In 2020, a community activist by the name of Leticia Caro approached FIMA, a grassroots justice organization in Chile. Leticia, a member of the indigenous Kawésqar community in the Magallanes region, was worried about the environmental impact of companies that were moving into the fjords of the Kawésqar National Reserve.
In this episode, we’re going to take a dive into what lies beneath these fjords and their icy waters: Chile’s salmon farming industry. We’ll follow the story of FIMA and the community-led resistance that is defending the sea from this destructive industry. And we’ll find out what can happen when an indigenous community, grounded in deep traditions of communing with the natural world, combines the power of law and the power of organizing, to protect their sacred waters.
Special thanks to Macarena Martinic, Gabriela Simonetti Grez and FIMA.
This episode was produced by Jackie Sofia and Poorvi Chitalkar.
A Common Pot: Stories and Recipes for Grassroots Justice is a production of Namati and the Grassroots Justice Network. Support for “A Common Pot” is provided by IDRC Canada.
Follow the Grassroots Justice Network on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube @grassrootsjn, and share your thoughts with us by emailing community@namati.org.
A Common Pot: Stories and Recipes from Grassroots Justice
Episode 4: FIMA, “What Lies Beneath”
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:00:11] A fjord is like a mini island, lots of mini islands, one beside another, so it’s like a crackled territory. So Chile is very long, it’s very thin, and suddenly in its southern tail it becomes all of these crackled territories, so its like little islands one beside the other. And these fjords are not only special because they are islands, but the water between them- it’s really calm and it’s like this special mixture from marine water and also melted ice water from the mountains. So we have all of these species that can also have refuge here in the fjord. but there’s like marine wolves and a lot of bird types. And even there’s like marine elephants. A million years ago, Kawésqar communities also found refuge in those fjords.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:01:21] This is Macarena Martinic. She is the coordinator of empowerment and public participation at FIMA, a grassroots justice organization in Chile that works towards ensuring the right to a free and healthy environment. The cold and crackled region that Macarena is talking about is Magallanes, a region in Chilean Patagonia. In this episode, we’re gonna take a dive into what lies beneath these fjords and their icy waters: Chile’s salmon farming industry. We’ll follow the story of FIMA and the community led resistance that is defending the sea from this destructive industry. And we’ll find out what can happen when an indigenous community, grounded in deep traditions of communing with the natural world, combines the power of law and the power of organizing to protect their sacred waters. I’m your host, Poorvi Chitalkar. Stay with us.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:02:26] This is A Common Pot, a podcast where we explore stories and recipes for social justice and systems change from around the world.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:02:48] FIMA was created in 1998. They started out as a sort of prosecuting organization for environmental crimes. They would take on a particular issue and litigate it. But over the years, their role changed.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:03:02] Yeah, there definitely has been an evolution. In ’98, when it was founded, we- Chile didn’t have an environmental institutionality. Now, since 2010, we have a solid environmental institutionality and FIMA was one of the organizations that was in that process. As a result, we now have environmental courts, we have an environmental assessment authority, we have- even we have an environmental ministry that we didn’t have in that time. We have special procedures for people to participate, to observe, to prosecute.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:03:45] While FIMA helped build many of these institutions and tools, they also started to help communities use them.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:03:52] And was that calling just for FIMA’s help that started all of these relationships with different communities. And nowadays we have been working with communities for a long years. And in other cases, we are almost every month helping a new community.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:04:12] In 2020, the Kawésqar community approached FIMA for their help. The Kawésqar are an indigenous people from the Magallanes region.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:04:24] Kawésqar people are a nomadic canoeist people who have inhabited and navigated the fjords and inland seas of Patagonia for thousands of years. So Kawésqar have been years and years navigating this entire territory. And now what they called the Kawésqar Wæs, that’s this huge, huge territory that they used to travel to, we know it as Patagonia.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:04:51] By the time the Kawésqar people approached FIMA, their ancestral territory was in serious danger.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:04:59] The salmon farming industry is an industry that started in Chile in the 70s. So before that, we didn’t have salmon farming. Salmon is not a native or a fish that grew naturally in Chile; it’s something that was introduced in a moment just for economic reasons.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:05:20] Over the last 50 years, salmon farms have made their way south, down the coast of Chile. As more and more of the sea became polluted from these farms, companies kept moving south in search of cleaner and more pristine waters, until they set up shop in the southernmost region of Chile – Magallanes in Patagonia. And today, Chile is the second largest producer of farmed salmon in the world, generating 6.5 billion dollars in export revenue. If you look at them from above, salmon farms don’t look like much. They’re a thin grid-like structure that sits on the surface of the water. But underneath are pens enclosed by nets, each pen holding thousands of salmon. The salmon live their entire lives in these pens. The population density inside the pens makes it a breeding ground for bacteria growth and disease. And so, antibiotics get pumped into the water to try to prevent the spread of disease. those antibiotics make their way into other wild species. The manufactured fish food and concentrated fish waste end up creating dead zones that kill ocean life. Escaped salmon from these farms also eat the native fish. This means that fisher folk who rely on local species for income and as a way of feeding their families are suffering too. Eventually, the salmon are mature enough to be harvested and killed for export. A person eating the salmon often has no idea that the farm that it came from has endangered people’s entire way of life. These destructive salmon farms exist despite the fact that the Kawésqar community’s territory has protected status as a national reserve.