09 December 21
I'm Going to Challenge All of You
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08 December 21
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The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
As news broke of Nunes’s decision, thousands of venders who have waited decades for Trump to pay them expressed bafflement that the California congressman would make such a boneheaded career move.
“It’s inconceivable to me that he thinks he will get paid,” Carol Foyler, one of the unremunerated venders, said. “Has he even Googled Trump?”
As Nunes packed his bags, his soon-to-be-former colleagues in Congress celebrated his departure into the wee hours of the morning.
Representative Adam Schiff, however, sounded a cautious note. “It’s essential that Devin not find out that he won’t get paid,” Schiff said. “He might change his mind and stay here.”
Brooklyn Center police officer Kim Potter fatally shot 20-year-old Black man Daunte Wright after allegedly mistaking her handgun for a taser. (photo: Hennepin County Sheriff's Office)
The high-stakes trial for the ex-cop who killed Daunte Wright is underway, but it’s far from clear it will satisfy enraged activists.
The viral video of the crime sent shockwaves through social media, and erupted long-simmering anger about racial injustice and police brutality in the United States. For weeks, people took to the streets to protest, Floyd’s final pleas to breathe became a rallying cry, and the world zeroed-in on past police killings, including in the Minneapolis area.
That included the August 2019 death of Dimock-Heisler’s 21-year-old son, Kobe.
“I had been fighting for months for people to pay attention to Kobe’s case and it was initially frustrating that George Floyd’s death was all over the news and not my son’s,” Dimock-Heisler told The Daily Beast. “But then, people started paying attention to our story and the stories of other parents or partners who lost loved ones to the police. Suddenly, we were getting truly noticed.”
That spotlight remained for months after Floyd’s tragic death—and even as Chauvin faced a jury before the world last April. But then, amid a trial that had massive stakes for law enforcement in America, white Brooklyn Center police officer Kim Potter fatally shot 20-year-old Black man Daunte Wright after allegedly mistaking her handgun for a taser during a traffic stop in the Minneapolis suburb.
Wright’s case sparked days of protests in the area and, critics argued, proved that the state had not done nearly enough to overhaul de-escalation and use-of-force policies. But for Dimock-Heisler, whose son was shot six times by two Brooklyn Park police officers responding to a “disturbance call” at his grandparents’ house, Wright’s death at the hands of now-ex cop Kim Potter’s colleagues was a more personal blow.
“I didn’t immediately recognize [Potter],” Dimock-Heisler said about when she learned of Wright’s death. “Then, someone told me that Potter arrived at the scene after my son’s death and advised the other officers to get in their cars, turn off their body cams, and not talk to each other. I was floored. What are the odds.” No officers were charged in the incident, with prosecutors concluding that Kobe Dimock-Heisler—who had a history of mental illness—was a danger to them.
“Now, I am terrified at the thought of her not getting convicted,” his mother added. “We need some justice.”
The trial against Potter for the April 11 traffic stop that began over expired car tabs and ended with Wright suffering a fatal wound to the chest began on Wednesday, just over seven months after Chauvin was convicted for murdering Floyd. But unlike Chauvin’s trial, which was widely viewed as a sure-thing conviction, Minnesota laws and Potter’s insistence—potentially bolstered by video—that the shooting was an accident complicates her case.
Potter, a 48-year-old who resigned from the force over the shooting after 26 years on the job, is facing first-degree manslaughter and second-degree manslaughter charges in connection with Wright’s death. She has pleaded not guilty, but throughout the trial, prosecutors and defense lawyers were expected to agree that the deadly incident was accidental.
Prosecutors, however, insist that Potter was criminally negligent—while the former cop’s defense deam insists Wright was resisting arrest and a use of force was warranted.
“This case is about this defendant Kimberly Potter betraying her badge, and betraying her oath, and betraying her position of public trust. And on April 11 of this year, she betrayed a 20 year old kid,” Minnesota Assistant Attorney General Erin Eldridge said during her opening arguments Wednesday.
But Ted Sampsell-Jones, a professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, said the state’s argument might be hard to prove given the body-camera footage.
“The fundamental problem for the prosecution is that the video evidence supports the defense claim that this was an accident,” Sampsell-Jones told The Daily Beast. “Before she fired, she yelled ‘taser! taser! taser!’—which is what officers are trained to say before they use a taser, so other officers can move.”
Sampsell-Jones added that for most people who watched now infamous body-camera footage of the incident, it’s clear Potter made a “stupid and tragic mistake”—a conclusion that might make it difficult for prosecutors to convince a jury she broke the law.
