A rusted, faded sign arches over the entrance to the town of Unión Hidalgo, in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca. The sign tells visitors in Zapotec and Spanish, “Welcome to Gubiña Ranch.” Local residents say their Pacific coast town started 150 years ago as a rural quarantine area during an influenza outbreak. Only the strong survived. Gubiña means “very poor” in Zapotec; that accurately describes most of Unión Hidalgo’s 15,000 residents. It also describes the residents of the other indigenous Huave and Zapotec villages that line the coast near Unión Hidalgo. Many local people make their living catching fish and shrimp in the coastal lagoons or harvesting palm products, firewood or salt from the wetlands.
One May morning two years ago, a crowd of nearly a hundred people filled benches and chairs lined up in front of Unión Hidalgo’s whitewashed Fisherman’s Church. Fishermen and women took their places in the shade under a bright red tarp, alongside several representatives of Mexican and international environmental organizations.[1] The group had gathered to discuss industrial shrimp farms—something many feared would threaten their livelihoods and their land, in particular the mangrove forests of the coastal wetlands.
Shrimp—once a luxury food—became the most-consumed seafood in the United States in 2001, surpassing tuna for the first time.[2] North American and Japanese appetites for shrimp have outstripped wild populations, increasing the demand for farmed shrimp. Tropical mangrove forests around the world have been bulldozed, burned and blown up with dynamite to make way for shrimp farms, artificial ponds for cultivating shrimp. Mangroves have become an endangered ecosystem, with intensive aquaculture—fish and shrimp farming—adding to the already heavy destruction caused by unsustainable farming practices. Even government and industry sources now acknowledge that, as the World Bank puts it, “mangroves do not make good sites for semi-intensive and intensive shrimp farms.”[3]
An operating shrimp farm requires huge quantities of artificial nutrients, pesticides, antibiotics, and fresh and salt water. It regurgitates a poisonous stream of these ingredients, mixed with shrimp excrement. In a decade or so, the shrimp farm literally drowns in its own waste. Between the late 1980s and late 1990s, shrimp farms consumed an estimated five percent of the world’s remaining mangroves.[4] The Philippines has lost 77 percent of its coastal mangroves since 1967, while Thailand lost 50 percent between 1961 and 1993.[5] As the aquaculture industry exhausts suitable coastline in Asia, it looks increasingly to Latin American shores. Though 80 percent of the world’s farmed shrimp still comes from Asia, most of the rest comes from Latin America.[6] Thailand remains the world’s top producer. Ecuador is now in sixth place, just ahead of the Philippines. Mexico is eighth, with 98 percent of its output going to the United States.[7] In 1998, the production of shrimp farms surpassed that of artisan fishermen for the first time in Mexico.[8]
While government officials say the aquaculture industry creates jobs, coastal communities—whose economies already depend on the sea—fear job loss. The stories of two places, Unión Hidalgo and Champerico, Guatemala, show how intense grassroots opposition can be—and how violence is often the response to community outcry. In spite of the violence, these are hopeful stories, about how poor people can face a powerful, global industry and win.
In Unión Hidalgo, the local environmental group Gubiña XXI organized the May 2001 meeting at Fisherman’s Church. A coalition of local activists, fishermen, and farmers, Gubiña XXI was the first to sound the alarm when rumors of a shrimp farm started floating through town. Marco Antonio Rodríguez, president of Mexico’s chapter of Red Manglar, the Latin American Mangrove Defense Network, traveled from the state of Campeche to attend the meeting. He told the group, “You are not alone. What is happening in Campeche is what is happening in Oaxaca, is what is happening in Nayarit.” Industrial shrimp farms are looking to expand their operations in all those states.
Juan Carlos Cantú, a Greenpeace representative, told the group that the Mexican government’s long-term goal is 700,000 acres of intensive shrimp farms in the country. That figure comes from a World Bank-funded plan in the early 1990s, which was unsuccessful. In 2002, there were 51,800 acres of artificial shrimp ponds in Mexico.[9] “One of the priorities is Oaxaca,” Cantú continued. He explained that the lifespan of a shrimp farm is about a decade, after which the shrimp farmers “abandon the land.” One of the fishermen in the audience corrected him: contaminated land. “Without mangrove,” said another. “Without fish,” added a third. Cantú finished the list: “And salinated. We all know that the worst thing you can do to land is throw salt on it.”
