Trapped in the Tide of Organized Crime | Hakai Magazine
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Marcos Ruiz is lying face down in the mud, legs splayed and one arm sunk up to his shoulder in a narrow hole. When he finally grabs the crab burrowing in the hole, he pushes himself out with his other arm and sits back on his heels to examine his prize. The red mangrove crab is male and looks to be the right size, longer than 7.5 centimeters, so he tucks it into his long sweater, which has been folded up and fastened with a cord to create a pouch squirming with live crabs. Then he sloshes over to the next hole and reaches in.
From behind a line of leggy, verdant mangrove trees, his friend and colleague Pablo Abelardo Yepes Villon eggs him on. “Your arms are too short, Marcos!” he yells. Ruiz laughs, trying to hold his face out of a puddle with one arm still in the hole.
This easy camaraderie is emblematic of life in Ecuador’s crabbing collectives—traditional communities of cangrejeros, or crabbers, who catch and sell crustaceans while protecting the mangrove ecosystems in which those crabs live. Though the practice dates back generations, only in the past 25 years have Ecuador’s 3,300 or so cangrejeros begun organizing into formal groups. Today, some 60 collectives dot the 2,200-kilometer-long coast. Their members begin each day in much the same way as their parents or grandparents did—leaving their homes before dawn, hitching rides to the port, and boating down rivers to the mangroves where they spend the morning traipsing through watery forests before exhaustion and heat force them back to dry land. In these early hours, the only sounds are the chatter of parrots and parakeets and the workers’ own voices.