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:07:10] there is a space for interpretation and that’s what in Chile has been very bad done by different governmental institutions. And they have said that it is allowed for salmon industry to be in- placed in the National Reserve, even though it is a very aggressive industry, it has big environmental harms, and even though it is like quite obvious that this activity is not compatible with the National Reserve.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:07:45] Even though salmon farms are scientifically proven to harm local wildlife and communities, it’s pretty easy to get a permit for operating in the National Reserve. All a farm has to do is submit a declaration. This declaration gets reviewed by the Environmental Assessment Authorities.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:08:01] Yeah, you don’t even apply, you just do it. What happens when you have a declaration is, it’s a- it’s like literal a declaration. So the private owner of the project is declaring, like in a good faith, that his project is not going to produce environmental impacts. So they’re like swearing to us and we need to trust them. And also there’s no public participation unless you request it. and you have like a very short term to request it. It’s only 30 days. And this request has to be accepted. So the environmental authority is going to decide if your public participation requirement fits. And this is like a big problem that we have identified in the most of the communities in Chile that are trying to protect their lands or the environment, that they don’t really know the law and they don’ really know how to participate when these projects are being environmentally assessed. But of course, the law doesn’t make it that easy.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:09:10] It is not easy. First, you may not even know that a declaration has been issued by a salmon farm. And even if you did find out, you would only have a small window of time to draft and submit a request letter that argues for the public to have a say. But the Kawésqar people didn’t have a choice. They needed to become environmental defenders quickly.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:09:31] they are not environmental defenders. So they are just a family- a group of families that wants to fight for their cosmovision. They want to- they are also in this journey to get back their cosmovision.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:09:49] The Kawésqar people’s way of life is older than Chile itself. For thousands of years, they have navigated the area of Patagonia and beyond. And so, with the salmon farming industry threatening the sea, they HAVE to fight to keep their cosmovision alive. The meaning of the Kawésqar cosmovision is difficult to translate, but what’s unique about it is a close bond to the sea. The sea is at the heart of their culture. For the Kawésqar people, defending the sea also means conserving memory, honoring ancestors, and preserving their cultural identity.
Leticia Caro (archival tape, English interpretation from Spanish) [00:10:34] From the perspective of the elders, what is the most important force, perhaps the greatest spirit of the territory? No, it’s not just perhaps, it is the greatest. Since time immemorial, there have been certain restrictions related to the sea. These restrictions are called hayámes, which are taboos. They prohibit throwing objects into the water that do not belong to the sea, as doing so is believed to awaken monsters in the ocean depths. So, when I explain these to my children in those very words they begin to understand that there is a deep respect for that being, for that force that is present and that has guided us in both the past and the present.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:11:21] They have another dynamic or structural intersection that is colonialism that, of course, is something forced and is driving away their identity and their cosmovision. So they are also in this process of gaining it back. This is all of the things that I have been learning from many, many talks with Leticia that has had the patience to tell me this story once over and over.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:11:56] Leticia Caro has become a leader in the Kawésqar community in Magallanes and their fight to defend the sea. Maca remembers when FIMA first started working with them.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:12:05] Leticia Caro is one of the Kawésqar families’ representatives, reached to us. They were, on that time, facing problems with a legal figure that is supposed to protect a certain area for constitutonarios, for indigenous uses. So the area is given for the community’s administration if they prove that they use this area, and they have been using it for this time as their custom. So they had this trouble with these requirements.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:12:42] FIMA worked with Leticia to file a legal claim to protect an area inside the Kawésqar National Reserve by showing the court that the Kawésqar community was already using it according to their indigenous customs.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:12:54] but it’s actually one of the most powerful weapons of this law. Salmon farming or other fishery- aquaculture industries are not allowed to ask or use their concessions.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:13:12] And they won that case. This was an important win for FIMA and the Kawésqar community. But it was just the beginning. Several cases followed, challenging various companies’ declarations to set up in the National Reserve. And each time, Maca and her team did their best to bring the community’s knowledge and the Kawésqar cosmovision into the courts.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:13:34] It’s a balance you need to strike in a way, because we cannot of course file a legal action entirely based on the Kawésqar community’s knowledge, because we need to of course use the law to enter the court’s jurisdiction. But also we have like this important knowledge that could maybe shape law.