The company that planned to build Unión Hidalgo’s farm, Camarón Real del Pacífico, had not made its plans public. As in most small towns, though, no secret is safe in Unión Hidalgo. One month before the meeting, Gubiña XXI members had visited the proposed site for the shrimp farm with a group of fishermen and palmeros, people who earn their living harvesting fronds and hearts of palm. The site was at the edge of the Guiee Estuary—part of the town’s communal land. The estuary has thick stands of black, white and red mangroves—the only three species that grow in the region. The dense blue-green foliage of the mangroves reached far overhead. At low tide, the mangrove roots poked from the mud like delicate stalagmites—evidence of a healthy ecosystem. Even at midday, birds filled the air.
Past the palm stands tended by the palmeros and the salt flats where Unión Hidalgo women work, the group discovered a large area of burned mangrove and palm. Paths had been cut from the burned area into the mangrove thicket. Perhaps eight feet wide—about as wide as a canal connecting a shrimp farm pond to the lagoon would be—each path stretched straight toward the lagoon. They found five paths in all, each about 500 yards apart. Camarón Real del Pacífico had already cleared land for a project that few in Unión Hidalgo even knew was happening.
Though the company claimed it had purchased that coastline, land purchases are complicated business in Oaxaca. Unión Hidalgo’s land is an ejido, a government land grant that is communally controlled. Under this system, residents have access to plots of land. They can sell the right to use their plots to other community members or will them to their children. Unión Hidalgo has also maintained some of its land for common use. None of the land can be sold to a private business or an outsider without community agreement.[10] Nonetheless, illegal land transactions are common in the region. As the federal government removes the legal basis for Mexico’s communal land tenure, problems have increased. Camarón Real del Pacífico was structured as a cooperative, including both local and non-local members. They pooled members’ money to purchase just over 300 acres of land, apparently illegally, from several local plot holders.
After the tour of the Guiee Estuary, Gubiña XXI sent large color photographs of the blackened palm and mangrove to Mexico’s Attorney General for Environmental Protection, PROFEPA. Shortly afterwards, PROFEPA investigators arrived in Unión Hidalgo to document the damage, listing several laws Camarón Real del Pacífico had broken. After more than a year of pressure from Gubiña XXI, in June 2002 PROFEPA fined the company 25,000 pesos (nearly $2,500) for destroying the mangrove and for failing to complete an environmental impact statement. Shortly after that, Camarón Real del Pacífico disappeared. A new company called Desarrollo Acuícola Oaxaca Pacífico appeared, with a very similar list of associates. The fine was never paid.
Armando Sánchez, a school administrator, was the local representative for both the old and new companies. Like a small number of Unión Hidalgo residents, Sánchez had been convinced that the benefits of the shrimp farm outweighed the costs. His role in this story shows how national politics become entwined in these sorts of local struggles. In June 2000, the General Association of Mexican Workers and Peasants (UGOCM)—an organization closely associated with Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)—had invited Sánchez to visit operating shrimp farms in the northern state of Sonora. That state has 11,370 acres of shrimp ponds and is responsible for 29 percent of Mexico’s national farmed shrimp production.[11]
Sánchez returned from his trip to Sonora with a long-term plan: first, a shrimp farm in Unión Hidalgo, then several others in nearby towns. According to Sánchez, his company’s farm would consist of a series of 10- to 20-acre ponds with earthen walls and shallow canals connecting them to the lagoon. The ponds would be seeded with shrimp larvae imported from Sonora or the Yucatan peninsula. Because Unión Hidalgo’s climate is so well suited to shrimp farming, the company planned on two harvests each year rather than the single annual harvest of the Sonoran farms.
Sánchez toured a 2,500-acre shrimp farm in Sonora. Hundreds of Oaxacans who live in fishing villages have done the same, as part of a government-funded program to promote industrial shrimp farms in southern Mexico.[12] Sánchez was impressed both by the Sonoran farm’s productivity—about 1.2 metric tons per acre annually—and by the standard of living the workers enjoyed. As typically happens with older operations, however, Sonoran shrimp farms have been plagued by disease and other technical problems. And what Sánchez did not see were the enormous ecological costs.
