MEXICO
Charting the Course The Baja California Coastkeeper
By Serge Dedina
The rock walls that protrude into the Pacific shoreline of Santa Rosalillita, a tiny fishing village of fewer than 100 residents on the Pacific coast of the Baja California peninsula in Mexico, are more mirage than marina.

The Santa Rosalillita jetties were once destined to be the centerpiece of Mexican President Vincente Fox’s ambitious $1.7 billion Escalera Nautica or Nautical Ladder, a plan to develop 27 yacht marinas, golf courses, hotels, new highways, new cities, and a land bridge for hauling yachts that would span the Peninsula from the Pacific at Santa Rosalillita to Bahia de Los Angeles, 70 miles eastward on the Sea of Cortez.

Today, salty fishermen in Santa Rosalillita shake their heads in disgust while watching waves break over the top of the now abandoned marina that has become a multi-million dollar sandbox. A lawsuit filed by Baja California Coastkeeper and the Grupo de los Cien resulted in an $80,000 fine against the marina developer by the Mexican Environmental Protection Agency for failing to obtain required project permits.

Apparently the Mexican government learned little from the Santa Rosalillita marina disaster. Last year President Fox approved a 500 slip marina for Bahia de Los Angeles. The proposed marina project is just one of many shady projects that threaten the last coastal wildlands in the rugged and sparsely populated Baja California peninsula.

As the Baja California Coastkeeper, it is my job to assist a team of activists, community leaders, and passionate environmental attorneys to preserve areas that are home to gray whales, sea turtles, bottlenose dolphins, whale sharks, and fishermen and their families. It is not an easy task. Their livelihoods are under assault by the most powerful corporations on the planet, shady developers and poachers unafraid to use violence to protect their illegal catch.

Fernando Ochoa and Fermin Smith best exemplify the dynamic team that Baja California Coastkeeper supports. Fernando moved to Baja California from Mexico City two years ago determined to put his law degree to work to assist Mexico’s rural poor defend their families and communities against corporate raiders, corrupt government agencies, and a mafia of well-connected developers.

With the assistance of Baja California Coastkeeper and the Global Green Grant Fund, he started the Northwest Environmental Law Center (DAN) – the only environmental law institute outside of Mexico City in the country. Within months he had joined forces with Pronatura, a conservation organization, and Fermin, a lifelong fishermen and former mayor of his isolated hometown of Bahia de los Angeles (who now works with Pronatura.)

Two weeks after learning of Fox’s decision to approve the marina, Fernando and DAN assisted Fermin and the Ejido (a communal landowner cooperative) of Bahia de los Angeles to file an injunction in federal court to stop the marina. The inhabitants of the town, who make their living from eco-tourism and sport-fishing, claim the marina will destroy one of the most important whale shark feeding sites in the entire Eastern Pacific. The Mexican government never notified the community of their plan to give private developers an exclusive concession to a salt marsh wetland and beachfront the town’s impoverished residents use for their livelihoods.

Fernando is confident that the injunction will be successful because the project does not, "comply with any law that regulates development."

By taking legal action against the Mexican government for approving a marina that could destroy their way of life, the courageous fishermen and their families of Bahia de los Angeles are inspired by the image of the abandoned marina in Santa Rosalillita. The two jetties that make up that marina are now the favored recreational spots for the sons and daughters of local fishermen. They are the marina’s only users, patiently hand-lining for halibut and corvina off the boulders of its abandoned breakwater.

Fermin and the inhabitants of Bahia de los Angeles have run out of patience. Their children’s future lies in their ability to chart their own course. As Fermin tells me one day while we look out over the Sea of Cortez community he calls home, "We have to stand up for our town and our way of life. Protecting this place is the only way we will have a future."

Serge Dedina is the Baja California Coastkeeper and the Executive Director of Wildcoast. He is the author of Saving the Gray Whale.