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:13:59] They built their resistance against the salmon farming industry with two key strategies, or weapons, as Maca calls them. One: They challenged the decision of the Environmental Assessment Authority with something called general administrative recursive reclamations. This sounds super technical. But the gist of it is this: If you can prove that the company’s claims about the environmental risks posed by the project are false, then they could get shut down by the government. This became a kind of legal companion for the Kawésqar people’s existing knowledge. They knew that the salmon farms were wrecking more havoc on the environment than they let on. But they needed to prove it to the assessment authority. And that proof came by boat. The Kawésqar people had seen that employees of various different salmon farms were being picked up by the same boat at different ports in Magallanes.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:14:57] they all were connected between them in a way because the same boat went from Natales or from Punta Arenas that took the working people to the center, that took back the salmons that were raised there- raised (laughs) – grown there. Now I’m getting attached to salmons.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:15:17] When FIMA and the community dug further, they found out that even though these salmon farms had registered as separate projects, they were in fact all operated by the same Norwegian-owned company called Nova Austral. And so they made the case that the environmental impact of all of these farms should be assessed together. FIMA and the Kawésqar community took this case all the way to the Supreme Court in Chile. And they won. The Supreme Court win set a precedent moving forward.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:15:50] This was an important decision, not only because these projects weren’t able to develop here. The judge’s decision was very important for other cases of salmon farming, because it stated that it was needed an integral assessment of these projects and that was not being done, because most of the projects were fragmented. So, they were like units that each one entered into the assessment environmental process, but they needed to be assessed in a whole.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:16:25] Fighting projects that are already in operation is difficult and takes a long time. This one case alone, it took about eight years to move through the court system. But what if they could learn about the projects before they started? The second weapon also involved catching the companies in their own lie. FIMA and the Kawésqar community found company declarations that claimed that the public had had a chance to give feedback on the project, when in reality, this never happened. This also worked. Three salmon farming centers had their declarations denied and had to go back to the beginning of the application process. Another win for the Kawésqar community.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:17:07] So we were able to get the Supreme Court to say there was no public participation made in the process and therefore there was an illegal violation of the right to participate, the right to environmental protections. And these projects went again entered into the environmental assessment process. And then the community started organizing again to make a lot of observations.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:17:34] Salmon farming isn’t the only threat facing this community. Coal mining poses significant environmental and community risks. And now, the heavy winds that blow through this region are being coveted for hydrogen production. There are at least 22 hydrogen projects in Magallanes, and all the energy they produce is being exported to Europe. Even though this is seen as a quote-unquote green energy source, it copies the same old patterns of harming communities that come with other forms of resource extraction. The truth is, the Kawésqar community will have to continue defending their territory for the foreseeable future. To get there, FIMA has worked with Leticia and others in the community to build their knowledge of the law and their ability to use the law themselves.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:18:22] Like, how can we work with communities that is not only around a legal strategy? First, it was mainly throughout, like, classic legal empowerment, to say, that it was workshops and bringing them to the process throughout activities where they could know the law.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:18:41] It was difficult for Maca to know if all of FIMA’s efforts were making any difference, were building any sort of capacity. But then, something happened.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:18:52] We were laughing a couple of months ago with a colleague from FIMA when Leticia sent us a document. It was a legal document. It was something that it was a specific requirement of having an environmental assessment ended. And she sent us one for one project. We thought at first that she was asking us if we could fill it, if we can make this petition for the environmental authority regarding this specific project. So we asked her, what was this about? And she answered us, “No. I’m sending this just for you to know.” “To know what?” “To know that I already presented this.” And she had already made her document. She had already presented it. This was just like a notice for us. that felt so good, so we are hopeful that she could maybe transmit this knowledge to other Kawésqar members and that really like make- give sense to our work.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:19:59] While Maca and her team are helping the community understand the law, they are also making sure that the law pays attention to the Kawésqar knowledge and cosmovision. They have recently put this to the test in the case of the Canal Kirke.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:20:14] We had this recent hearing in Valdivia. It’s a project that pretends to explode a canal where- an important canal for Kawésqar communities, they want to explode it in order to broaden it and bigger ships can go through. It is Canal Kirke. Beautiful place with amazing animals, birds, views and amazing stories- Kawésqar stories of what happens there, how Kawésqar women taught their kids to navigate, to know the territory. If the Kirke was aggressive you couldn’t navigate through the Kirke. Kawésqar wisdom just like taught you to wait, maybe this is not the time, that maybe the canal is not ready for us going.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:21:14] A couple months ago, FIMA concluded their arguments in the case to protect the canal. In addition to technical and legal arguments, they included the Kawésqar cosmovision, which argues for a more respectful and less extractive relationship with nature.