“That will make it difficult to convict. Not necessarily impossible, since the charges can be founded on at least some forms of reckless accidents,” Sampsell-Jones said. “Chauvin’s case ended up being a slam dunk. This one is shaping up to be much tougher.”
To prove the first-degree manslaughter charges under Minnesota law, prosecutors need to show that Potter caused Wright’s death with “reckless handling or use of a firearm so as to endanger the safety of another with such force and violence that death or great bodily harm to any person was reasonably foreseeable.” To prove the second-degree charge, prosecutors need to show that Potter “caused an unreasonable risk” by using a firearm.
Simply put, prosecutors do not need to prove that Potter intended to kill Wright, only that she was reckless in her actions. But to do so, prosecutors also need to pass a higher threshold to prove culpable negligence, which is described in Minnesota law as an “unreasonable risk, and consciously [taking] chances of causing death or great bodily harm to another.”
“For second-degree manslaughter, the statute says that she must consciously disregard a risk of death or great bodily harm,” Sampsell-Jones said, adding that “great bodily harm is defined in the law as permanent, serious injury.”
Even if Potter was “reckless” in the sense that she made a “really dumb mistake by drawing the wrong weapon,” he continued, that does not necessarily mean she “consciously disregarded a risk of death or great bodily harm.”
According to Potter’s criminal complaint, Officer Anthony Luckey and Potter, his field training officer, pulled over Wright for expired car tabs on the afternoon of April 11. After performing a records check on Wright, Luckey discovered the young man had an outstanding gross misdemeanor warrant. Luckey then asked Wright to step out of the car.
Judge Regina Chu ruled that Wright’s alleged prior acts will not be admissible during trial unless the defense can prove that Potter knew about them at the time of the shooting.
Body-cam footage shows Wright getting out of his car, then jumping back inside before Luckey could handcuff him. Potter is then seen grabbing her handgun with her right hand before pointing it at Wright and yelling about the taser.
About a second later, Potter fired a single shot at Wright’s left side. The complaint states Wright cried out in pain before his car sped off for a few blocks and eventually crashed into another car.
“She was trained not to shoot an unarmed driver, she was trained not to fire into a vehicle and she was also trained not to use her taser on a fleeing suspect, and she was trained to be aware of the differences between her gun and her taser,” Eldridge told jurors on Wednesday.
The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s office has said Wright died from the gunshot and that his death was a homicide. After the incident, a Minnesota Department of Public Safety Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator examined Potter’s duty belt and concluded that her handgun was holstered on the right side and her taser on the left, the complaint notes.
“The grips or handles of both the gun and taser face Potter’s rear. The taser is yellow with a black grip,” prosecutors state in the complaint. Eldridge echoed to jurors on Wednesday that Potter had a “duty belt with her gun and her taser” which held the gun on her right-dominant side and taser on her left side.
“We trust [police officers] to know wrong from right, and left from right,” the prosecutor added.
Potter was arrested on April 14, one day after she and Chief Tim Bannon both resigned from the Brooklyn Center Police Department.
The idea that Potter used the wrong weapon is at the crux of her defense team’s argument. A study by The New York Times in April found that while uncommon, at least 15 other officers across the country have also claimed the weapon confusion in mostly non-fatal situations. The report concluded that about a third of the officers were indicted and only three were found guilty.
Potter’s defense attorney, Paul Engh, said in his opening arguments that Potter had no choice but to attempt to use a taser on Wright because she believed her partner was in danger. “She made a mistake. This was an accident. She’s a human being,” Engh argued to the jury.
Engh added that Potter believed she was within her rights to use force because her parter was hanging onto Wright’s car during the incident and, he claimed, could have been killed if he drove away.
During jury selection, one of Potter’s defense attorneys also suggested that the former cop may testify on her own behalf to show the emotional implications of what happened that April day. After the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, where the teenager’s testimony may have proved crucial for his acquittal on charges of murdering two people and killing a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the prospect of the cop speaking out on her own behalf loomed large.
“Though it’s uncommon for criminal defendants to testify, the conventional wisdom is that they [should in] mistake or self-defense cases. The jury wants to hear their story. And since her defense attorney told prospective jurors Potter will testify during jury selection, I fully expect her to,” Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor, told The Daily Beast.
Rahmani added that while “jurors love police officers,” this trial stands apart from that of Chauvin because he “intentionally made decisions that killed Floyd” while body-camera footage may support Potter’s argument that she believed she used a taser. Sampsell-Jones agreed, noting that Potter’s testimony could “help her case.”
“Potter is also more likable than Chauvin, who had a history of using excessive force,” Rahmani added.
But for Dimock-Heisler, the stakes if Potter is not convicted are at an all-time high. Since Wright’s killing, Dimock-Heisler and her support group Families Supporting Families Against Police Brutality have been able to advance several pieces of police-reform and public-safety legislation.
