Endangered Species and Precarious Lives in the Upper Gulf of California

From a hilltop overlooking the community of Puerto Penasco, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari decreed a million-hectare biosphere reserve for the upper Gulf of California and the delta of the Colorado River. Assembled with him on the podium in June of 1993 were the governors of Sonora, Baja California, and Arizona, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, Luis Donaldo Colosio, then head of the Secretaria de Desarrollo Social (SEDESOL), and Dr. Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon, an aide to President Salinas at the time and now his successor. Salinas set the parameters for the reserve's management plan. Resource exploitation was to be prohibited within a nuclear zone at the mouth of the Colorado River, and offshore shrimp trawling was to be outlawed in a larger buffer zone, north of a line traversing the upper Gulf from Puerto Penasco to San Felipe on the coast of Baja California. Within this buffer zone, too, inshore fishermen would be restricted to the use of gillnets with a mesh size of four inches or less. Salinas also called for the active pursuit of economic alternatives for the region, specifically the further development of tourism, sport fishing, and aquaculture. Such pursuits were to be underwritten by a billion dollars in regional assistance from the Programa Nacional de Solidaridad (PRONASOL), run by the Sonoran native and heir-apparent to Salinas, Luis Donaldo Colosio. In its conception, then, the biosphere reserve was an amalgam of resource management notions. It called for a strictly protected nuclear zone—although none of its architects specifically addressed the nascent literature on "harvest refugia" as a fisheries enhancement tool (cf. Dugan and Davis 1991a, 1991b; Carr and Reed 1991; Tegner 1991; Roberts and Polunin 1993). It presumed the need for an "integrated conservation and development program" (ICDP) to relieve pressure on endangered species and a fragile environment (cf. Brandon and Wells 1992; Chou et al. 1991; Stycos and Duarte 1995; White 1988). And, at least in the buffer zone, the plan suggested that a "sustainable" fishery could be fostered—primarily through severe restrictions on gear. The Upper Gulf of California and Colorado River Delta Biosphere Reserve thus began as a concerted effort to arrest the deterioration of an ecosystem and to protect several endangered marine species. It is a symbol, too, of Mexico's willingness to respond to international calls for environmental consciousness. Simultaneously, though, Mexico was responding to another international agenda. The neoliberalism of the North urged—indeed, required—Mexico to undertake a multifaceted program of structural adjustment, including, in the case at hand, the privatization of the region's fisheries. The Gulf of California, thus, serves as a crucible for these two agendas, and we here take a midcourse glance at how these agendas are sorting themselves out. We examine the political environment in which the biosphere reserve was conceived and, consequently, the environmental politics accompanying the implementation process. And we assess, again in a preliminary way, since there is no closure to the process, how one small community in the upper gulf is structurally adjusting to the new economic order. These two seemingly disparate agendas are, in El Golfo de Santa Clara at the mouth of the Colorado River, very much intertwined.