On super fishers and black capture: Images of illegal fishing in artisanal fisheries of southern Chile

Abstract

Illegal fishing (IF) is an unrelenting problem for small-scale fisheries governance worldwide, one with complex causes and solutions. This study explores stakeholders’ images on IF as a way to understand its underpinnings and persistence. As an apt illustration, the king crab (Lithodes santolla) fishery of the Magellan region, Chile, was chosen, which operates under a semi-open-access regime. The results from two-year ethnographic research reveal four powerful images, as they literally emerge from stakeholders’ narratives, comprising a series of practices that are branded in these particular terms: i) super fishers, which refers to owners of authorized vessels, who land the capture of unauthorized ones; ii) whitewashing, which involves the “whitening” of catch coming from unauthorized vessels or extracted in anticipation of the fishing season; this unreported capture can enter the export chain; iii) cooked on board, which involves the processing and packing, while at sea, of banned undersized or female crabs, which are later sold locally; and iv) black capture, that involves the landing of alive banned crabs in unauthorized ports, that are later processed in households and sold locally. These images suggest that IF is a relational phenomenon; this is to say that it is distributed on a series of relationships, practices, and actors embedded in a particular geographic and cultural context. As such, IF is difficult to dismantle, since changes do not depend on the ideal behavior of one actor -“the ethical fisher”- but on transformations of intertwined practices of all actors across the value chain.