NARANJAL, ECUADOR – 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.
Lately, though, the tranquility of this routine has been shattered. Ruiz has been a cangrejero for more than 20 years, and in that time, he and his fellow crabbers have overcome pirates, unforgiving weather, and an aggressive shrimp farming industry. Now, organized crime and drug trafficking threaten to undo those gains. In addition to the day’s catch, Ruiz must also consider the armed group charging his collective a monthly extortion fee, the strain of safely getting to the mangroves and home again, and plummeting sales related to the violence that has largely taken over Ecuador’s coast. Can the cangrejeros’ unity and connection to place help them withstand such pressures?
Also re-published on Longreads
Kimberley Michelle Brown 