Among them is the Daunte Wright and Kobe Dimock-Heisler Community Safety and Violence Prevention Resolution that would create a “cite and release” policy for misdemeanors and low-level traffic violations—like expired tabs. The Brooklyn Center City Council passed the landmark legislation in May. This after protests spurred by Wright’s death last year concluded with police using flash bangs and tear gas on residents.
“We have worked so hard to make Minnesota better, and I’m really scared they are going to accept her argument that this was a mistake,” Dimock-Heisler said. “If that happens, that just sickens me. It makes me sad just thinking about it now.”
People attend the March on Washington, Friday Aug. 28, in Washington, on the 57th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech. (photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)
“We need to restore order,” the former president told his chief of staff before his infamous Bible photo op
Trump gave the instruction as he prepared to walk from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church to squint and have his picture taken while holding a Bible. The U.S. Park Police and National Guard troops tear-gassed protesters in Lafayette Square, which sits between the White House and the church, to clear a path for the president.
“Upstairs in the Residence, President Trump was growing anxious,” Meadows reportedly wrote in The Chief’s Chief, which published Tuesday. “He had given an order for the park to be cleared, and it was not being followed. The various law enforcement agencies that were supposed to be under the command of [then-Attorney General] Bill Barr were clearly not communicating with one another, and it did not seem that a single arrest had yet been made.”
Protesters had gathered in Lafayette Square on June 1 as part of the demonstrations sparked by the police killing of George Floyd. According to Meadows, the protesters were trying to take down a statue of President Andrew Jackson that stood in the park, prompting him to phone Trump. “It looks like we have a situation out here,” Meadows said, according to the book. “They’re trying to tear down statues and vandalizing the park. I assume that we have the authority to deploy whatever law enforcement is necessary to fix this?”
Trump’s answer was yes, and more. “Not only do you have the authority,” the president said, according to Meadows. “I want you to go out there and bust some heads and make some arrests. We need to restore order.”
Meadows writes that he “was not quite prepared to crack anything,” but notes that he “went to the front door of the White House and spoke with the head of the Secret Service” and “pointed out that we had orders from President Trump to open up Pennsylvania Avenue.”
“The leaders of these forces were resisting, but it was clear that the officers on the ground felt the same way President Trump did,” Meadows added.
Meadows’ book has reportedly angered Trump, who feels betrayed by Meadows’ accounting of his presidency — including a story that Trump tested positive for Covid ahead of a debate with Biden, a week before the White House publicly acknowledged his diagnosis. Trump’s reported anger about that revelation prompted Meadows to call his own book “fake news” after Trump did. Perhaps in an effort to appease the former president further, Meadows announced through his lawyer on Tuesday that he no longer intends to cooperate with the congressional committee investigating Jan. 6.
Florida Army National Guard Captain Adam Cockrell addresses soldiers from Delta Company, 1st Battallion, 124th Infantry, 53rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
The National Defense Authorization Act would boost pay by 2.7% for servicemembers, overhaul the military justice system and update diversity training requirements.
In a win for conservatives, a provision expanding the draft to include women was dropped from the compromise measure, despite being included in both the Senate and House versions of the NDAA and earlier bipartisan support for the provision.
An effort to scrap decades-old war authorizations was also left off the final measure.
The bill also includes $27.8 billion for the Department of Energy for nuclear weapons work, $3.5 billion for military construction across the country, as well as funds for military procurement of Arleigh Burke-class destroyers to F-35 aircraft.
Committee leaders hailed reforms to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including removing commanders from the decision-making process of covered crimes, such as rape, sexual assault, murder and kidnapping. The defense bill also would criminalize sexual harassment under the UCMJ.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., however, argued the reforms don't go far enough.
"House and Senate Armed Services leadership have gutted our bipartisan military justice reforms behind closed doors, doing a disservice to our service members and our democracy," she said in a statement.
The Democrat, who sits on the Armed Services Committee, pushed for a bill that would remove convening authority from the chain of command.
The legislation would beef up resources to counter Russia and China. It would authorize $4 billion for the European Deterrence Initiative, which aims to discourage Russian aggression in Europe, and $7.1 billion for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative to discourage China's aggression in the Pacific — as well as bolster the U.S. presence there.
Domestic politics also found its way into the bill.
For example, there is a provision that would prohibit private funding for deployment of a state national guard to any other state, except for a natural disaster. This came after South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem this summer said donations from a Republican donor would pay for a deployment of guard members to the U.S. border with Mexico.
Lawmakers also use the bill to establish an independent Afghanistan War commission to study America's longest war and provide recommendations and lessons learned. President Biden received bipartisan criticism for how his administration handled America's withdrawal from the Afghanistan.
