April 29, 2025 — One morning in early April 2024, Elías Naal Hernández set out with his fishing net to try his luck in the waters of Isla Aguada, off the coast of southeastern Mexico. The town sits between the Gulf of Mexico and the Laguna de Términos, the country’s largest coastal lagoon. Until he arrived, the fisherman could not begin to imagine the devastating scene he would face that morning at the sea.
“It was an enormous slick: miles and miles of oil. We would catch it in water buckets and they would fill up because of how much there was,” said Hernández. The only thing he caught that day — by the bucketful — was oil.
The spill was also detected via satellite imagery by scientists who have spent years studying oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. Their satellite images show evidence of potential oil slicks beginning March 7, 2024. The oil slicks appeared to originate near infrastructure owned by Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), a Mexican state-owned company responsible for extracting oil from the Gulf of Mexico. Pemex provides 80% of the nation’s crude oil.
Although Pemex was legally required to report the oil spill, the company did not do so. Naal Hernández said that when he went public with the spill, Pemex downplayed the event, arguing that it was a natural release of oil. This response is heard all too often by fishers who report spills, which, according to Naal Hernández, do not have the characteristics of a natural event.
When Naal Hernández started fishing 38 years ago, it was typical for sierra fish, wahoo (Acanthocybium solandri), blackspot seabream (Pagellus bogaraveo), hake, red snapper (Lutjanus campechanus), tuna, tilapia and catfish to swim very close to the coast. Some 300 aquatic species live in the estuary and almost 80 of them are now endangered, according to Mexico’s National Institute of Ecology. For decades, fishing nets would occasionally fill with pink shrimp. Fishers could see bottlenose dolphins, loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) and the critically endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtle (Lepidochelys kempii).