The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 67/No. 40           November 17, 2003  
 
 
Venezuela fishermen fight for living income
 
BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
AND CAMILO CATALÁN
 
CUMANÁ, Venezuela—“We are close to getting a co-op, we expect it by the end of the year,” said Tomás Blanca, a fisherman here, in the capital of Sucre state, 300 miles west of Caracas, September 30. “With that we will be able to get credits, buy motors and polyvalent boats, and sell the catch directly to the market. Right now the companies resell fish for 2,500 bolivars [$1.60] per kilo after they buy it from us for 500.”

Blanca’s measured self-confidence that independent fishermen have made a little progress over the last year in implementing the Law on Fishing and Aquaculture was evident among other producers here.

The government passed this bill in 2001. Along with the new agrarian reform law and legislation strengthening state control of oil, gas, and mineral resources that are part of the country’s national patrimony, the fishing law has fueled the hostility of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie and its backers in Washington against President Hugo Chávez.

The law granted small fishermen exclusive fishing rights up to six nautical miles offshore. In the past, the large fishing companies were allowed by law to operate as close as three miles off the coast. They often came as close as one mile from the shore, by paying off the Coast Guard, Blanca said. With their high-tech equipment they would often scoop up all the fish and leave almost nothing behind for the working fishermen.

“Since last year, there’s enough fish for us to catch,” said Yorbaris Bermúdez, whose family lives in a tin-roof, dirt-floor house a few feet away from the water in the San Carlos neighborhood of Cumaná, where most residents are fishermen. “That’s why almost all the fishermen are Chavistas.”

The fishing law granted small fishermen exclusive rights for the fishing of sardines and some other seafood and for all fishing in lakes and rivers inland. The measure set guidelines for financial assistance to these exploited producers—above all, credits for fishermen’s cooperatives—so they could have a living income. It also imposed higher taxes on capitalist fishing companies and standards that could improve conditions for workers on the industrial fishing boats.

Implementation of the 2001 law is still lagging behind, Blanca said, but they have made some progress toward getting fishermen’s cooperatives set up, which is the only way to get government help. Blanca showed Militant reporters the papers he and five other fishermen had filed for the “Rafucho” co-op and said he expected final approval by government authorities by the end of the year. In the absence of co-ops being set up, all credits stipulated under the new law to aid independent fishermen in the state of Sucre have been channeled to the local branch of the National Institute of Fishing and Aquaculture (INAPESCA) set up to implement the 2001 fishing law. Locally, INAPESCA is run by opposition forces, Blanca said. “They have used 8 million bolivars [$5,000] from such credits to set up a fish farm in the area,” he said, “which has been a waste, and is now overwhelmingly opposed by the fishermen. The credits due must be put under the control of the independent producers.”

The fish farm employs very few people and the yields are low compared to what even independent fishermen catch with their small boats in the sea, where salt-water fish are found in ample supply, Blanca said.

In a few states, INAPESCA has already disbursed credits to fishermen. In a joint project with the Corporation for the Recovery of the state of Vargas, for example, INAPESCA granted credits of 300 million bolivars ($187,000) August 13 to fishermen in the town of La Guaira in that state. Some 35 local fishermen were the first to benefit, and 60 more will get credits by the end of the year. Fishermen in Vargas were given priority, according to various reports in the Venezuelan press, because devastating storms in 1999 caused most to lose their boats and fishing gear. INAPESCA president Daniel Francisco Novoa Rafallí said that artisan fishermen catch 70 percent of the fish consumed in the local market.

Other fishermen interviewed at Cumaná said one of the biggest political challenges is convincing most of the local fishermen to band together in co-ops. Government authorities have ignored their demands for decades, and many of the things promised in the new fishing law have not been implemented for two years now, so it is difficult to persuade fishermen this won’t be another wasted effort. Only the example of one or two working cooperatives that Blanca and others say they are close to setting up can help make progress, we were told.  
 
Struggle over bottom trawling
Blanca, Bermúdez, and Marco Motonari—a fisherman in San Carlos here who now works part time as a salesman in the local market—described a new challenge fishermen have faced since early this year; piracy on the high seas. Armed men in boats painted black stop the fishermen while at work, threaten to shoot them, and rob them of their motors and their catch. Blanca said he thinks these are thugs organized by the large commercial companies to demoralize independent fishermen from pushing for their rights under the 2001 law.

“It may also be retaliation for actions by small fishermen to stop pesca de arrastre [bottom trawling] by the large commercial firms where they scrape the ocean floor and destroy the environment,” Blanca said.

“We have been fighting against this kind of fishing for 12 years,” said Francisco Roque, a fisherman for 50 years. “We had a confrontation along this coast with one of these companies.”

In June, Blanca and others said, a number of fishermen burned three industrial boats docked in Cumaná. Their owners had refused to stop bottom trawling. “Special nets are thrown to the bottom of the sea and brought up in a way that scoops up everything, including coral, on the seabed,” Blanca said. Under the 2001 law, this practice is prohibited near the coast, but a number of large companies are doing it anyway. The fishermen’s groups are now pushing to ban this practice altogether and for the imposition of severe penalties against violators, up to expropriation of the company.

Blanca is a local leader of the National Organization of Artisan Fishermen (ONPA). This is the new name of the National Bolivarian Command of Artisan Fishermen that Blanca belonged to when Militant reporters met him for the first time in July 2002. ONPA has largely replaced the old union of fishermen in the leadership of some 40,000 working fishermen nationwide. The latter group is controlled by the social democratic Democratic Action party, which alternated with COPEI, a smaller Social Christian party, in the federal government for decades until Chávez was elected president in 1998.