The compromise measure now heads to the Senate, where lawmakers have been unable to pass that chamber's version.
Congress has passed the NDAA, usually in a bipartisan manner, for over 60 years in a row.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks during an immigration reform demonstration in Washington DC on 7 December. (photo: WillOliver/EPA)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls out Lauren Boebert on Twitter for posting a picture of her family holding rifles in front of a tree
In a tweet on Wednesday, Ocasio-Cortez called out far-right congresswoman Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who had posted a picture of her family, including her small children, holding rifles in front of a Christmas tree.
“Tell me again where Christ said ‘use the commemoration of my birth to flex violent weapons for personal political gain’?” said Ocasio-Cortez, recalling back in 2015 when conservatives declared that there was a “war on Christmas”, with companies like Starbucks facing threats of boycott.
“lol @ all the years Republicans spent on cultural hysteria of society ‘erasing Christmas and it’s meaning’ when they’re doing that fine all on their own.”
In addition to Boebert’s gun-themed Christmas photo, Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie recently posted a picture of his family holding rifles while posing in front of a Christmas tree, with the caption: “Merry Christmas! PS: Santa, please bring ammo.”
The photo was posted only days after a school shooting in Oxford, Michigan, located an hour outside of the state’s capitol, where four students died and seven people were injured.
Boebert and Massie’s Christmas photos faced widespread criticism, as several other Republicans have used violent imagery in attempts to shock and provoke as well as rally supporters. Arizona congressman Adam Gosar was censured after tweeting an animated video depicting him killing Ocasio-Cortez and Boebert received criticism for Islamaphobic comments about Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
“Here his family’s got guns under a Christmas tree just after four kids were killed,” said Elaine Kamarck, a former official in the Clinton administration, in an interview with the Guardian. “The guy’s abominable but that’s what’s happening to the Republican party. They’re flat-out nuts. There’s a piece of the Republican party that now supports violence.”
Myanmar's military personnel patrol in a truck in downtown Yangon on November 2, 2021. (photo: AFP)
Some of the victims’ hands were tied when their bodies were found in a Myanmar village, locals said.
Video emerged on Tuesday showing the blackened, stiffened corpses stacked in a still-smoking pile, with Done Taw village locals saying they were massacred by soldiers from Myanmar’s military junta.
News outlet Myanmar Now reported locals as saying that some of the victims’ hands were tied when their bodies were found. Cries for help were reportedly heard during the fire, leading some to believe that they were burned alive.
“They beat them to the brink of death and burned them alive before they died. Some of them are not even 18,” said a leader of the local People’s Defense Force (PDF), a self-organising guerilla group that has sprung up in communities across the country to resist the junta.
Myanmar has been rocked by unrelenting civil unrest as anti-junta groups have fought back against the country’s military, which toppled Aung San Suu Kyi’s government in a coup on Feb. 1.
It remains unclear if there were any eyewitnesses to the killings, and the exact circumstances surrounding the deaths are yet to be verified. But one Done Taw resident told Myanmar Now that the 11 victims “were running through the farm and got shot and were taken to the hut where they were burned.” Another villager organising the mens’ funerals said the soldiers “found them, beat them up and burned them.”
Local news outlet Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) said the men were tied up and shot in the head, with those who survived the shooting heard wailing as the hut was set on fire and they were burned alive.
The victims included a man with paraplegia and five people under 18, including a 14-year-old, according to a list compiled by the local PDF. Myanmar Now reported the local PDF as saying all the men were members of the group, but none were armed when they were captured by soldiers.
DVB, however, reported that all the men were civilians, with Radio Free Asia quoting local villagers as saying the men were farm workers.
“He didn’t do anything, [he was] just a naive boy although he was over 20 years old. Only once or twice was he a village nightwatchman, he didn’t join a PDF or other armed group,” a woman told DVB, referring to her son who was killed.
Fighting had broken out near the village on Tuesday morning when PDF forces detonated explosives as a military convoy was passing through the area. Following the explosions, soldiers entered the nearest village, which happened to be Done Taw, and opened fire.
The military has not publicly responded to the killings and could not be reached for comment.
Myanmar’s military is infamous for its ultra-violent acts and is regularly implicated in atrocities committed against civilians. In 2018, Reuters journalists reported that 10 unarmed Rohingya men were shot, hacked to death and then buried in a mass grave in what has come to be known as the Inn Din massacre.
On Sunday, disturbing video footage captured a military vehicle plowing into peaceful protesters marching in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city. The attack occurred ahead of Aung San Suu Kyi’s politically motivated trial on Monday, where she was sentenced to four years in prison—later reduced to two—for incitement.
