She's supposedly the Queenpin of the black market trade in sea cucumber and tonight 49 year old Guatemalan Georgina Maribel Mendez Aldana along with her two Guatemalan employees remains in police custody pending a court hearing. She's already pleaded guilty and paid a two thousand dollar fine for employing Guatemalans. Tomorrow she will appear in court for other offences engaging in commercial fishing whilst not being the holder of a valid Fisherman's License; attempting to export fisheries without a valid exporter's license and engaging in the fishing of Sea cucumbers without a special license. This is after she was caught with 3075 pounds, or 7033 individual sea cucumbers in the back of a borrowed pickup.
On Tuesday, we learned from the Fisheries Department that she had apparently forged her 2014 Sea Cucumber license:
Hampton Gamboa - Fisheries Supervisor, Conservation Compliance Unit
"She had in her possession at the time a contractual agreement signed by a local lawyer for last year with this said person who have an export license. But in our laws its clearly stated under the sea cucumber these license are not transferrable and they are not issued to any company and she had the documentation for this year. We also had to call in the police to look at forgery and things like that. We hope that we can deal with this individual strongly so that it sends a message to the rest of 
exporters who is even thinking of trying to enter the black market and things like that. Let us have a legitimate way of having the season and harvest the product at the right time so that we can eliminate these problems because these things create problems, it helps destroy our industry much faster."
An examination of Mendez Aldana's bogus 2014 sea cucumber license suggests that it was scanned from a 2013 license, and the bottom altered to make it seem that it had been issued for 2014.
And, as for our sea cucumber? Well, if you watched the news two nights ago, you'll know that it started off at a tiny two inches…but after we left it soaking for 48 hours, it is now at three times that size, six inches. We bought this one for just two dollars on the local market - and Mendez Aldana reportedly pays even less, but in a restaurant in China a single sea cucumber properly prepared sells for well over one hundred US dollars. In Asian culture, the sea cucumber is thought to possess mystical powers.
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