One of ONPA’s aims is to convince local authorities to ease up on requiring permits for small fishermen until credits and other measures are put in place that allow them to have a living income, Blanca said, or to waive the fees and give licenses to independent fishermen for free.  
 
Tussles with National Guard
Francisco Roque described this challenge more concretely. “We’ve had many problems recently with the National Guard because they demand we get permits before we go out to the sea,” he said. “But how can we do that when it costs 200,000 bolivars [$125] to get the papers? If you don’t have a permit they can give you a fine or requisition your boat. For many of us here, we have no option but to go out without the license. The other day I had an incident with a guard who came to bother me. I had to slap him on the chest so he would leave me alone. They don’t let us work in peace.”

Roque said he is lucky if he makes 100,000 bolivars a month. Despite these problems, he added, he remains a Chavista and is convinced that with more actions by fishermen, peasants, and other working people the government will find the wherewithal to “do the right thing.”

The campaign to eliminate illiteracy, which is as high as 80 percent in the fishing communities, is one such example (see “Venezuelans carry out literacy campaign with aid and volunteer trainers from Cuba” in last week’s Militant).

Roque, Blanca, and others pointed to the popular markets as another example. The government launched these markets in the middle of the bosses’ “strike” last December-January, which was aimed at undermining Chávez. They are run by the army. Basic food items there are for sale at half the price of the regular stores. Chicken, for example, is sold at 1,750 bolivars per kilo, compared to nearly 3,000 on the regular market—much of it imported by the Venezuelan government from Brazil. Price differences are similar for cooking oil, rice, pasta, or powdered milk. Under popular demand, these markets were maintained and expanded throughout the country after the employers’ lockout ended in February.

“A number of local chicken merchants said last week they’ll go on strike because business has plummeted,” said Tomás Blanca. “Many more of us go to the popular market now. Let them do that. They’ll be out on their own.”

We confirmed this during a visit to the market with Estebán Blanca, Tomas’s brother who works on industrial fishing boats here. “Without this measure, most of us wouldn’t have been able to survive,” Estebán Blanca said. Prices of most food items have nearly tripled since last year.

Estebán Blanca and his wife, Yarisa, who works at a nearby hospital, spent a good part of the day with us. Estebán had just quit his job at an industrial fishing company because they refused to give him an advance of 30,000 bolivars (about $20) to buy school supplies for his two kids.

In discussions with Estebán Blanca, his neighbor Carlos Jiménez who also works on industrial ships, and Eladio Porras, president of the marineros union—which organizes the crews at industrial fishing companies—we got a good picture of what these workers face.  
 
Workers on industrial fishing boats
“The company pays us 530,000 bolivars per trip,” Estebán Blanca said. “A trip lasts 45 days at sea. After that we get a month of ‘rest,’ without pay. That means we make 7,000 bolivars per day—below the minimum wage. And when the fish doesn’t bite, they pay us less or close to nothing because we get paid by the total tonnage of the catch. Unless you get sick on the boat or have an accident at work, there is no medical coverage of any kind. To make things worse, if the police find drugs on board, they take us all to jail even though we have no idea what’s on the boat when we get in.”

These companies don’t recognize the union and “anyone who shows respect for the union is fired,” Blanca said. “They don’t respect the new law on fishing either. Chávez can’t change this on his own.”

Almost all the 1,200 workers on industrial boats belong to the marineros union, Porras said. “We on the crews signed a collective agreement in May 1990 with 53 large companies across Venezuela,” he stated. Most of these firms are owned by Italian and Spanish capitalists. But the owners have since refused to abide by any of the provisions of the contract or to recognize the union. “They are supposedly obligated to turn over 16 percent of their profits over a year to the workers, but they never do that,” he said. Porras reiterated that any worker who gives any indication that he is favorable to the union is fired.

The marineros union is now fighting to convince the government to give these workers credit to form a cooperative that would start with one industrial boat and a processing plant, employing 380 workers to begin with, Porras said. “We are convinced we’ll be able to sell fish more cheaply on the market and improve wages and working conditions for the workers,” he stated.

Porras also described how the large industrial fishing companies siphon off wealth from the country. These companies fill up their boats with as much as 1.5 million liters of fuel, which they buy at 38 bolivars per liter. This is 10 bolivars cheaper per liter than the price of gasoline in Venezuela—the world’s fifth-largest oil producer. This is a subsidy the capitalist fishing firms got for signing the contract with the union. But they have continued to get it, even though they have in fact torn up the contract. Fuel prices are 10 times higher in other countries, Porras said. Workers know that a large boat consumes only about a third of this fuel on each trip, but they come back to fill up for the same amount again—evidence that the owners sell most of the fuel on the black market and profit handsomely.

Estebán Blanca and Carlos Jiménez said that until the virtual monopoly on fishing by these capitalist firms is dealt with by government action, independent fishermen and workers like them don’t see a solution to their plight. One positive step in the fight for that, we were told, has been the banding together of independent fishermen and the workers on the industrial boats into a nationwide federation now being formed.

“The great majority of the poor are with Chávez,” Blanca said. “The rich and the middle class are against him. They own most of the media and they keep pushing against us. They want to get rid of Chávez by force, but we won’t let them.”  
 
 
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