Efforts by the administration of President Laura Chinchilla to clean house at the Costa Rican Fisheries Institute (Incopesca) continued this week, as officials pondered the fate of Incopesca President Luis Dobles.
Dobles has not been fired, but sources with knowledge of discussions taking place within the administration told The Tico Times Dobles could be ousted in coming weeks.
Last Friday, Communications Minister Francisco Chacón denied the rumors. At Tuesday’s weekly Cabinet meeting, Environment Minister René Castro said, The government will be meeting in the next few days to discuss the future of Incopesca, including President Luis Dobles. But it’s not the Environment Ministry’s decision, it’s the Agriculture Ministry’s.
Last week, Chinchilla’s Cabinet fired Incopesca Vice President Álvaro Moreno, citing multiple ethics violations concerning his ties to the commercial shrimping industry, based in the central Pacific city of Puntarenas.
Since 2010, Moreno served as the agency’s vice president, a four-year post. He also was appointed vice president of Incopesca’s board of directors.
Dobles and Moreno are two controversial figures who, until Moreno’s firing, led an agency charged with regulating Costa Rica’s commercial fishing industry and promoting conservation policies to protect marine wildlife.
The Puntarenas Prosecutor’s Office this week confirmed it is actively investigating Dobles and others in relation to a series of incidents in late 2011, when four fishing vessels landed shark fins at a public dock in Puntarenas (TT, Oct. 14, 2011). The fins were attached only to the sharks’ spines, with flesh and bones shaved away.
According to Puntarenas Assistant Prosecutor Tatiana Chaves, the landing of fins attached only to shark spines is a violation of Costa Rica’s Fishing Law and Agriculture and Livestock Ministry Decree 34,928, which prohibits shark finning, a practice that involves slicing lucrative shark fins from the body and dumping less-valuable meat and carcasses overboard.
Shark finning is a multimillion-dollar industry that fuels demand for shark fin soup, a delicacy in many Asian countries, most notably China and Taiwan. Conservationists say that most longlining fishing vessels operating in Costa Rican waters and throughout Central America participate in the gruesome practice.
The Puntarenas Prosecutor’s Office is investigating Dobles for allegedly authorizing in 2011 the ship Wang Jia Men 89 to unload 36 shark carcasses with fins attached. The office is also investigating Katy Tseng Chang, legal representative of three boats flying Belizean flags and charged with the same infraction.
They were trying to circumvent the law by unloading fins only attached to the skeleton, Chaves said in an email. It is a tactic by fishermen to save space on board and transport more shark fins, leading to overfishing and waste of marine resources; in addition, the bleeding out of sharks without proper sanitary measures can generate toxins that could affect people’s health.
The fourth case under investigation by Puntarenas prosecutors was filed Aug. 11 against the Costa Rican ship Los Pericos and its captain, Daniel Obando, whose crew was caught illegally fishing at Isla del Coco National Marine Park with 27 shark fins on board. According to Chaves, Obando was briefly detained and must check in with authorities monthly, pending a court hearing. The vessel was temporarily seized.
Two similar cases brought by prosecutor’s offices in Aguirre and Parrita, also on the Pacific coast, await preliminary hearings.
Except for a handful of park rangers who live there, Isla del Coco is an uninhabited national marine park 365 miles west of Puntarenas. It belongs to an important marine biological corridor extending to Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands. It is also a marine sanctuary for several species of sharks, including the hammerhead, which Costa Rica is actively working to place on the list of endangered species under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES.
Randall Arauz, president of the Marine Turtle Restoration Project, which has filed several injunctions against Incopesca in the past decade, and who recently returned from a research trip to Isla del Coco, said shark populations are dwindling around the island.
In the past, hundreds of hammerheads could be spotted, Arauz said, but during his recent trip, he saw only about 100.
They’re not coming back, he said.
Yet, for every successful detention at the park, dozens of other boats avoid being caught, he said.
They’re sitting at the 12-mile line, and at night, they come in the park to fish and then leave before anyone can get there, Arauz said.
Coast Guard officials said they are doing their best to crack down on illegal fishing, but they are limited by few resources and loopholes that only allow officials to prosecute boat crews caught red-handed. With a limited number of boats and crew, Coast Guard officials also must divide their time between policing for illegal drug trafficking and cracking down on poachers.
In many cases, park rangers can detect boats, but the Coast Guard can’t get there in time to obtain evidence needed for prosecution, officials said.
The Coast Guard simply does not have the capacity to pursue so many boats, Public Security Vice Minister Celso Gamboa told The Tico Times.
When the ship Los Pericos was caught illegally fishing at Isla del Coco, 14 other boats reportedly were spotted in the area.
There was no way of knowing if the other boats were shark finning, Coast Guard Director Martín Arias said. Many boats seek water and supplies at Cocos Island.
Still, Arias said officials are committed to policing shark finners in Costa Rican waters, particularly given the country’s recent bad press over its extradition request for marine conservationist Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, over a 2012 clash with a Costa Rican vessel accused of shark finning in Guatemalan waters.
Arias pointed out that in the past year, 12 cases of shark finning have been sent to the courts. But processing the cases could take up to two years, he said.