Scant coverage helps turtles’ cause

Talli Nauman writes…

Campaign poster

Maybe next time protectors of the endangered sea turtles could hire a virile, scantily clothed man to advertise their cause, since putting a female Playboy model on their banners and posters has kicked up such controversy this time.

But the advertisers have already verified that two wrongs don’t make a right.

Their pandering a sex symbol to combat myths of sexuality has drawn criticism from the sex equality camp and caused coastal environmental authorities in Guerrero, who usually are pretty hip to the bikini billboards of Acapulco, to plead for the state to be omitted from the target audience list.

The campaign to vanquish the custom of eating sea turtle eggs as aphrodisiacs is being spearheaded by Argentine model Dorismar, who has been teamed up with members of the mega-popular norteño group Los Tigres del Norte by a whole menagerie of activist organisations.

Mexico’s National Women’s Institute says it’s degrading and sexist to attack the issue using sex appeal as the weapon. But the extraordinarily lovely “Dorita,” as she is fondly nicknamed, has relatively few qualms about heralding the human body as an object, of course, since that’s how she makes what appears to be a very honest living.

For its part, Los Tigres del Norte has announced that members do not eat turtle eggs – and their ratings have not diminished. Their volunteers distributed turtle protection information, postcards and stickers during their recent tour that ended in June, reaching thousands of fans in some of the centres of population where the custom is most prevalent - Mexico City, Ciudad Obregón, Hermosillo, Tijuana and Mexicali.

The groups Wildcoast, Pronatura Noroeste, Fondo Educación Ambiental, Colectivo Creativo, Selva Negra, Grupo de los Cien, and Fondo de Conservación del Golfo de California raised billboards and other ads during the Roman Catholic fasting period and observation of Lent in February and March, when consumption of sea turtle meat typically soars due to the mistaken belief that it is fish rather than red meat.

In their next step this turtle nesting season, the activists are putting up the Dorismar ads beginning in September on billboards near Mexico City and nesting states including Jalisco, Michoacan, and Guerrero.

The ads urge people to report illegal trade in the species to the Federal Attorney General’s Office for Environmental Protection (Profepa).

Outside of Mexico, media coverage of the gal with scanty coverage in the publicity already has been generous, drawing attention to the messages: “My man doesn’t need turtle eggs” and “Sea turtle eggs DO NOT increase sexual potency!”

Luis Fueyo, head of Profepa coastal enforcement, said the federal agency will participate and distribute the posters in its offices nationwide. So the controversy has worked in favour of the conservationists – and therefore hopefully in favour of the 200-million-year-old species.

Mexican beaches are nesting habitats for seven of the world’s eight sea turtle species, and all of them are in danger of extinction.

Since Mexico banned hunting, sale and consumption of sea turtles and by-products in 1990, manifold efforts have helped coastal residents formerly in the turtle trade to make their livings protecting the critters and in other lines of work.

So I thought the days of intensive commercialisation were over. But marine conservationists now say the ban has created a flourishing black market; and the interest in sucking raw turtle eggs to increase male sexual prowess has grown in recent years.

As if to punctuate this statement, 80 sea turtles were bludgeoned and butchered alive in one single massacre this August on the Guerrero coast. As many as 100 eggs can be removed from a dead female. On another stretch of Guerrero’s coast near Petatlán, at least 100,000 eggs have disappeared this nesting season.

Now that campaigners have answered to the feminist challenge about using a woman’s body to advertise the cause, they are bound to face the environmentalist challenge that billboards create visual pollution.

If only the message can filter down to the right people in the meantime.

Talli Nauman is a founder and co-director of Journalism to Raise Environmental Awareness, a project initiated with support from the MacArthur Foundation. 

This article originally appeared in The Herald Mexico – El Universal © 2005; Republished with permission.

Filed in: Mexican Life & Society