We can’t all be billionaires. But anyone, anywhere can be an entrepreneur. Carving out a living on one’s own terms knows no boundaries.
Natal Batista Ferreira, 50, does it in one of the most savage places in the Americas: as a licensed, independent, commercial fisherman in the Brazilian Pantanal in Mato Grosso. It’s the Wild West meets the Wild Kingdom. Killer jaguars, anacondas, blood sucking mosquitos, crocs and contraband for a cool R$42,000 a year. That actually goes quite far in this part of the world, and not much different than someone living in Louisiana working on a shrimp boat, making the same change in dollars. You can raise a family in the sun, doing what you love. Natal (and his wife) has six of them, aged 19 to 30.
But, being entrepreneurial in this part of the world isn’t easy. It’s the kind of place where bad guys will burn you alive while you’re sleeping in your campsite. (Natal has a secret escape hatch at his part-time residence on the Paraguay River, but more on that later.) Mato Grosso’s Pantanal is no country for old men.
Perhaps for this reason everyone refers to him by his nickname, Problema, which means problem in Portuguese. Most people think that’s his real name, but alas, he tells us, his parents thought more highly of him than that.
No one knows me by my name. Here everyone knows me as Problema. If I get a phone call it’s, he makes a phone symbol with his hands, like a hang loose sign, Can I speak with Problema? In my adult life, I’ve been surrounded by problems. If there’s trouble somewhere, I’m probably in the middle of it, he says.
Thousands of miles away from the Keys, Problema has one of the most sought after jobs in the world. He’s a successful independent contractor in an emerging market, living the dream.
I leave the lines in all day. But the fish I’m after here really bite at night, he says, having just woken up that morning at three to catch some seven catfish called pintado (pseudoplatystoma corruscans) on his lines. It’s a carnivorous deep river fish that can get over 100 pounds. One was a 70 pounder, but the fish here don’t put up much of a fight. Maybe a five minute battle on a bamboo line, he says. No reel. This is old, old school.
Part of his fish story is how he walks the line between making a living selling monster cat fish to triple-decker luxury fishing vessels which is verifiable and being an undercover vigilante in one of the most preserved places to fish. This being Brazil’s Wild Kindgom, too, there is the very real element of life-and-death survival that makes fishing solo here more exciting than it probably should be.