Panamanian authorities seized six longliner vessels on Jan. 20 for fishing illegally in protected waters. They also opened an investigation into an additional 10 vessels that surveillance data showed had apparently been fishing in the area but left by the time authorities arrived.

The seizures took place in the Cordillera de Coiba, a marine protected area that’s part of the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor, which connects several MPAs in four countries. It was the largest illegal fishing bust in the history of Panama’s MPAs, according to a government press release.

“This was big news, and it came as a surprise for everyone,” Annissamyd Del Cid, the Panama national coordinator at WildAid, a San Fransisco-based NGO, told Mongabay. The group has worked in the Eastern Tropical Pacific since 2010, including helping to bolster authorities’ monitoring capacities, and works with the Panamanian government to help protect the Cordillera de Coiba.

The fishing vessels, whose activity is still under investigation, were Panamanian-flagged, meaning they were registered in the country. But no identifying information has been released publicly, so the nationality of the owners isn’t clear. Panama serves as a major “flag of convenience” state, used by vessel owners around the world, often to avoid stricter regulations elsewhere.

Panamanian authorities detected the first entry into the MPA on Jan. 10. In the days that followed, three state agencies — the National Aeronaval Service (SENAN), the Aquatic Resources Authority of Panama (ARAP), and the Ministry of Environment — used aerial and satellite-based surveillance to track the vessels. The authorities issued warnings for the vessels to leave, but these went unheeded, as such warnings had not been followed by enforcement action in the past, according to WildAid experts.

Along the way, the environment ministry requested and received support from the help desk of the Joint Analytical Cell (JAC), a project started in 2022 and co-managed by a group of fisheries monitoring nonprofits that’s designed to help underresourced countries enforce maritime rules. The JAC team used Skylight, an AI-powered fisheries intelligence platform, to find 16 vessels in the Cordillera de Coiba MPA in one large-scale image taken on Jan. 17. The Skylight system, which WildAid helped introduce to Panamanian authorities, triggers a satellite to take a high-resolution image of a vessel or an area.

The JAC work confirmed the vessels’ presence in the MPA and showed that some of the vessels had gone “dark” — that is, they had turned off their automatic identification system trackers, which are required under international law. Panama’s aerial surveillance had also shown that some of the vessels had their vessel monitoring system trackers turned off, a possible violation of Panamanian regulations.

The surveillance work led authorities to board and seize six of the vessels on Jan. 20 and bring them to port in Chiriquí, Panama, in the days that followed.

The Cordillera de Coiba was established in 2015 and greatly expanded in 2021, with its management plan finalized in 2022. It spans 67,742 square kilometers (26,155 square miles) and contains a series of richly biodiverse underwater mountains called seamounts. Like other MPAs in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor — which are located near Cocos Island in Costa Rica, Gorgona and Malpelo islands in Colombia, and the Galápagos Islands in Ecuador — it contains a variety of shark, whale and sea turtle species, some of which are critically endangered.

The longliners under investigation were targeting yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares), according to WildAid staff members, based on information they were given.

The seizure was championed by Juan Carlos Navarro, Panama’s environment minister, according to John Baker, WildAid’s president. Navarro, a former mayor of Panama City, is a “decorated environmental leader” who spearheaded the development of national parks in the country, Baker said.

Ana Lorena López, a staff member at the Ministry of Environment, spoke to Mongabay on March 18 but couldn’t offer much information beyond what had been shared in the government press release from January, saying the investigation into the incident is ongoing. The ministry didn’t respond to follow-up questions about the fate of the vessels and their crew since Jan. 20.

The seizure showed the value of JAC’s help desk, Jordan Steward, Skylight’s communications manager, told Mongabay. “This is working,” he said. He described the help desk as “like Interpol” but “made up of NGOs,” and said the NGOs’ aim is to have it serve more countries.

Banner image: Fishing vessel. Image courtesy of Nicolas Job / Ocean Image Bank. 

Panama: A ‘flag of convenience’ for illegal fishing and lack of control at sea

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