In the past ten years, scientists and economists have begun using “ecological footprint” models to account for the total land and natural resources required to produce a commodity, or maintain a certain standard of living.[13] An ecological footprint gives a rough idea of the efficiency and sustainability of an enterprise by including all the inputs required and wastes generated. When applied to industrial shrimp farms, the model shows those operations are not more efficient over the long term than people fishing with nets and canoes.[14] Each acre of shrimp pond in an intensive operation requires somewhere between 35 and 190 acres of healthy mangrove to provide the raw materials (shrimp larvae, fish food, and clean water) and process the wastes it creates.[15] When the inputs and wastes are factored in, the net production of edible protein produced by intensive shrimp farms and mangrove forests, acre for acre, are roughly equal.[16]
As for the higher standard of living that Sánchez noted, the former fishermen who work at shrimp farms represent a small portion of those who worked in the area before the farm was built. Intensive aquaculture operations employ only one or two workers per acre of shrimp pond.[17]
Back in Unión Hidalgo, Gubiña XXI was determined not to let Sánchez’s vision become reality. Sofía Olhovich, a Gubiña XXI volunteer, says, “The shrimp farm—according to the company’s plans—will last 20 years. The average is ten. What is ten years in the life of a community? Especially an indigenous community?” In addition to filing complaints with PROFEPA, Gubiña XXI contacted journalists and garnered national media coverage for their cause. They went door-to-door in Unión Hidalgo with videos and popular education materials distributed by Greenpeace. They produced their own materials, in Zapotec, explaining the environmental, social and economic effects of industrial shrimp farms. They organized more meetings bringing together local residents, people in nearby communities facing the same issue, and representatives of national environmental and indigenous rights organizations.
In the midst of Gubiña XXI’s organizing campaign, Armando Sánchez secured the PRI candidacy for municipal president. Though the PRI lost the national elections in 2000—after more than seven decades—it still controls Oaxaca. The shrimp farm became the pivotal issue in the Unión Hidalgo election. Three other candidates ran for municipal president, all of them taking an anti-shrimp farm stance. The left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution’s campaign slogan typified the strategy: “PRD supports the fishermen in opposition to the shrimp farm.” In the end, with strong support from the state government and UGOCM, Sánchez won the October 2001 election. He received a plurality of just over 45 percent of the vote.[18]
In December 2002, the end of his first year as municipal president, Sánchez gave his administration’s financial report. Many local residents—including Gubiña XXI members—believed the report failed to account for a lot of government funding. The community requested that the state government intervene and complete an audit. On February 13, 2003, a crowd of 2,000 people demanding Sánchez’s resignation waited at the municipal offices for the state-appointed auditors. Municipal police began to shoot at them, supposedly to prevent them from taking over the government building. The shots killed a 29-year-old man and injured nine others.[19] In the days that followed, the community forced Sánchez and his administration out of town. They declared Unión Hidalgo an “autonomous municipality.”
Six weeks after the people of Unión Hidalgo forced Sánchez out of town, the federal Environment and Natural Resources Secretary (SEMARNAT) put an end to Desarrollo Acuícola Oaxaca Pacífico’s plans. The agency denied the company permission to construct the shrimp farm. In its 12-page decision, SEMARNAT concluded the plan would violate Mexican environmental law and that the company provided “false information concerning the environmental impact of the project.”[20]
As the story unfolded in Uníon Hidalgo, a very different struggle against a shrimp farm took place in another Pacific coast town, 240 miles away in Guatemala. The two places are very different: Unión Hidalgo is a close-knit Zapotec community. The 25,000 residents of Champerico, Retalhuleu, are not indigenous, but ladinos—people of mixed descent. Many in Champerico are first-generation fishermen and women, the children and grandchildren of farmworkers who moved to the port town after the collapse of lowland agricultural plantations in the 1970s. While the region around Unión Hidalgo still has large, healthy stands of mangrove, much of Guatemala’s coastal mangrove has been depleted. Between 1965 and 1996, Guatemala’s Pacific coast lost about half its mangroves.[21]
Until the 1970s, Champerico was the country’s busiest Pacific port, shipping out cotton from the plantations and coffee from the highlands. The Champerico dock now stands rusting and abandoned. Its old winches serve only to raise and lower the wealthier fishermen’s motorboats into the water. Even the former port director works as a fisherman.
Champerico’s fishermen continue to face the legacy of the failed plantation industry. “When they fumigated, there were fish kills,” says local fisherman Enrique Bonilla. The pesticide tanks were often filled with DDT. “Seems like those pesticide sprayers earned by the tank or something. It all poured into the sea, and that’s how everything was left empty” of fish and shrimp.
