A new episode of the France 5 documentary series leads us on the trail of dangerous traffickers involved in the gradual disappearance of a species of fish.
The sea and its fauna have aroused all sorts of desires for decades, even causing a real slaughter in certain species. This is the case of the totoaba, a fish that has been protected since the 1970s. It lives in the Sea of Cortez – which the oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau called “the aquarium of the world” –, between Baja California and Mexico. The swim bladder of this species, with supposed aphrodisiac properties, is used in traditional Chinese medicine.
Considered a luxury product, a symbol of wealth, it was trading in 2022 between 50,000 and 100,000 dollars per kilo in Asia. These maddening prices attract traffickers, who illegally and excessively fish this fish, nicknamed “the cocaine of the seas“. The documentary Planet Killers: the godfather of the oceans* returns to the traffic in totoaba, responsible, in spite of itself, for extraordinary criminality since it favored the alliance of the Chinese mafia and the Mexican cartels.
A fearsome association of criminals
“Illegal fishing represents 23 billion euros each year”, reveals in the documentary Luis Tortas, an Interpol criminal intelligence officer, who works on environmental crimes. A trade so lucrative that Mexican traffickers, more experienced in drug trafficking, have become poachers of the seas under the rule of Asian criminals.
“The Chinese mafia, to sum up, is the financial arm. They are the ones who buy, they are the ones who recruit. In reality, they are the ones who grease the gun with which we are going to shoot you“, vsWe see in the film an ex-chief of the Mexican police who miraculously escaped an assassination, while he was on the trail of Oscar Parra, one of the barons of this “cartel of the sea”, imprisoned since. “When I started to investigate the totoaba (…) I discovered a unique situation in the world, reveals Mark Davis, former FBI agent. Some speak of a two-headed monster when referring to totoaba trafficking. Because it’s a marriage between Mexican cartels and Chinese organized crime.”
Chinese medicine, the mainstay of trafficking
This union is devastating in a Mexico already plagued by drug trafficking, and it could only end with the probable disappearance of the species. The needs of the Chinese pharmacopoeia are such that they are responsible for the extinction of many animals other than these fish, in various regions of the world. Traditional Chinese medicine has an industrial weight of more than $60 billion a year, according to the World Health Organization, and its international development represents a major focus of the Chinese government’s policy.
“In this case, we quickly discovered that all the illegal totoaba business is in fact in the hands of Chinese networks run by Chinese businessmen”explains Andrea Crosta, founder of Earth League International, an organization that fights for the protection of the environment. “They live in Mexico and they are the bosses. (…) Without the Chinese traffickers in Mexico, there would be no totoaba trafficking.” At the head of this colossal illicit trade, the Chinese godfather Wu Junchang, wanted for years by Interpol.
* The documentary “Planet Killers: the godfather of the oceans”, directed by Hugo Van Offel and Martin Boudot, is broadcast on Monday April 3 on France 5 and on france.tv.