The Disappearing Fishermen

The Disappearing Fishermen is one of a series of ethnographic journalism stories about the violence embedded in the web of power structures shaping our global market system. In the Honduran wetlands of the Central American Gulf of Fonseca, these structures result in multiple forms of harm and damage to artisanal fishing communities. During the eighties and the nineties, the shrimp farming industry that settled in these wetlands was conceived to meet the Global North’s “need” for shrimp. Powerful international institutions including the World Bank and development agencies such as USAID provided loans to private companies, while the Honduran government enabled the encroachment of shrimp farms through land-use concessions, without any concern for the impact on the Gulf’s population. For five decades, the expansion of the shrimp farming industry has stripped artisanal fishermen communities of their fishing spaces and unleashed severe social conflict, depleted resources and created a deep, unspoken environmental crisis. In addition to discussing the community's experiences of harassment and violence at the hands of state institutions and shrimp farming companies’ private security, this story delves into the Traditional Environmental Knowledge of artisanal fishing communities. It explains the impact on the dynamics and importance of the wetlands to artisanal livelihoods. The work highlights the extreme level of wetlands pollution and argues that the environmental disaster that has caused two significant fish and mollusk die-offs in the last five years is the manifestation of structural violence in its most overpowering form.