Captains fear foreign trawlers are stripping Costa Mar's waters

The morning catch was light again. Captain Héctor Morales stood on the dock at Puerto Azul as his crew unloaded a half-full hold—mackerel, snapper, a few grouper—enough to cover fuel and ice but not much else. Around him, a dozen other boats were doing the same. It was July, supposed to be solid season, but the waters had been quiet for weeks.

Morales and other captains say the problem is not the weather or the quotas. It is the large foreign vessels that operate in the deeper channels beyond Costa Mar's territorial fishing zone, in waters the federal government has not yet formally claimed but where local boats have cast nets for decades. Those ships, they say, are industrial-scale operations from distant regions, equipped with sonar and refrigeration that lets them work the waters relentlessly and move their catch across the federation before Costa Mar's cooperative even learns they were there.

The complaint is not new, but the tone has shifted. For the first time, captains are asking the Federal Assembly in Meridian to intervene—not just to expand Costa Mar's legal fishing boundary, but to enforce existing rules in the gray zones where most of the damage appears to be happening. The question is whether Meridian will treat it as a conservation matter or as a federal commerce dispute, and which federal ministry will take the lead.