A pair of vaquitas swim off the coast of San Felipe in October 2008. (photo: Paul Olson)
A tiny porpoise called the vaquita has polarized a Mexican fishing town. The species is fighting for its life.
One morning in November, I set out to sea in a small boat near San Felipe with three members of a community that conservationists have accused of killing vaquitas: shrimp fishermen. Dressed in white rubber boots and colorful waders, the men had agreed to show me what it’s like to fish using gillnets, a kind of net that often unintentionally catches marine animals other than shrimp.
The captain, a short man in his 60s with a thick gray mustache, motored us out as the sun was rising. Big-bellied pelicans cruised beside us. I spent the next 10 hours watching the crew fish with long walls of net that hang from buoys like sheets in the ocean. Gillnets are designed to trap marine creatures that swim or drift into them, especially if their bodies are roughly the same width as the openings in the net — in this case, about the size of a credit card.
That morning, the fishermen told me that in their experience, shrimp gillnets don’t ensnare vaquitas. The nets break easily, one of them said, while ripping through the thin strands of green nylon with his hand. If a vaquita gets stuck, it can tear its way out, he added. (The man asked me not to share his name so he could speak freely without fear of reprisal from other fishers or conservationists.)
But some research, carried out by US and Mexican institutions, shows that shrimp gillnets are among the kinds of gillnets that imperil vaquitas. The porpoises, which are about half the size of a bottlenose dolphin, get tangled in the mesh and eventually drown — a cruel irony for an animal that lives underwater.
The fishermen’s nets didn’t snag any vaquitas, though they did bring in plenty of other species they didn’t mean to catch: small guitarfish, scorpionfish, dozens of crabs, and a stingray the size of a pillow. The ray was alive when the men tossed it back to sea, though it had several cuts on the tips of its fins. The fishermen caught hundreds of shrimp, too, some of which we ate after boiling them in seawater using a small propane stove they brought on board. (They were delicious.)
To conservationists, the way to save the vaquitas is simple: eliminate the use of gillnets like these. But if there’s one lesson that vaquitas can teach us, it’s that transforming a way of life of even a small community isn’t simple at all.
Scientists, environmentalists, and government officials eager to save the vaquita have tried many times to rid the Upper Gulf of gillnets, and have even banned them outright in some areas. Not only have those efforts failed, they’ve also angered local fishers, who make up a large portion of San Felipe’s 17,000 or so residents. Tensions rose to a boiling point early this year after a ship operated by the environmental organization Sea Shepherd Conservation Society tried to remove a fishing boat’s gillnet, provoking a conflict. The Sea Shepherd ship and a fishing boat collided, resulting in the death of a fisherman.
The tension was still palpable in November when another skiff approached our boat. One of the fishermen looked at me and photographer Luis Antonio Rojas and yelled from the other boat: “Throw them overboard. They want to stop us from fishing.”
I was clearly an outsider — was it the blotches of sunscreen? — and local fishers often say that outsiders want to interfere with a whole community’s livelihood to try to save the few vaquitas that are left. Their frustration probably isn’t helped by the fact that the vaquita may be too far gone to come back from the brink of extinction now.
“We fishermen are also going extinct,” said Mario Humberto Izquierdo Hernandez, a fisherman in his late 60s whom I met at the port in San Felipe. He’s been fishing his whole life and has never seen a vaquita.
Talking to the fishermen, I couldn’t help but feel that no one wins in this conflict between fishing and conservation: It pits two groups who both love the ocean against each other. And how is anyone supposed to save a local species without the support of the local community?
But there’s something that could be more devastating than the extinction of the vaquita: the risk that thousands of other threatened species worldwide that share habitat with people will die off in the midst of these same kinds of conflicts. Ultimately, that’s what brought me here, to figure out what we can learn — and what we can even gain — when we lose the vaquita.
InIn mid-October, a team of scientists from Mexico and the US piled onto two large ships off the coast of Baja California, near San Felipe, and motored out to sea. Their goal was to survey the last remaining vaquitas. The boats weaved through a constellation of fishing skiffs to a nearby patch of ocean not far from land.
Each ship carried a handful of skilled wildlife spotters, who would take one-hour turns scanning the water. From sunrise to sunset, pairs of spotters peered out to sea with plus-size mounted binoculars called “big eyes.” A recorder would stand right behind them, ready to carefully jot down any sightings of the porpoise.
Even with the right equipment, these animals are hard to spot. Vaquitas are tiny — about five feet long — and shy compared to other marine animals. They don’t like ships, and tend to pop up once and then disappear. Making it harder, the Upper Gulf can be choppy and murky, not a clear Caribbean blue. Their small fins blend in and you often can’t see more than a few feet or so below the surface.