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:21:48] They document reports and a lot of testimonies and time of the Kawésqar community, so I really hope I could say you in a couple of months something different and that our strategy of bringing the cosmovision of the Kawésqars is like giving success. It was something important in that hearing and there was a lot of people watching. It was really exciting.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:22:18] The Canal Kirke case and the salmon farming resistance show how incremental wins take time. And the years that it takes for these incremental wins to happen, that long wait can feed frustration in the community.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:22:31] Frustration is something really close and really present throughout all of this process and that’s something that it’s difficult to work with because frustration is not only a feeling, it’s also something that can weaken the organization, can weaken bonds between communities. It can also generate untrust, desconfianza, of the organization and the strategy. So time is a challenge itself. So that’s something that we usually talk with the communities when we start working, like from the start. And I think what’s most important is we need to make sure that our work is not exclusively a legal strategy, because we know that even after long processes and after good decisions, even that doesn’t mean justice for the territories.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:23:32] And if the long wait and uncertain processes aren’t challenging enough, FIMA and the Kawésqar community are up against another big challenge: there’s a false narrative brewing that frames them as being anti-development and anti-progress. The narrative goes something like this…
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:23:49] “They are getting and messing into the things, threatening our ways of living and mainly our job, because they have their conservative environmental interests, own interests.” So it’s like a really ancient narrative, but that has been increasing in the last maybe two years. Really, really strong in the salmon farming industry. So we believe the narrative starts in companies, but companies are not really the ones that are saying this, like on the media, on interviews. It’s the workers.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:24:37] And even within the Kawésqar community, there are different views. There are “the Kawésqar people who defend the sea,” and then there are Kawésqar people who rely on these salmon farming companies to earn a living and feed their families.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:24:52] Yeah, of course. Probably there are more Kawésqar families that works for the industry, or they just don’t care. Maybe they have decided, because they can and it’s perfect, it’s okay, they don’t want to recover their cosmovision. That’s why the Kawésqar communities that we work with, they call themselves as the “Kawésqar communities that defend the sea,” because it’s not inherently as Kawésqar. One of the impacts that they denounce from the salmon farming industries, of course, how social tissue and also their links among, like in their own family has been deteriorating. Being accused if you are working in a certain place, being accused if you are opposing a project, having this, like, binary decisions of course can break any family.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:25:59] FIMA and the Kawésqar who defend the sea have been fielding baseless attacks on the salmon farming resistance for a while now, but recently it’s gotten worse. A couple years ago, FIMA was running a legal empowerment workshop in Puerto Natales and things took a turn.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:26:16] It was open as always. So we were really like teaching people how to make complaints in the environmental prosecutor agency. That was it. It was like really basic. But it was a moment where we had like just win a couple of months before. And of course, workers were really annoyed. They didn’t allow people to talk. They made like suggesting questions of, “Why are you here? Why are you taking our jobs? What have we done to you?” They didn’t like allow to carry on with the workshop. In our case we were three women colleagues, so they treated us like as little girls and, “You don’t know what we do. You don’t know how our work is done.” We were talking about an administrative process and they would ask us like, “Do you know how technically a cage type F works?” Like things that really weren’t into the case, to demonstrate that we didn’t know what we were talking about when talking about salmon farming. And we couldn’t go on with the workshop.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:27:26] This was just one instance of many. Maca and her team know the powers behind it too.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:27:32] And they are also supported by right-handed parliamentaries that are pushing the agenda of the industry in the parliament. So that’s what the narrative is about. And it’s hard. Like, people who are living in Magallanes, it’s appealing to fear, it’s appealing to insecurity. And that, of course, divides the community, with of course, normal consequence of environmental defenders that live there and indigenous communities feeling their security threatened.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:28:06] FIMA has responded to these attacks with transparency. They’ve published clear evidence in defense of their work on their website. And they’ve published opinion columns in reputed media outlets. But they’re beginning to see how this is a trap.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:28:21] We didn’t want, like, people to feel we were hiding things. But also, we don’t want to fall. And that’s something that we believe that one of their main objectives is that we use our time and our energy in defending ourselves. And that’s something that has happened. We have been likewise other years, now we have been SLAPPed in more than one case.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:28:49] SLAPPs are strategic lawsuits against public participation. Essentially, these are bogus lawsuits that are brought to harass and silence justice defenders, often by the companies that they’re trying to hold accountable.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:29:03] So, we have, and we need to spend time in this. And that’s something that we wouldn’t like to do, but it’s something that we are facing and we have to do. So we need to choose which of the battles give, so we can also have time and energy to keep our work on. So it’s not easy.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:29:25] This narrative question weighs heavily on FIMA’s minds. It’s also a struggle for lots of grassroots justice organizations around the world. To respond to these false and negative narratives, communities are often asked what their version is- what is YOUR counter-narrative?
