May 15, 2017 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Carlos Rafael pled guilty to running a massive criminal enterprise that stole from honest fishermen and undermined the fisheries as a whole. One of his quotes offers a revealing insight into his perspective:
“This is America; anything can happen, with money behind it.”
Let’s put his money to work fixing the fishery he badly damaged.
Carlos Rafael should be banned from commercial fishing forever. The fish quota he owns should be redistributed to all the fishermen he harmed. That’s what existing regulations mandate, that’s what many in the industry believe, and we agree.
But we can demand and expect more. Honest fishermen have not been playing on a level field with the likes of Carlos. We need to make sure they aren’t put in that position again.
To do that, we must invest some of his illegal gains in fishing’s future by improving dockside monitoring, expanding electronic monitoring and increasing fishermen-scientist collaborations to get better fish counts.
We can transform this moment into an opportunity to create the oversight and infrastructure necessary to make honest, long-term success possible for our iconic fishery.
This can happen, and Carlos Rafael’s money should be behind it.
This letter originally appeared on SeafoodNews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.