Mexico Cut the Vaquita's No-Net Zone by 86%. Fishers Deserve Better

Mexico has cut the area where fishers may not use gillnets by 86%, to 1,562 square kilometres, in the only stretch of sea where the world's rarest porpoise lives. ^[1]

President Claudia Sheinbaum says the smaller zone will protect biodiversity in the Gulf of California while letting fishers make a better living. ^[1] I believe the fishers deserve that. I also think the trade is a bad one, because a smaller boundary is a promise, enforcement is a fact, and Mexico has struggled to deliver the second.

The vaquita is a small porpoise found nowhere but the northern Gulf of California. ^[2] Gillnets, curtains of mesh hung in the water, can entangle it and keep it from surfacing to breathe. ^[3] NOAA calls illegal gillnet fishing for totoaba, a large fish whose swim bladders are highly prized in China and can fetch up to $10,000 in Asia, a major threat. ^[1][3]

Mexico permanently banned most gillnets in 2017, and NOAA reports that illegal use went on anyway. ^[3]

Scientists estimated last year that seven to 10 vaquitas remained, including at least one calf. ^[1] That was a count within a limited search area, not a census of the whole population. ^[2] The number is small, and nobody can say how much smaller the truth might be.

One caution on the facts. The change comes from Reuters, citing the government. No decree or gazette notice has been published in the material I have seen, and as of July 29 draft replacement boundaries had still not been enacted in Mexico's official gazette. ^[2]

The exact lines and legal terms are unconfirmed. This column argues from what has been reported.

The best case for the cut

The argument for shrinking the zone is better than its critics sometimes allow. Lorenzo Rojas-Bracho, a vaquita expert who took part in the International Committee for the Recovery of the Vaquita, told Reuters he hoped a smaller area would let authorities concentrate their conservation work. A ban is hard to enforce across a vast area, he said, especially one that includes places with no recent vaquita records. ^[1]

He is right about the logic. A rule nobody can police is theatre, and a patrol boat can only be in one place.

Authorities told Reuters the measure took the committee's proposals into account. ^[1] Whether the committee's advice supports these particular lines has not been made public.

Rojas-Bracho also offered the most hopeful sentence in the story. If no more vaquitas are killed, he said, the survivors could have a good chance of repopulating the species. ^[1] I take that seriously. It is the whole case for acting at all.

But it is a conditional. The cut works only if the nets stop, and the cut itself does nothing to stop them.

A line is not a patrol

So who will enforce the smaller zone? Gerardo Ceballos, a biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said the reduction was made without the technical or logistical capacity to enforce the rules in the area, and warned that it could put the vaquita on a path to extinction. ^[1]

Those are his assessments, not settled findings. They are also the assessments of a scientist who has no reason to fear the vaquita's disappearance less than the government does.

In 20 years of reporting abroad I learned to ask of any new border who will stand on it. Mexico has announced the border. Reuters reports no patrol budget, vessel count or monitoring plan to go with it.

The geography is not reassuring either. Recent surveys have detected vaquitas outside the 225-square-kilometre Zero Tolerance Area, the small core zone where enforcement is strictest. Some of those detections reached the edge of the larger 1,841-square-kilometre Vaquita Refuge in September 2025. They were acoustic detections, meaning the animals were picked up by underwater microphones rather than seen. ^[2]

The refuge, the Zero Tolerance Area and the broader gillnet-prohibition area are three different boundaries. ^[2] The new 1,562-square-kilometre figure is smaller than the refuge's area.

No map or gazette notice showing where the new line runs has turned up in the material available to the paper. If animals heard at the refuge's edge now swim in water where nets are legal, a smaller map has moved the danger toward them.

That is the real objection to the cut. The best defence of it is that a smaller area can be guarded. The best argument against it is that the vaquita lives in more of the gulf than the guarded area covers.

What fishers were promised before

The president speaks for fishing communities, and she is right that they matter. NOAA says fishing is a major source of income for people across the vaquita's range. ^[3] Anyone who has watched a coastal economy depend on one fishery knows a ban is a bill, and someone has to pay it.

But look at how this has gone. Mexico announced compensation for fishers affected by an emergency gillnet ban in 2015. ^[3] It permanently banned most gillnets in 2017, and illegal use continued. ^[3]

I suspect, and it is only my inference, that the fishers who obeyed carried the cost while the nets stayed in the water. Meanwhile a totoaba swim bladder can fetch up to $10,000 in Asia. ^[1] That is the market a legal fisher in the upper gulf has to live beside.

The sources do not say how well the refuge was patrolled. They do say the illegal nets kept coming, and my reading is that the protection fell short of what the fishers were promised. Rules that are lightly policed punish the law-abiding and leave poachers a clear run. Shrinking the zone does not fix that. It makes the lines shorter and leaves the trade untouched.

If the aim is a better living for fishing families, the livelihood plan should have come first. That means safe gear, compensation that arrives, and work that pays when the water is closed. None of it appears in what has been reported.

I also have not seen the voices of the fishers themselves, which is a gap in the debate and no small one. The people this policy is named for have not been heard.

There is a harder possibility to state plainly. Loosening the rules on water nobody can watch may not help honest fishers at all. It may hand the water to whoever is least scrupulous, because a net legally set looks, from a distance, like a net illegally set.

The verdict

Sheinbaum's government has framed this as biodiversity and livelihoods advancing together. That is a fine sentence. The vaquita cannot be fed a sentence.

Ceballos made the point that is easiest to forget. Extinction, he said, would not solve insecurity, poverty or any other local problem, and Mexico would lose an icon. ^[1] A species that dies for a policy that did not work does not come back when the policy is corrected.

So here is what I would watch. First, the legal text: when the boundary is published in the gazette and exactly where it runs. Second, patrols and monitoring: boats, funding, and an honest count of illegal nets found.

Third, the next survey, which should tell us the vaquita's numbers and where it actually lives, including outside the strictest zone. Fourth, the fishers, and whether the compensation and alternative work promised to them turn up in a form they can bank.

If those answers are good, I will say so happily. Until then, Mexico has swapped a line it could not defend for a smaller line it has not shown it can. A promise can be revised next year. A species cannot.