With the arrival of aquaculture companies, the fishermen confronted yet another challenge to their survival. On May 8, 2001, hundreds of people poured into Champerico’s dirt streets. For two days the protestors smashed windows and lit bonfires.[22] The riot had been sparked when managers from the nearby Camarones del Sur (CAMARSA) aquaculture operation sent armed guards in motorboats to patrol the waters around their 1,250-acre property. The farm is located at the edge of Ixtán Estuary, the usual fishing grounds for many Champerico residents. When several people tossed their fishing nets too close to the facility’s fences, the CAMARSA guards fired warning shots, confiscated their equipment and physically threatened them. CAMARSA managers claimed they did this to prevent people from stealing the shrimp from the farm’s tanks. The fishermen countered that the company was denying them the right to earn a living.
After the confrontation between the fishermen and CAMARSA guards, the community demanded negotiations with the company. The resulting meeting between government, community and CAMARSA representatives spun out of control. The crowd waiting for the results of the meeting tried to take one of the CAMARSA representatives hostage. Camilo de León, a community leader who was at the meeting, described how the crowd beat the man and forced him to walk barefoot on brambles. The company had piled up the brambles to prevent fishermen from reaching their fishing grounds. According to de León, the protestors told the man, “Now, you are going to feel what we, the fishermen, feel when we cross here. Now you are going to feel yourself how the rich marginalize the poor. Call your security guards to come defend you.” The municipal police reacted with bullets, killing a 14-year-old boy.
The violence shocked both sides, propelling them to the negotiating table. The community members demanded that CAMARSA stop dumping wastes in the lagoons around the shrimp farm, and allow them to keep fishing nearby. They accused CAMARSA of breaking environmental laws, because it had cleared mangrove trees around its property. Mangrove is the only legally protected ecosystem in Guatemala; cutting it down has been prohibited since 1989. According to federal law, CAMARSA should have completed an environmental impact study before starting the shrimp farm. The company never did. Since Guatemala did not have an Environment Minister until 2001, there was no one to enforce the law.[23]
Five weeks later, in mid-June, negotiators reported the results of their discussions to the town. Dissatisfied with what CAMARSA had agreed to, the fishermen organized a demonstration at the company’s gates. As one Guatemalan newspaper reported, “A peaceful protest of artisan fishermen ended in tragedy, when the security guards of the shrimping business shot into the crowd, killing one person and injuring another 11, according to police.”[24] This time, a 23-year-old fisherman was shot to death. The police arrested several CAMARSA employees, including a North American manager. Once again, the company and the community sat down to negotiate.
The Champerico uprising attracted regional press coverage and a couple of brief wire reports. Headlines like “Looting and destruction” and “Tension continues: Adolescent victim of riots buried” blared above lurid photos of young men burning books in the streets and a mother wailing over her son’s coffin.[25] The local clergy, bus drivers union, restaurant owners association and teachers organization all joined the fishermen’s cause.[26]
Two non-governmental organizations in Guatemala City, Greenpeace and Trópico Verde, collaborated with the Champerico residents during and after the conflict. Trópico Verde launched an international letter-writing campaign to Guatemala’s president, demanding that he pressure CAMARSA to negotiate with the community and obey the law. International organizations including the Earth Island Institute, Natural Resources Defense Council and World Rainforest Movement supported the effort and contacted the media.[27] As a result, on July 21, 2001, the New York Times ran a long story about Champerico’s struggle.[28]
That single article affected CAMARSA’s Miami-based owner in a way that all the coverage in Guatemala never could. The piece was surprisingly sympathetic to Champerico’s residents, including quotes like: “What you see in a sense is some of the poorest people in the world competing for the use of local coastal resources with some of the richest consumers on the planet.”[29]
Those coastal resources are in danger. In addition to CAMARSA’s 220 acres of shrimp tanks, there are four other industrial shrimp farms between Champerico and the Mexican border: a total of 1,250 acres of ponds.[30] According to an October 2001 ecological footprint analysis of the region, the five shrimp farms in northwestern Guatemala would need approximately 44,300 acres of healthy mangrove to provide clean water and shrimp larvae, and to process wastes, over the long term.[31] There are only about 29,500 acres of mangrove forest in all of Guatemala.[32] The numbers simply don’t add up.
In May 2001, Champerico residents had not heard about ecological footprint models. They had, however, seen their real-world implications: security patrols, barbed-wire fences, and barricades of brambles separating them from the mangroves and waters that sustained them. As Camilo de León explains it, “Mangroves are forests that give life to human beings, protect them from natural disasters, give life to other beings that live within them. They are natural industries created by our God and therefore they must be respected. They are not idle lands, as some would like to think, or useless swampy places; on the contrary, they are resources of incalculable value and difficult to restore. Let’s not forget, then, that mangroves are life, are fire, are pure environment, are blood.”
