage and left to dry in the sun before the bones and shells are ground into fertilizer.
The stench there—the odor of death—was unholy. It clogged my nostrils and sent bile rising in my throat. Vultures retreated reluctantly as I approached. Here and there I saw flippers stripped of their flesh, their five fingers, like yours and mine, jutting up out of black putrescent meat.
There were eggs there too, where no eggs should be. Mixed with the bowels of their slaughtered mothers, they were heaped into a sprawling pile and covered with maggots. I suspect someone will tell me that PIOSA only chooses the finest eggs to go back in the sand or on those styrofoam boxes, and that these were rejects. But I saw that pile with my own eyes. There were thousands upon thousands upon thousands of eggs, all rotting in that evil heap.
I was, quite literally, sick to my stomach.
On the telephone, Antonio Suárez is a very persuasive and charming man. He is proud that, in his capacity as director general of PIOSA, he employs some one thousand persons who fish for turtle, shark, red snapper, and lobster.
He denied that he ever offered Juan José de la Vega money for a film.
He denied that he offered the leaders of some co-operativas money, or that he pressured them in any way, to bring suit against the ban on turtling during the nesting season.
He said that it was not true that he was responsible for depleting the species.
“It is my opinion,” Antonio Suárez said, “that the turtle is a resource we ought to take advantage of, but that we ought to protect the species, that we ought to have quotas, and that we ought not to protect a bigger quantity than the species can support, and that we may always repopulate the species.”
Suárez was proud of the new lab and said that it was true that he had paid for most of the construction costs. He said the lab had dumped 20 to 30 million hatchlings into the water in the months of July through September! He said that the Department of Fisheries had checked on this number.
It is possible that Suárez misspoke himself. Officials at the Department of Fisheries said they had no such data. And, in late November, one high-ranking biologist involved with the lab admitted that it had not been functioning when I was there. He said he expected it to open by February or March.
Suárez was quite specific about the October arribazón. He said that while arribazónes are always larger from July through September, some fifty thousand Ridleys had laid their eggs on the beach in October. Again, this is somewhat at odds with information received from the Department of Fisheries. In late November, officials there said there had been no October arribazón.
People I know and trust were on the beach at Escobilla during the entire month of October. The moon entered its last quarter twice and the winds blew in the sea, and, for the first time since anyone who lived near the beach could remember, there was no October arribazón. Only 90 million years of evolution going to waste on the beach at Escobilla.
Author’s note:
The above article appeared in the February 1978 issue of Outside magazine. I had gone to Mexico expecting to see one hundred thousand turtles spread out along a moonlit stretch of beach, and the story I envisioned would be a prism through which we could look 90 million years into the past. When the turtles failed to appear, I wanted to know why. This was a reluctant investigation, but the evidence of greed and fraud couldn’t be ignored. A reporter has mixed feelings at such times. It was a great story, but the research left me feeling angry and helpless.
In the years that followed, I monitored the situation on the beach at Escobilla from afar. (It was made known to me that I wouldn’t be a welcome guest in that part of Mexico.) Some well-meaning people working on behalf of the turtles felt the article was counterproductive. Carlos Nagle, a consultant for the World Wildlife Fund who works with the Mexican government on environmental problems, thought a more tactful, diplomatic approach would have produced better results. Indeed, after publication of the article, American scientists had their research permits revoked, and Nagle found poisonous pieces of cut-up jellyfish on the beach where he walked barefoot. “I cursed you and your magazine for four years,” Nagle told me mildly. “Mexicans are sensitive to American cultural and economic intrusions. They are proud. The outcry over that article: it was like walking into someone’s house and telling them they had to rearrange their furniture.”
Does such an article simply leave the reader feeling helpless while making the job tougher for those who are fighting for a diplomatic solution? Juan José de la Vega didn’t think so. “That article was the best thing that ever happened to the turtles,” he said. “It made the public aware of the problem. Mexican people have no desire to see an entire species of animal vanish from the earth.”
And José Toro, the American Justice Department attorney who was to finally secure an indictment against Suárez, agrees with de la Vega. “These investigations are not conducted in a vacuum,” he told me. “It was public pressure that made the investigation possible, and the pressure came as a direct result of that article.”
As a journalist, I have to believe that a problem in the spotlight is one that is not going to be hidden away; I have to believe that people exposed to such a situation will care, and that something can be done.
Four years later, in 1982, I tested that belief. Here, in part, is that followup to the original article.
A few weeks after the Outside article was published, I received a letter from Dr. Peter Pritchard, vice-president for science and research at the Florida Audubon Society. Dr. Pritchard, having recently returned from a fact-finding mission to Escobilla, wrote: “When I was there in late November, they were still killing five hundred to seven hundred turtles per day, and every one was a female containing eggs.… The local PIOSA jefe told me that the story behind the opening ceremony of the research facility and the subsequent draining of the tanks was simply that the plumbing system was not ready for dedication day, so they had hand-filled the system just for the ceremony, then emptied it again. They still did not have their plumbing system in operation when I was there, but they were ‘working on it.’ … I, like you, was revolted by what I saw.… The feds say that they will clamp down and close the season if the turtles show a diminution in numbers. Unfortunately, it may be too late then—the Kemp’s Ridley, on the other coast, has shown no recovery even after a decade of full protection.… Open season during the breeding time is a sure recipe for disaster.”
“The Shame of Escobilla” was reprinted in the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) Marine Turtle Newsletter. Dr. Pritchard wrote a commentary, and I quote from him again, not only because his comments are cogent, but because it will later be important t
o know exactly where he stands. Reflecting on his visit to the slaughterhouse, Pritchard wrote, “I found the sight of the beautiful female Ridleys, fresh from the sea, being bashed in with iron bars and deftly eviscerated, one after the other, five hundred or more per day, a disgusting and demoralizing sight, and I found the idea of creatures being butchered in this way when they were gathering to lay their eggs totally unacceptable, both emotionally and biologically.”
Pritchard had questioned the director of the Mexican Department of Fisheries, who had, apparently, been quite frank. PIOSA, he said, had been allowed to fish during the breeding season, had been allowed such dangerously high quotas, because it would be logistically difficult and extremely expensive to field a small army of enforcement personnel in remote coastal Oaxaca. It was thought that if Suárez got the quotas he wanted, he would, in turn, see that those eggs laid naturally or buried at the lab would be adequately protected from poachers. Pritchard’s commentary went on to question the concept of the lab itself and mentioned that the Suárez/PIOSA operation constituted the largest butchery of turtles in the world.
In the summer of 1978 ABC aired its American Sportsman segment on the plight of the Olive Ridley. Producer/director John Wilcox and associate producer Bob Nixon had put together a powerful and emotional documentary. It was all there on film: the lab with thousands of turtles in the tanks and the media standing around looking suitably impressed, followed by empty tanks only two days later. There was a final shot of the dump, that foul boneyard, and all those eggs, the next generation, rotting away in that maggot-infested heap.
A small groundswell of public support seemed to be building, and the Environmental Defense Fund took good and proper advantage of it. They threatened to sue the United States federal government: The EDF demanded that the Olive Ridley and two other species of sea turtle be declared a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, Threat of suit was enough. The Olive Ridley was declared to be endangered. The effect of the action was to prohibit importation of any of the protected turtles or of products derived from them.