Riots Across Chile as Fishing Industry Blamed for Red-Tide

notes and translation by Earth First! Journal

Notes: Earlier this week, we posted an article about Chile’s red-tide crisis. Since then, a state of emergency has been declared, thousands of people have been fired while large corporations have received government subsidies. Folks have realized that the salmon fishing industry is to blame, especially combined with El Niño: “There is no other option. They’ve contaminated our ocean… the community says they must leave.” Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets, blockading main highways and roads, in Valparaíso, Santiago, Concepción, Temuco, Valdivia, Osorno, and Puerto Mont to support Chiloé (in Puerto Mont, over 10,000 people rioted during the day, then destroyed government buildings and banks, and finally threw molotovs at the police during night confrontations; seven activists were injured).

from Es-Contra Info

Devastation and extraction have reached disproportionate levels of death and harm!

Chiloé, and the rest of the world, are understanding that the true and only real face of capital, the state, and its technocrats, is a face of misery; destruction is what remains.

Let’s organize our rage and transform it into action, combating the devastation of the Earth in all the trenches. Without leaders nor masters, who only strive to negotiate and make pacts which will improve their political career.

Let’s fine-tune the struggle on the streets, without the need for labels of “students,” assuming that the revolutionary struggle goes beyond any institution, reforms, or patches, which only aim to lighten the load of our own chains.

Capital and the state means death, means imposition! Let’s rattle the insurrection and disobedience against the same culprits as always. There, where their power, their death machines, and ideology cannot live is where Anarchy lives!

from Metiendo Ruido (only a part of full article)

The problem is eutrophication of the system: An overload of nutrients and organic matter in amounts exceeding the capacity of the environment to absorb, recycle or disperse this income in an aquatic medium, which not only involves microalgae blooming, but also the development of anaerobic conditions in that system. So far, over 400 salmon farms between lakes and the Magellan strip have reported anaerobic conditions.

“The salmon industry in five years has increased its production by 15 times within the Chiloé sea… they paved the sea with nutrients, and precisely what’s been really surprising to me is that our bad luck, because the worst kind of species proliferated–Alexandrium catenella– it generates cistos (?) resistance, and therefore at this moment, we have an active red tide and a latent red tide being deposited in the sediment around the sea inside the Lakes Region and therefore this will never end; the red tide will never leave the sea of Chiloé, because when these conditions are met, cysts will appear and you’ll have red tide again,” said the researcher Hector Kol.