After the New York Times article appeared, the negotiations with CAMARSA swung to favor the Champerico residents.[33] “The article directly pressured the owners of the shrimping company, and indirectly influenced the Guatemalan media to give more attention to the issue. CAMARSA began to fear the grassroots movement in Champerico when it realized that there were supporting organizations that could garner international attention,” says Piedad Espinoza of Trópico Verde. “The third key was that Champerico joined the Red Manglar, which threatened to turn the CAMARSA case into a very high-level struggle.”
In September 2001, CAMARSA agreed to many of the community’s demands. According to Elmer López, then director of Greenpeace Guatemala, in nearly a decade spent working with coastal communities, he had never seen a group of subsistence fishermen and women extract so much from an aquaculture company.
Between September 2001 and February 2002, CAMARSA removed the piles of brambles and pulled back the fences. Champerico’s residents returned to their regular fishing grounds: the estuaries near the shrimp farm. The company’s negotiators promised to allow the mangrove it had illegally cut down to regenerate. They further agreed to enclose their water pumps with floats, reducing the amount of oil spilling into the lagoons. They even promised to clean the pump filters regularly.[34] This last promise astounds: It is expensive and time-consuming work, with no direct, immediate benefit to the shrimp farm. It improves wild catches, but not shrimp farm production.
Beyond the concessions they secured from CAMARSA, Champerico residents gained something even more important from the experience: leverage. In the course of organizing their campaign, Bonilla, de León, and other fishermen and women founded the Neighborhood Association for the Comprehensive Development of Champerico, AVEDICHAM. On May 2, 2002, a shrimp farm located just south of the CAMARSA facility fired warning shots at fishermen working nearby. This time, the event did not lead to a riot. Instead, AVEDICHAM representatives approached the police and the company and successfully challenged the aggressive behavior.
Even this leverage won’t solve all of Champerico’s problems. Enrique Bonilla and Camilo de León agree that the people of Champerico need to find other ways to earn a living. There are too many people fishing, with too little to catch. Champerico desperately needs economic alternatives to the shrimp farms and to subsistence fishing. AVEDICHAM has turned its attention to the much broader issues of poverty and economic depression. They have begun with two ideas: found a community library and raise scholarship funds for their children.
In both Unión Hidalgo and Champerico, collaborations with national and international organizations like Red Manglar strengthened their campaigning. The fact that both communities identified the problems on their own, set their own agendas and decided when and how to involve the NGOs made these collaborations successful.
Anti-shrimp farm organizing grew into something larger in both cases. In Champerico, that effort is relatively small-scale: monitoring shrimp farm activity and slowly seeking economic alternatives to fishing. In Unión Hidalgo, it’s huge: local autonomy. Gubiña XXI is part of the Consejo Ciudadano Hidalguense, the Hidalgo Citizens’ Council, which currently runs the entire municipality without any financial support from the state or federal government.
The differences in scale of their respective work relates to the nature of the two communities. Unión Hidalgo is an indigenous community with long ties to the local land. Champerico is, essentially, a town of ecological refugees. Enrique Bonilla says, “The ones who are more unified are the indigenous people. Not like us, who just get jealous of each other.” Though past community organizations in Champerico have failed because of internal conflict, AVEDICHAM has thus far managed to avoid this pattern.
Both communities have set precedents. Champerico secured some level of accountability from an industry that usually abandons the communities surrounding its facilities. Unión Hidalgo managed to stop a shrimp farm before it gained a foothold. As Camilo de León likes to say, “It is a lot easier to put a shrimp farm in than take it out.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wendy Call, wendycall@world.oberlin.edu, is a freelance writer who divides her time between Massachusetts and Oaxaca.
NOTES
1. In Unión Hidalgo, all the fishermen are indeed men. The term pescadora—a fisherwoman—refers to a woman who sells fish, as many of the community’s women do. In the case of Guatemala, discussed later in the article, there are indeed some fisherwomen who work in the lagoons.
2. “Shrimp, Salmon, Tilapia Rise in Popularity,” press release from the National Fisheries Institute, Aug. 30, 2002.
3. “Shrimp Farming and the Environment, A World Bank, NACA, WWF and FAO Consortium Program ‘To analyze and share experiences on the better management of shrimp aquaculture in coastal areas,’” Synthesis report, 2002, p. 22, .