Most challenging of all is that vaquitas are so incredibly rare. Their numbers have declined by 99 percent in the past decade, research shows. During the last major survey, in 2019, researchers saw an estimated 10 animals (though that number doesn’t represent the entire population, because the scientists searched a limited area). That may be why half a dozen or so older fishermen told me that they have never once seen a vaquita, even though they’ve spent most of their lives on the water in the porpoise’s habitat.
Fishing is the main reason for this sharp decline. But there’s one catch in particular that’s especially problematic: the totoaba, a greenish-gray drum fish.
Like the vaquita, the fish is endemic to the gulf and threatened with extinction. One of its organs known as the swim bladder — part of the body that helps it control buoyancy — is valuable on the black market. Poachers catch the fish in gillnets and remove their swim bladders, which Mexican cartels smuggle into China. Some people consider totoaba swim bladder a delicacy with medicinal properties, and just a gram of it can go for up to $46 US, according to a 2018 report. (For reference, the price of gold is currently around $57 per gram.)
Why does this matter for vaquitas? Fishers catch totoaba using gillnets made with thick nylon strands that have particularly large openings (the fish can grow to more than six feet long). When vaquitas get stuck, it’s hard for them to escape. Though most kinds of gillnets can ensnare vaquitas, totoaba nets pose the greatest threat to the porpoise, scientists say.
Just after the vaquita survey concluded, I drove to a port on the southern edge of San Felipe to meet a scientist who helped lead it, Barbara Taylor. I walked down a long, narrow ramp onto a dock where the air smelled especially fishy. Before me was one of the survey ships, the Narval, a large gray vessel with a vaquita model on its deck.
Taylor, a marine scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), met me on the ship’s upper deck, wearing a vaquita bracelet, vaquita earrings, and a shirt that said: “May the vaquita always swim here!”
Over the shrill calls of seagulls, I asked Taylor the big question: Had they found any?
“It’s lonely out there,” said Taylor, 67, who’s been studying vaquitas since the ’90s and has participated in seven other similar surveys. “It’s one of those things that those of us who work on the vaquita lose sleep about,” she added. “Are we going to come out here and see none?”
Thankfully, not this time. There were eight vaquita sightings across the two ships, and each sighting typically includes one to three animals, according to Jonathan White, an author who was on the ship and helped fund the expedition. Those sightings also included calves, said White, who reviewed unpublished findings of the survey. White stressed that survey estimates don’t represent the total number of vaquitas in the Gulf, and are only an estimate of how many individuals the scientists saw during the survey.
The first sighting on the Narval was close to sunset on the first day of the trip, said Ernesto Vázquez Morquecho, one of the official spotters. He saw the animal’s fin and back breach the surface — “just enough to describe it as a vaquita,” he told me that morning. “It was really, really hopeful.”
It’s hard to imagine that spotting perhaps a dozen individuals of any species is hopeful. In fact, many scientists would likely consider a population of that size “functionally extinct,” meaning the animal is no longer fulfilling a function in the ecosystem — in this case, controlling the populations of small fish and other critters vaquitas prey on. But for Vázquez Morquecho, Taylor, and the other scientists, it’s still a good sign — and useful for conservation.
“It’s important to know that the vaquitas are still out there and that it is worth trying to give those last individuals a break,” Taylor said. The other good news, she added, is that vaquitas appear to be reproducing as fast as they can. “You shouldn’t write them off,” she said. Sometimes, against the odds, nature can recover when it’s given a chance.
SanSan Felipe is a desert town about two and a half hours south of the US border, located on a stretch of the Baja coast where dust devils rise from miles of silty sand. Many cultures mesh and collide here: You can see retirees from Ohio eating dinner next to marine biologists not far from a strip club, while a few hundred feet away, fishermen haul up their catch from the beach. At least on the surface, San Felipe is not a wealthy town; I saw no mansions or flashy cars.
A loose coalition of scientists, local and global conservation groups, Mexican officials, and even a celebrity or two has been trying to give vaquitas a chance for decades now. The Mexican government has enacted various bans on gillnet fishing in large parts of the Upper Gulf. It also established a handful of protected areas, including the Zero Tolerance Area, an 87-square-mile zone about 30 minutes off the coast of San Felipe where fishing is technically prohibited altogether.
But this name is a misnomer since local fishers don’t usually follow these rules — in part because of a lack of enforcement. While only some fishers catch totoaba, nearly all of them use gillnets and fish in the Zero Tolerance Area. During the surveys in 2019 and this year, Taylor saw “no evidence of enforcement,” she told me. In fact, she said, the survey team had trouble even looking for vaquitas in the Zero Tolerance Area because there were so many fishing skiffs. (Mexican government officials did not respond to a request for comment.)
