Forty-Three Pups Went Back Into the Water. The Law Had Nothing to Do With It.

A decree banned shark fishing across Colombia in 2021 and changed almost nothing on the Wayuu coast. A project that hands fishers a notebook changed seventeen boats out of twenty.

In May 2026, fishers working the shallows of Bahía Hondita, on the desert coast at the very top of South America, hauled in a large female tiger shark. When they opened her they found she was pregnant. Juan Manuel Uriana, thirty-three, who leads the local fishers' association, did something his father would not have done: he got the pups out alive and put all forty-three of them back in the water.

He had been taught how. That is the entire story, and it is smaller and stranger than the version a conservation press release would tell.

A coast where protein is not a metaphor

Punta Gallinas is about fifty families of Wayuu, living where the Colombian department of La Guajira runs out of land. Goats, salt, wind, and fish. The nearest towns with a market, Uribia and Riohacha, are hours of sand away.

La Guajira holds roughly seven per cent of Colombia's population and accounts for more than a fifth of the country's deaths from child malnutrition. A 2026 study followed 398 children across twenty-seven Wayuu communities in nearby Manaure and found some form of malnutrition in ninety-two per cent of them, most of it chronic stunting rather than sudden acute hunger. Protein is not an abstraction on this coast. Shark meat has been part of it for as long as anyone can remember.

What Bogotá decided, twice

In March 2021 the government of Iván Duque signed Decree 281. It reclassified sharks, rays and chimaeras: they stopped being a fishery resource and became a hydrobiological one. In practice the wording removed them from the category of things a person may legally catch or sell, anywhere in Colombia, for any reason.

Written down, it is a good law. Colombian Caribbean waters hold around ninety shark and ray species by the count of Camilo García, a marine biology professor at the National University of Colombia, and the ones off La Guajira are among the least studied in the country. Several are in trouble — the blacknose is endangered, the smalleye hammerhead critically so.

Read from a house in Punta Gallinas, the same decree said that a food already on the table was now contraband. Three years later the Petro government issued Resolution 0119, on 24 January 2024, decriminalising incidental catch for eleven shark and four ray species while keeping targeted fishing banned. Agriculture minister Jhenifer Mojica put the reversal plainly: the state cannot criminalise coastal communities, and food sovereignty is not negotiable. The conservationist Sandra Bessudo called the new rule full of gaps and said it protected nothing at all. Both of them had a point. And out in the water neither version of the decree changed much, because nobody is standing on that beach checking whether the shark in the boat arrived by accident.

The thing that did change

Wilfrido Arends, forty-six, known to everyone as Caracas, fishes out of Punta Gallinas. With the Colombian biologist Felipe González he set up Proyecto Puyuii, which does something the decree never attempted: it asks the fishers to write down what they catch — species, size, sex, where and when.

Diego Cardeñosa, a marine biologist at Florida International University, trains them on identification and on getting an animal back over the side alive. The project pushes larger-mesh nets, which let the small ones through, and argues against longlines. Uriana knew how to open a pregnant female and save the litter because somebody had shown him, recently, in his own language, on his own beach.

By the project's own count, seventeen of the roughly twenty boats working out of Punta Gallinas have stopped fishing for sharks on purpose. Alexi López, fifty-six, who used to hunt them, now guides tourists. Luzmila Arends, Wilfrido's sister, runs a guesthouse in the village.

There is a literature behind this pattern. In 2021 Neil Dawson and sixteen colleagues published a systematic review in Ecology and Society covering 169 studies of conservation projects, mostly in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Where local people held real influence over the decisions, the projects delivered good environmental and good social outcomes in 56 per cent of cases. Where management sat with an external body, the figure was 16 per cent. The review is a finding about who is in the room when a rule gets written, and how much that predicts whether the rule survives contact with the people it governs.

What the good news costs

A buyer in Riohacha or Uribia still pays around fifty thousand Colombian pesos a kilo for fins, roughly fifteen dollars, cash, no questions. No decree signed in Bogotá has moved that number.

Then there is what happened to the alternative. Goats are the other protein here, and the drought of 2025 killed most of them; Luzmila lost 247 of her 300 animals. The substitute for shark meat died in the same season that the case against shark meat got stronger. Tourism, the other way out, is seasonal and thin, and it depends on visitors reaching one of the least accessible corners of the country.

Felipe González states the project's wager without decoration: if the fisher earns more showing the animal than killing it, there is the solution. Nobody has collected on that bet yet. And seventeen boats out of twenty is a number the project counted itself, in a place with no independent fisheries observer for a hundred kilometres in any direction. Mongabay's Euan Wallace, who reported the story from Punta Gallinas in August, records the harder version too: without research, even subsistence hunting can quietly push a population past the point it recovers from.

"You feel like your programming has been changed," Arends says. "From hunter to protector."

The decree ordered exactly that outcome in 2021 and did not get it. A project with a notebook and a wider net got it in four years, on the same beach, from the same men. Forty-three tiger shark pups went back into the water at Bahía Hondita because one of those men had been taught something and decided to use it.

Sources

• Euan Wallace, "Indigenous fishers rethink shark hunting & protect species on Colombia's coast", Mongabay, 20 August 2026 — https://news.mongabay.com/2026/08/indigenous-fishers-rethink-shark-hunting-protect-species-on-colombias-coast/
• Decreto 281 de 2021, Gestor Normativo, Función Pública (Colombia) — https://www.funcionpublica.gov.co/eva/gestornormativo/norma.php?i=160550
• "Pescadores que 'capturen' un tiburón no serán criminalizados: ¿qué cambió con la nueva norma?", El Colombiano, 14 February 2024 (Resolución 0119 de 2024) — https://www.elcolombiano.com/colombia/como-cambio-la-norma-de-pesca-de-tiburones-y-rayas-en-colombia-BF23734454
• Dawson, N. M. et al., "The role of Indigenous peoples and local communities in effective and equitable conservation", Ecology and Society 26(3):19, 2021 — https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol26/iss3/art19/
• "Nutritional Follow-Up in Indigenous Children Under Five Years in Colombia", Children, 2026 — https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13406853/
• ICSF, "On Colombia's food-insecure desert coast, how Indigenous fishers are responding to shark hunting ban" — https://icsf.net/newss/on-colombias-food-insecure-desert-coast-how-indigenous-fishers-are-responding-to-shark-hunting-ban/