It’s the hidden U.S.-Mexico border war.
For years, Mexican fisherman have crossed into U.S. waters to illegally catch high-priced red snapper. It has become a multi-million dollar black market, the Mexican cartel is involved, Texas fishermen are outraged, and the federal government can’t seem to stop it.
The U.S. Coast Guard on South Padre Island has a one-of-a-kind mission among the 197 stations along the nation’s seacoasts. Their chief enforcement activity entails bouncing across the swells of the lower Texas Gulf in pursuit of wily Mexican fishing boats filled with plump, rosy fish destined for seafood houses in Mexico City and Houston.
These are the red snapper poachers.
“United States Coast Guard! Stop your vessel! Stop your vessel!” yells a Coastie in his bullhorn as the 900-horsepower fast-pursuit boat pulls alongside the Mexican lancha. Four Mexican fishermen tried to outrun it but thought better and throttled down. The fishermen are handcuffed, their catch is confiscated and the boat is towed back to the Coast Guard station.
Scenes like this, captured on Coast Guard video, have become more and more common. Interdictions of illegal fishing boats have soared from nine seizures in 2010 to 148 incidents last year, with 547 Mexican fishermen detained and released without charges.
Coast Guard commanders, commercial fishermen, marine biologists, and federal officials told NPR that the large-scale, illegal harvesting of red snapper is doing great harm to the Gulf.
“They’ll come into U.S. waters, they’ll fish, they’ll grab as much snapper as they can, and they’ll go head back south before we can detect ’em. The average catch they’ll have onboard is 1,000- to 3,000-pounds of snapper,” says Lt. Commander Dan Ippolito, commanding officer of Coast Guard South Padre Station. Last year his station seized 37 tons of marine life from Mexican lanchas.
Fishermen, Coast Guard personnel and scientists regularly come across gill netting and trot lines that can be 3-miles-long, attached to floating buoys. They’re both illegal in this part of the Gulf because they kill marine life indiscriminately.
“We find red snapper, sharks, sea turtles, dolphins,” said First Class Petty Officer Erin Welch. “It’s incredibly physically taxing on the crew. We have to utilize everybody that’s onboard to be able to pull this up.”
Michael Walker, of SaltWalker Sport Fishing Charters, pulled up a gill net a few years ago.
“It had about a dozen dead sailfish in it,” he said, “and I don’t know how many mackerel, little sharks, big sharks.”
In 2011, game wardens encountered a nearly three-mile-long gill net that contained approximately 3,000 juvenile sharks, according to Lt. Leslie Casterline, game warden for the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department.
The poachers also illegally harvest shark, cut off their fins and sell them in a separate black market that supplies soup-makers in Asian cultures.
“Removing apex predators from ecosystems causes cascading effects,” says Greg Stunz, a marine biologist. “Sharks are at the top of the food web, and when you remove those predators it can cause the entire ecosystem to become out of balance.”
It is widely suspected among Texas fishermen and law enforcement that the Gulf Cartel is helping the snapper poachers buy new boats.
“A poor fisherman, you know, [pays] $3,000 for a lancha, $5,000 to $10,000 for a motor. How can he afford to lose that? Is he making that much or is it a bigger operation?” asks Michael Walker, the charter captain who sees a lot from the helm chair of his 45-foot deep sea fishing boat.
The DEA in Houston confirms that the Gulf Cartel has, for years, used Playa Bagdad as a staging ground to run drugs north in fishing boats. And it’s on the rise. A DEA agent wrote in an email to NPR that “based on intelligence, coupled with recent seizures of cocaine, we’ve identified an uptick with drug trafficking organizations utilizing maritime smuggling of narcotics along the South Texas coastal waterways.”
NOAA is again taking stock of Mexico’s efforts to curtail illegal snapper poaching. The agency declined to make an official available to interview because of the forthcoming biennial Report to Congress on IUU fishing, expected in September.
Mexico wants to remain in NOAA’s good graces. If Mexico were to be decertified, it would lose part of the lucrative US seafood market and US port privileges for Mexican vessels. A spokeswoman for the Mexican Embassy wrote in an email to NPR: “The Mexican government has followed up on the cases of vessels reported by the State Department and is in communication with NOAA in order to have a favorable result regarding certification in September.”
In a final twist to the story, Mexico exported 7,500 tons of red snapper to the U.S. last year, for a value of $50 million, with the lion’s share of the profits made by wholesalers.
NOAA suspects some of those fish were caught illegally in U.S. waters, iced down in Mexico, and sold back to seafood lovers in Texas.
2021 npr