Most scientists and fishers I spoke to, and even some of the very people tasked with enforcing the law, agreed that there’s barely any enforcement. Several marines stationed aboard a naval ship near the Narval told me they patrol the Zero Tolerance Area every day, but it’s hard to control fishing because there are so many boats coming in and out. (The officers spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press.) They also acknowledged that fishers face pressure to earn money for their families.
American conservation groups, working alongside the Mexican government, have tried more drastic measures to save vaquitas. In the fall of 2017, a program called VaquitaCPR, largely staffed by US scientists, captured two vaquitas that they had planned to take into human care until gillnets could be removed from their habitat. The first animal, a young female, showed signs of extreme stress after it was captured. Fearing the worst, the scientists released it back into the ocean. It disappeared. The second, an adult female, was similarly distressed and had a heart attack when the team released it into the water. It died shortly after. Unlike some other rare species like the tiger or red panda, vaquitas have not survived in captivity.
Meanwhile, Sea Shepherd — which was involved in the survey — began sending out a ship to cut and remove fishers’ illegal gillnets, also with the support of the Mexican government. In 2019, a National Geographic documentary produced in part by Leonardo DiCaprio, Sea of Shadows, featured the organization. Following the deadly collision this year, Sea Shepherd claimed that fishers attacked its ship before ramming into it. The family of the deceased fisherman claimed that Sea Shepherd ran into his skiff, according to BBC News.
Captain Peter Hammarstedt, Sea Shepherd’s director of campaigns, told Vox that the organization has for years “supported local fishing communities and the Mexican government to remove illegal fishing gear” from a protected area called the Vaquita Refuge. “Without these net removal operations, the vaquita would likely already be extinct,” Hammarstedt said. National Geographic did not respond to a request for comment.
An us-versus-them mentality now hangs over the two camps, said Valeria Towns, a former government official in Mexico’s environmental ministry and the program coordinator at Museo de la Ballena, a Mexican environmental organization. (The organization owns the Narval ship, which also removes illegal gillnets in vaquita habitat, she said.) Documentaries like Sea of Shadows can make things worse, Towns said, because they make fishermen look like villains. “It polarized the complex social issue in the area,” she said of the documentary. The problem is that now fishers in San Felipe, she added, “feel like the vaquita is their worst enemy.”
After meeting Taylor on the Narval, I drove south down the coast to a beach about 45 minutes from San Felipe. I was there to witness a different approach to vaquita conservation — fishing with a sustainable net that catches shrimp without killing porpoises.
Under an awning a few hundred feet from the ocean, I met a fisherman who builds eco-friendly nets. He’s a member of a local coalition of sustainable fishers, called Pesca ABC, but he fishes outside of town because he’s concerned about conflicts with other San Felipe fishers. He also asked me not to share his name.
“Ninety-eight percent of fishermen don’t know how to use these different nets,” the fisherman, a middle-aged man wearing a loose polo shirt, told me. If you don’t have the proper training to use them, they capture less, he adds. “That’s why they don’t like them,” he said. “That’s why they think the other nets are better.”
We sat on stools near the beach as the light faded, and he used his hands to demonstrate how the net works. Unlike gillnets, which hang in the water largely unattended, this net drags behind a boat, said the man, who’s been fishing for almost 40 years. The eco-friendly part is a metal grate inside the net, called an excluder. When large animals enter, they run into the grate and exit through a hole nearby, whereas the shrimp pass through and get caught. “There’s no bycatch,” he said, meaning that fishers using these nets rarely catch other species by mistake. (Some fishers who use gillnets dispute that claim.)
The problem is that the fishing community, on the whole, believes these nets capture less, according to Daniel Arellano Millán, Pesca ABC’s field coordinator in San Felipe, who joined us on the beach. Pesca ABC is trying to collect data that shows eco-friendly nets can be profitable, Arellano Millán said.
As we were finishing up our conversation, another fisherman approached in the darkness, barefoot, carrying a white bucket splashed with brown mud. He sat beside me and shined a flashlight inside. A large triggerfish lay on a pile of squirming tentacles. Octopuses. “Should I put one on your back?” the man said, laughing, as he pulled them out of the bucket to count.
The ocean here is full of life, from sea turtles to dolphins to these octopuses. That’s what draws fishers here in the first place, and it’s what conservationists want to protect. Both of these communities care about this stretch of coastline because of its staggering abundance — but they have very different visions for what should be done with it.