4. “Shrimp–—The Devastating Delicacy—The environmental damage caused by shrimp farming,” Mike Haler, Mathew Gianni and Lorenzo Cardenal, Greenpeace report, May 1997, .
5. “Country Profile: Philippines,” Simeona Aypa, Department of Agriculture, and Santiago Baconguis, Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Philippines, and “Country Profile: Thailand,” Sanggontanagit Tanan and Anand Tansutapanich, Department of Fisheries, Thailand, both at , and “Mangrove Management and Development in the Philippines,” Dioscoro M. Melana, et al, paper presented at “Mangrove and Aquaculture Management” meeting, Kasetsart University, Bangkok, Thailand, Feb. 14- 16, 2000.
6. “Shrimp Farming and the Environment,” p. 1.
7. “Shrimp Farming and the Environment,” p. 12 and “Shrimp Aquaculture, the People, and the Environment in Coastal Mexico,” Billie R. DeWalt et al, Report prepared under the World Bank, NACA, WWF and FAO Consortium on Shrimp Farming and the Environment, 2002, p. iv, .
8. “Shrimp Aquaculture…,” p .7.
9. “Shrimp Aquaculture…,” p. iv.
10. Changes to Mexico’s constitution before the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed, along with the “Indigenous Law” signed in 2001, threaten communal land tenure. Thus far, legal challenges and social opposition to both initiatives have prevented the government from eliminating communal lands altogether.
11.“Shrimp Aquaculture…,” p. 5.
12. Aziz Curioca, Director, Consejo Estatal de Pesca, Salina Cruz, Oaxaca, author’s interview, July 2000.
13. Our Ecological Footprint, Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, New Society Publishers, 1996 (See or ).
14. “Mangroves in Misery: Human impact upon mangroves on the north-western Guatemalan Pacific Coast,” Stuart Thomson, Stockholm University, Oct. 2001, p. 24.
15. “Mangroves in Misery,” p. 30.
16. “Mangroves in Misery,” p. 17.
17. “Aquaculture floods Indian villages,” G. Cohen, Multinational Monitor, July-Aug. 1995, p 22-24 and “Camaronicultura en Oaxaca,” William Griffin, Cuadernos del Sur, Año 7, No. 16, May 2001.
18. “Gana el PRI en Unión Hidalgo,” Tiempo: Diario Independiente del Istmo, Juchitán, Oaxaca, Oct. 22, 2001, p. 30.
19.“Se enfrentaron policías y colonos en Unión Hidalgo, Oaxaca; un muerto y 9 lesionados,” La Jornada, Mexico City, Feb. 15, 2003 and “Organismos indígenas analizan combate a discriminación y lucha por autonomía,” La Jornada, Feb. 16, 2001.
20. Letter from the Subsecretaría de Gestión para la Protección Ambiental of SEMARNAT, to Desarrollo Acuícola Oaxaca Pacífico, Mexico City, March 3, 2003.
21.“Wetlands and Coastal Zones,” UICN: World Conservation Union, 2001, .
22.“Caos y tensión,” Nuestro Diario, Guatemala, May 9, 2001.
23.“Los impactos de la actividad camaronera en Champerico, Retalhuleu, Guatemala,” Trópico Verde, and AVEDICHAM, 2001, p 2, .
24.“Otra vez disturbios: Protesta en Champerico,” by Julio Rodas, Nuestro Diario, June 18, 2001.
25. Notícias, Guatemala, May 9, 2001 and Nuestro Diario, May 11, 2001.
26.“Champerico tiene la palabra,” Prensa Libre, Guatemala City, June 1, 2001.
27. See, for example, .
28.“Guatemala – Conflict sparked by shrimp farming,” David Gonzalez, New York Times, July 21, 2001, online at .
29. Jacob Scherr, Natural Resources Defense Council, quoted in “Guatemala–Conflict sparked by shrimp farming,” New York Times, July 21, 2001.
30.“Registro de Granjas Camaroneras,” MAGA/UNI/PESCA: La Pesca y la Acuicultura en Guatemala, Nov. 1999, p. 7.
31.“Mangroves in Misery,” p. 30.
32. Elmer López, Greenpeace Guatemala, author’s interview, Nov. 26, 2001.
33.“Actualización sobre Champerico,” letter from Carlos Albacete, Trópico Verde, sent to REDMANGLAR e-mail list serve, Sept. 28, 2001.
34.“Cronología de los hechos ocurridos en el puerto de Champerico,” compiled by Camilo de León, pages unnumbered, Nov. 2001.
