Over 25 years ago, illegal fishing was seen as a significant threat to international fisheries. Extraordinary efforts, such as the adoption of the UN Fish Stocks Agreement and the UN Compliance Agreement, illustrated the importance of addressing illegal fishing at the global level. The countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have a long history of addressing fisheries interests by leading global efforts. The Santiago Declaration of 1952 established a 200 nautical mile fisheries zone leading to the codification of the concept in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). It also created a regional coordination mechanism, the Permanent Commission of the South Pacific (CPPS), which has recently begun efforts to establish a regional plan of action to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing in accordance with the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) International Plan of Action on IUU. The intervening decades have seen i