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:29:41] A powerful narrative is a narrative that is built from below and that is built from also the communities that we work for and that we want our narrative to work for. So, narratives in the case of Magallanes is something we want to really start working with them and see how we can face this together. We usually work a lot from the opposing way, because of mainly how legal strategies work. And we usually react a lot. But this working with narratives takes you- like, pushes you to go into a more positive, creative language. And also, it’s not easy to be an indigenous community in Chile, nor in Latin America. No, maybe not in any country in the world. So, you need to take into account that maybe your narrative is never going to be massive and that doesn’t matter. It’s your narrative too, and you need to like own it.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:30:55] Maca reminds us that in a way, the counter-narrative, the answer to this question that asks the community what their version of development is, what they would like the economic future to look like for their children and grandchildren, is both simple, but also complex.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:31:14] Yes, and no. (Laughs.) They have this imaginary where Kawésqar cosmovision is again something they can live in, something they are not defending, that is respected also. But I believe they still are in an unfortunate moment where they need to still be defending themselves and saving their cosmovision and resisting. They come from a process that was something very different before that has all of these structural things intertwined, like their way of life has been changing a lot; the indigenous legal tools that are protecting indigenous communities are demanding them to be indigenous, but they’re also like being part, like us, of a process that we’re all going to as society. We can call it globalization, or maybe like development, or whatever, but I do know they want to stop defending and they want a place where they can reconnect with their cosmovision.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:32:35] I asked Maca to share a recipe with us, it could be food or drink, that captures the spirit of Magallanes and this story.
Macarena Martinic, FIMA [00:32:42] Calafate is a berry that is typical from the region. And also, lots of people recollects calafate. Kawésqar communities also have this important activity in recollecting calafate. Before now, if you go to Magallanes, you start seeing all the calafate products that there are. But it, like, has the perfect acid flavor you need in that cold region, and beautiful region. And it’s like making pisco sour that is like a Chilean and Peruvian also drink. And in this case you would have pisco, sugar, lime- it’s also with lime but you would add like calafate syrup as you like. I recommend. And if you have the calafate syrup nothing can go bad.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:33:33] One of the legends of the region is that anyone who eats the calafate berry will find themselves in Patagonia. The other week, our colleague Claudia brought back the mythological calafate berry in the form of a small jar of jam. It sat on the counter, glistening a ruby red through the glass. Jackie and I dug into this precious treat and realized the legend was true. We were immediately transported to Magallanes, with its sparkling vast ocean and gusts win. We felt the beauty of the Kawésqar Wæs and the fragility of those crackled icy fjords and all the lives that call it home.
Poorvi Chitalkar, Host [00:34:30] This episode was produced by me, Poorvi Chitalkar. Our managing producer is Jackie Sofia. Audio engineering and sound design by Mohamad Khreizat. Editorial support by the Namati Communications team. Additional support by Anuradha Joshi, Claudia Cote, and Catalina Marino. A very special thanks to Macarena Martinic and Gabriela Simonetti Grez of FIMA, for sharing their story with us. Thanks also to Canada’s International Development Research Centre, whose support makes this work possible. A Common Pot: stories and recipes of grassroots justice, is a production of Namati and the Grassroots Justice Network. To join the network, head to www.grassrootsjusticenetwork.org and follow us on social media, on YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook @grassrootsjn.