FishersFishers have more interest than anyone in saving the vaquita, according to Lorenzo GarcÃa Carrillo, who heads up the largest federation of fishers in San Felipe. I met GarcÃa Carrillo, 48, at his office, a bright yellow building near the main beach in town. “We live from the resources in the sea,” he said.
While scientists come to San Felipe with a salary from organizations and governments, he said, fishers here get their salary from selling seafood. He estimates they make anywhere from $23,000 to $47,000 a year, on average. “This is a fisherman’s town,” and there aren’t many other industries, added Izquierdo Hernandez, the fisherman I met at the port. A healthy sea is good for vaquitas, but it’s also good for those whose livelihoods depend on it.
Fishers have another reason to care: “If the vaquita goes extinct, there’s going to be punishment,” said GarcÃa Carrillo, who worries that the government or conservation organizations may take action against fishers. “It would be catastrophic.”
So why do fishers continue to use gillnets? GarcÃa Carrillo claims that sustainable nets like the one we saw capture far fewer shrimp — not even enough to recoup the cost of gasoline. Like the shrimp fishermen who took me out to sea, he also doesn’t believe that gillnets actually kill vaquitas. Scientists strongly disagree with that claim. “The claim that vaquitas don’t die in those nets is known to be false,” Taylor, the NOAA scientist, said of shrimp gillnets.
A number of existing solutions might help vaquitas, from sustainable nets to steering fishing boats clear of the Zero Tolerance Area. The challenge is that when scientists push for these changes, they don’t get through to most fishers. Part of the barrier is surely cost — gillnets require less gasoline to operate than sustainable nets and they can capture hundreds of pounds of shrimp per day. But it’s clear that politics and culture play a role, too.
The scientists I spoke to acknowledged that gillnetting is a way of life for much of San Felipe’s fishing community. There’s a culture of competition that rewards catching more fish, and even fishing the endangered totoaba — becoming what’s known locally as a totoabero — looks appealing if it comes with a hefty paycheck, Towns, the former government official, said.
There’s also not much of an incentive to catch fish sustainably. I noticed that there’s no market for vaquita-friendly shrimp, for example, and there’s no effective regulation of gillnets. So fishers are actually making “the economically sane choice” by continuing to use them, Taylor said.
“As long as I’ve been here, there really has never been any rewards for the people who do it right and lots of rewards for people who do it wrong,” Taylor continued. “I don’t blame them for not having faith that that’s going to change.”
OnOn my last day in San Felipe, I hired a fisherman to take me out to the Zero Tolerance Area. I wanted to test my luck with vaquita spotting. Have you ever looked for a critically endangered species? It’s not easy or particularly fun. Staring out at the sea, I saw about 10 fishing boats, plenty of pelicans, and an empty Doritos bag. No porpoises.
I felt a sense of loss as my mind wandered. We’re watching an extinction happen in slow motion, and time, money, laws, and research haven’t been enough to stop it. Across the spectrum of opinion — which includes the conservationists, the fishers, and those in both camps — most people are unhappy with the process.
While some fishers, especially those that regularly catch totoaba, have profited handsomely, the majority of people here fish to get by. They say that all the efforts to save the vaquita have only made their lives harder — the San Felipe fishing community left as the bycatch of the net of restrictions conservationists have advocated for.
Conservationists around the world can learn lessons from efforts to save vaquitas, Towns told me. If the vaquita goes extinct, she said, “we should write a book about all the things you shouldn’t do if you want to preserve a species.”
Over the past three decades, much of the money spent on vaquita conservation — tens of millions of dollars — has gone toward valuable science-based efforts like surveys. But ultimately, the vaquita faces a problem rooted in complex social dynamics. “Too many scientists are influencing the policies,” Towns said. To solve the problem from the root, she said, local people must be involved in managing their own resources.
Taylor, for her part, wishes there was more of an effort, early on, to develop an “ethic for sustainability” among the fishing community. “I think that the conservation world right now is really seeing how important it is to get the communities involved at a very early stage,” she said. If she could turn back the clock, she would have also encouraged scientists to capture vaquitas when there were more of them — and thus more room for error. Captive vaquitas could have preserved a reservoir of healthy animals that could have been reintroduced later on.
“You have to fight for the best and prepare for the worst,” she said. “We did not prepare for the worst.”
On the day that the shrimp fishermen took me out on the ocean, I saw a lot of life and death. A dolphin surfaced about 100 feet from the boat, and pelicans fought with each other over bycatch. The fishermen removed dying fish and shrimp from the net; crabs wielded their pincers in self-defense as they tried to scurry away. I felt amazement and sadness at the same time. I understood that I could mourn the same creatures that inspire joy and wonder and keep a community alive. It’s that joy that reminds us of what’s worth saving.
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