“If we do not find her at the end of the day she will be lost forever, I’m sorry for her mum,” says the forensic anthropologist and criminologist Israel Ticas, while looking at the thick vegetation around him. He is digging into the woods in a remote area controlled by the street gang the Mara Salvatrucha to find Reina Isabella Sanchez, a 20 years old girl who disappeared in 2013. She was the girlfriend of a policeman. Reina will never be located. In the Northern Triangle, between El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala in the last forty years, violence has become part of life. Beyond the average murder rate of a war zone, nowadays people are not just being killed, but they are actually vanishing. The only Criminologist in El Salvador, mothers who can’t find their loved ones and Sicarios become the chorus of a painful melody revealing a grey area, where resilience, love, and dignity lay.

“It might happen, but you’ll never know when. I came to understand this when my brother never came back. On that day, I made peace with fear.” So says Reyes Cosio Rosas, a shark hunter from El Sargento, a small fishing village in Baja, California. Every night he faces the dark waters of the Sea of Cortez for a living. Due to this overfishing in the Sea of Cortez, the community of shark fishermen—or “Tiburoneros”—from El Sargento were forced to migrate to the Pacific side of the Baja peninsula more than ten years ago. This means that they spend most of their lives away from their families on abandoned islands, which are little more than outposts at the edge of the world. Blue Echoes follows the relationship between these men and the powerful (and dangerous) nature that surrounds them. They are guests in this capricious, aquatic environment; what keeps you alive can also kill you.