NOVEDADES
British chef Gordon Ramsay was threatened at gunpoint and had gasoline poured on him during a recent visit to Costa Rica to investigate shark finning for his latest television show.
Ramsay was in the country filming for a show called Gordon’s Shark Bait, part of a UK Channel 4 series Big Fish Fight. Early on in production, Ramsay made it clear he had no qualms about locating and confronting illegal traffickers of shark finning.
“At one point, I managed to shake off the people keeping us away, ran up some stairs to a rooftop and looked down to see thousands of fins, drying on rooftops for as far as the eye could see. When I got back downstairs, they tipped a barrel of petrol over me.” 
Back at the docks, Ramsay said several men pointed guns at the film crew to get them to stop filming, and police warned them to leave the country. “They said, ‘if you set one foot in there, they’ll shoot you’,” reported Ramsay.
“It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry, completely unregulated. We traced some of the biggest culprits to Costa Rica. These gangs operate from places that are like forts, with barbed-wire perimeters and gun towers,” Ramsay told The Daily Mail.
The Costa Rican Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock signed an agreement last November to close the private docks of Puntarenas, but little has been done to actualize the agreement. Another fishing law says shark fins must be landed with fins attached to the body; but private docks often evade the eye of fishing officials.
Costa Rica also drew international attention for its blasé approach to shark finning in the 2006 film Sharkwater.
Ramsey’s section of Big Fish Fight has no set date to air.
04 January 2010 | 5:24pm
