My sons will be anything, but never fishermen, said 32-year-old Maicon Alexandre, the youngest of the leaders of Ahomar, a union of small-scale fisherpeople on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.
That determination is shared by his colleagues, like the president of Ahomar (the Association of Men and Women of the Sea) Alexandre Anderson de Souza, who has especially strong reasons to feel that way. Besides feeling responsible for the future of his fishing community, he is living in constant danger.
The 41-year-old activist, the leader of what could be the last generation of small-scale fisherpeople of Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, has not only received death threats, but has survived several attempts on his life.
He is now accompanied around the clock by two military police assigned by a federal human rights defenders protection programme that is overwhelmed by demand in a country with one of the highest gun-related death rates in the world.
The threat he faces is anything but abstract: four members of Ahomar, people close to him, have been killed since 2009.
The last two drowned in June after they were tied hand and foot and thrown into the waters where they were fishing. One of their boats was filled with bullet holes. None of the cases have been solved so far.
It was torture, they made them die slow deaths in the same place where they worked, to send a threat to their fellow fishermen, said Anderson de Souza, one of the 30 people in Brazil facing the worst threats to their life, according to a list kept by the Pastoral Land Commission, a Catholic Church organisation that issues an annual report on violent land conflicts and human rights abuses in Brazil.
Last year, there were some 350 activists and community leaders whose lives were in danger, according to the Pastoral Commission’s latest report, published in May.
Defying death is a new aspect of the mission that the leaders of the Ahomar union have begun to admit is virtually impossible: preserving Guanabara Bay so that it is environmentally capable of supporting the marine life that the fisherfolk depend on.
There are 22,000 officially registered fishermen and women in Guanabara Bay. But today, only around 6,000 families make a living from fishing, said Anderson de Souza. The families live in five different colonias or poor neighbourhoods along the bay.
Fishing was normal up to 2000. It didn’t make for a lavish lifestyle, but you could live decently, said Paulo Cesar, 56, who has been fishing since the age of 11, when he began working with his father and grandfather in Magé, a municipality to the north of the bay.
He said back then it was possible to pull in up to 100 kgs of fish on a good day, but now you’re lucky if you catch 10 kgs.
In January 2000, a pipeline running between a refinery and a local port spilled 1.3 million litres of oil into the bay, polluting about 50 square km, equivalent to 12 percent of the bay’s surface area, including mangroves, islands and beaches.
Marine life in the bay never recovered, the fishermen say, although Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, which was responsible for the spill, has sponsored studies that claim that the company’s quick clean-up response was successful, and that fish stocks had recovered by 2001.
But fishing in the bay, which is surrounded by greater Rio de Janeiro, an area home to 12 million people, is also threatened by the normal operation of an oil industry that is growing rapidly in the area, Anderson de Souza said.
2012 IPS-Inter Press Service