Crying Whale

Poet Aridjis recruited famous Mexican citizens including Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes. A huge boost came when Andreas Rozental, one of Mexico's most revered diplomats, joined the cause and brought his substantial international clout with him.

As part of a 10-element plan to stop the plant, attorney Szekely began issuing dramatic charges that the whales were in danger -- stories that were fed to the Mexico City press by a top-flight public relations firm Rozental had brought in.

Part of their core strategy was to divert ESSA and the Mexican authorities on science issues and environmental claims while they mounted a global political attack.

Environmental groups demanded, for example, that the scope of ESSA's environmental impact assessment not be set by Mexico's Institute of Ecology (like the EPA), since ESSA was 51 percent owned by the Mexican government. They demanded that a panel of top, independent international scientists decide what environmental issues should be studied. That blue-ribbon panel spent months holding "scoping hearings" to hammer out "terms of reference" -- the questions that had to be researched and mitigated if a salt plant were ever built at San Ignacio.

With ESSA thus busied, the environmentalists ramped up their efforts to create mass opposition to the saltworks in the public and press.

Membership Vice President Linda Lopez at NRDC launched a direct mail campaign in September 1996 to 2.9 million Americans in the environmental and animal rights communities. In the world of direct mail, the response was fantastic. Some 42,000 people sent NRDC money, and 120,000 signed petitions to Mitsubishi opposing the saltworks. NRDC membership exploded, growing from 175,000 to 350,000.

"We worked with a consulting team, and this one creative consultant did the genius work," says Lopez. "He told us our mail should say, "There is this whale nursery down in Baja, and we have to preserve paradise for this species.' It so perfectly captured the imagination of people, those whales traveling 5,000 miles, this whole mythic thing of them going to this quiet lagoon. I could cry even now, as I talk about it, and that's how our members felt."

In what is believed to be the most successful direct mail campaign ever conducted by environmentalists, Lopez and the team struck gold.

In 1997, 8.6 million letters went to the public, while 857,000 pieces of mail went to members. They got back checks averaging $15 each and raised $2.3 million that year -- not including sizable individual bequests inspired by the fight and $1,000 donations from the group's Council of 1000. NRDC membership rolls shot up again, from 350,000 to 458,000. Directed by NRDC to sign petitions to blast Mitsubishi, 300,000 people demanded that the stunned company stop the project.

In 1997 and following years, the nonprofit NRDC board agreed to revolve the new membership funds right back into the direct mail campaign.

"NRDC -- it's not well-known or the greatest name in the world, because it was chosen by a bunch of lawyers," says Lopez. "But we had a huge name in Bobby Kennedy, who is an attorney for our board. When we put his cover letter into our package, and he is totally into the idea of leaving a pristine area pristine, it made people feel totally confident in us."

Joel Reynolds, who even detractors at ESSA concede is a brilliant strategist, meanwhile was orchestrating an incredibly detailed political drive behind the scenes.

"For example," says Reynolds, "when Bobby Kennedy went down and spent time diving with the abalone fishermen of Punta Abreojos ... that was to provide political cover to the fishermen who were going to side with us and say no to local jobs. On environmental battles, you have to have the locals, or you don't win."

American environmentalists were not above playing serious hardball with locals who didn't get with the program. Raul Lopez, a fisherman who co-manages Kuyima, one of three $120-a-night-and-up "fish camps" for whale watchers, found the claim absurd that the whales might be hurt. Pointing to the thriving whales near the salt plant in Guerrero Negro, Lopez refused to back the environmentalists' plan to toughen Mexican law to make the salt flats protected from all development. He believed such a blanket law could hurt the area's economic future, and his own fishing.

"I was pressured to agree to a completely protected zone, and I refused, so they wrote letters that Kuyima was no good because we are not in the whale war," says Lopez. "They would not deal with us to our faces, so we did not trust or respect them. The environmental groups behaved the worst in this fight, because we did not follow them like sheep. Ba-aaah!"

But on the local political scene, Mitsubishi and ESSA were nevertheless hopelessly outfoxed. They were mired in a growing debate over science issues that the environmental groups were only too happy to fuel.