DZILAM DE BRAVO, Mexico — Whispers of high-speed boat chases, harpoon battles on the open sea and divers who dived deep and never re-emerged come and go around here like an afternoon gale.
The fishermen eye strangers — and one another — with deep suspicion. "We'll tear them apart," said one, Jorge Luis Palma, squinting into the horizon at a boat he did not recognize.
What has wrapped this village in such hostility?
Sea cucumbers.
The spiky, sluglike marine animals are bottom feeders that are not even consumed in Mexico, but they are a highly prized delicacy half a world away, in China, setting off a maritime gold rush up and down the Yucatán Peninsula.
"There is tension," said Manuel Sierra, one of the unofficial leaders of the fishermen here, "and now it has exploded."
There has been an indefinite ban on harvesting sea cucumbers, but it has been loosely enforced, and the black market is thriving.
With a growing Chinese middle class, demand for sea cucumbers has soared, depleting populations in Asian and Pacific waters because of overfishing.
"Sea cucumber fever," as residents call it, has taken a toll here, too. Of the estimated 20,000 tons available in 2009, only 1,900 tons are left, according to Felipe Cervera, secretary of rural development in Quintana Roo State.
The ban, meant to give the population time to replenish, came during seasonal bans on grouper, octopus and lobster. With few alternative sources of income, some fishermen are going after the sea cucumbers clandestinely, far from the coast and often in the middle of the night.
Once they have harvested and prepared the sea cucumbers, fishermen sell them to people they call "intermediaries," who coordinate the overland journey to ports in northern Mexico. From there, where the authorities are less concerned with illegal sea products than with drug shipments, the sea cucumbers are shipped to China, where a single pound can sell for $300.
With the quest to meet demand and cash in — fishermen here can make more than $700 on a good day — have come tales of derring-do and danger.
Local residents have turned the Yucatán waters, only intermittently patrolled by the authorities, into a kind of Wild West, with communities claiming and guarding their slices of the marine pie. Coastal towns are growing increasingly hostile to one another as neighbors are divided between those who respect the bans and those who fish illegally. The growing divisions within and between these communities have already led to violence.
In late January, fishermen here in Dzilam de Bravo detained a boat from the nearby village of Progreso, brought it to shore and burned it. In cellphone video captured by a resident and shown on Milenio Television, a crowd can be heard cheering as bright flames engulf the small craft.
During a town meeting here this month, shouts filled a tense conference room in the municipal palace as community members fought over what to do about the growing problem of "outsiders" seeking local fishing rights.
The Mexican Navy has been deployed in Yucatán waters, though patrols are irregular. The government has set up at least 15 checkpoints along highways in the state to deter sea cucumber shipments and their traffickers.
In Celestún, a town 120 miles west of here, a group of fishermen recently flipped over a van belonging to the National Aquaculture and Fishing Commission, rumored to be transporting a confiscated sea cucumber shipment. Fishermen have grown increasingly hostile toward the authorities, who they believe are cracking down on certain groups while, for a fee, helping others traffic in the contraband product.
Those involved in this bonanza risk more than jail time.
Fishermen talk of violence at sea, though they never report it to the authorities. Some say the people involved in the trade have shot at competitors to scare them away. Others speak of rapid retreats prompted by the sudden appearance of rivals or the authorities, leaving poachers who were diving below stranded at sea. Indeed, untrained and under equipped, many fishermen here have put down their harpoons and become divers in record time.
They plunge to depths of more than 50 feet with little more than a mask, their undergarments, a rickety hose for oxygen and a net, harvesting the glacial-paced animals like farmers picking strawberries.
Often, they come up too quickly or suffer other diving injuries. In Celestún, an estimated 30 fishermen have died from decompression sickness while harvesting sea cucumbers since 2009, according to Álvaro Hernández, a researcher at the National Fisheries Institute.
"My children ask for him and I just don't know what to tell them," said Blanca Mezeta, 26, who said her husband died in January after diving for sea cucumbers. He felt sick after ascending, but his boss insisted that they take the day's catch to the buyer before going to a clinic.
The fishing is leaving an environmental mess, too. A recent visit by boat to a clandestine preparation site, where the recently harvested animals are boiled and salted, revealed rusted caldrons and hundreds of black plastic bags strewn around bushes and trees in Celestún National Park, a protected biosphere reserve. Sea cucumber remains, beer bottles and empty cigarette packs dotted the coastline.
Navigating back into the harbor, Roman Agusto Flores, a lifelong fisherman in Celestún who opposes the poaching, discreetly pointed out the different groups of men sitting on docked boats, distinguishing between those who engage in the illegal sea cucumber trade and those who are restraining themselves. The two groups do not mix, he said.
"We have ruined everything ourselves," Mr. Flores said.
Standing by the entrance to her shack at the end of a dirt road in Celestún, Ms. Mezeta, the woman who lost her husband, remembered asking him to stay away from sea cucumbers. "Stick with fish," she said, fighting back tears. "Even if it's less money, we'll still eat."
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