- Blast fishing has taken a toll on both the fishermen and marine life of El Salvador’s Jiquilisco Bay Biosphere Reserve.
- Some residents have lost limbs or eyes or suffered bad burns. And populations of mangroves, fish, and critically endangered hawksbill sea turtles have declined.
- Over the last decade, officials have made rooting out the practice a top priority, placing their bets on a creative alternative that a local fisherman suggested in 2009: the creation of artificial reefs to replenish marine life.
- Today blast fishing has declined by 90 percent and the communities are trying to market their seafood as “clean fish” at a premium price.
To read an interview with the man who sparked the artificial reefs of Jiquilisco Bay, see the companion piece to this article:
Bringing back the fish: Q&A with a repentant blast fisherman
JIQUILISCO BAY, El Salvador — With no police patrol in sight, a young fisherman named Jose Salvador Soriano kneeled into his long, narrow boat and began preparing an explosive with the power to bring in nearly an entire day’s catch. The explosive contained sulfur, benzoate, chlorate and sugar, packed into a tube of newspaper with a wick made from a bicycle-brake hose.
The best spot to throw an explosive was under the long, spider-like roots of the mangroves lining both sides of the estuary, as fish gather there in large numbers to lay their eggs. But this time, Soriano miscalculated. Before he could toss the explosive — the wick quickly burning down — it went off in his hand, leaving him amputated up to the high wrist.
Soriano, now 47, got away easy compared to many other residents of the 35 fishing communities along El Salvador’s Jiquilisco Bay Biosphere Reserve, a 241-kilometer (150-mile) wetland that contributes approximately 2 tons of fish to the country’s seafood markets every day. Some residents have been badly burned, lost an eye or — because explosives are normally packed with the tube held between the thighs — their legs and genitals.
But blast fishing has also taken a toll on Jiquilisco Bay’s marine life. Populations of yellowfin snook (Centropomus robalito), hawksbill sea turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata) and Pacific red snapper (Lutjanus peru), as well as six kinds of mangrove trees, have shown noticeable declines since nearby communities began using explosives in the 1980s.
Over the last decade, officials have made rooting out the illegal practice a top priority, placing their bets on a creative alternative that a local fisherman suggested in 2009: What if an artificial reef could be dropped into the bay where they normally fish? Done correctly, it might allow for both an easy catch and a sustainable way of bolstering biodiversity.
“It may not have been as good as blast fishing,” said José Maria Argueta, program director for the local NGO the Mangrove Association, “but we argued that it was also sustainable and not dangerous. You could relax and catch fish and not worry about running from the police.”
It is now the 10th anniversary of the artificial reef project’s inception, and a dozen local cooperatives have installed more than 20 artificial reefs — collections of logs and hollow concrete structures — for line-and-pole fishing. But officials say blast fishing continues in some areas, and managing the reefs has become its own challenge.
“It’s a sustainable way to catch fish,” Argueta said. “It also allows people to fish without damaging the environment or themselves. But we need a plan to manage the artificial reefs.”
Blast fishing: ‘It’s just not a good idea’
The transition from blast fishing to artificial reefs has been, and continues to be, a slow one. Even after Soriano lost his hand in 1997 — before the reefs were even an idea — he kept using explosives for another five years, resisting officials’ attempts to persuade him to switch to traditional fishing methods.
Like most fishermen in the area, Soriano was looking for the most efficient way to bring in the largest possible catch. Given the cost of gas, bait, boat rental and fees to his local fishing cooperative, line fishing before the era of artificial reefs didn’t make much sense. It only brought in about 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms) of fish on a typical outing, sold for between $1 and $2 per pound. Explosives, meanwhile, with a radius as large as 80 feet (24 meters), sometimes brought in upwards of 40 pounds (18 kilograms) — and in a fraction of the time.
For other fishermen, explosives were all they knew. Their fathers never taught them how to line-fish. Or the nets they’d used in childhood were abandoned in the wake of the country’s civil war.
Politically motivated violence throughout the 1970s saw tens of thousands die at the hands of right-wing death squads, igniting a left-wing guerrilla movement and drawing in the U.S. through to the war’s end in 1992.
Many residents around Jiquilisco Bay joined the People’s Revolutionary Army and the Farabundo Martí Liberation People’s Force guerrilla groups. In the 1980s, they had decided to fight a war of attrition, carrying out sniper attacks, ambushes and land mine bombings. One hour from the shores of Jiquilisco Bay, the 400-meter (1,300-foot) Golden Bridge was destroyed by guerrilla-made dynamite.
Still other residents fled to other parts of Central America, such as Panama. Upon returning later in the war, they allegedly encountered two military officers who showed them how to make explosives. Today, no one knows the names of those two officers, but they are still talked about in various fishing communities, even mentioned vaguely in government reports, almost as myth: the bringers of explosives to Jiquilisco.
By the 1990s, the bay was showing a noticeable drop in marine life. Though there was little data taken in that time period, fishermen recall returning from trips with smaller and smaller catches.
“At first it was a good way to fish, but after a while not so much because we killed everything,” said fisherman Luis Gonzalez, 47, of Puerto El Flor. “More than anything else, this was business. It starts to get expensive when you’re coming back without fish.”
Other marine life suffered, as well. Critically endangered hawksbill sea turtles occupy approximately 37 kilometers (23 miles) of nesting habitat in and around Jiquilisco Bay. But between 2004 and 2008, the Zoological Foundation of El Salvador reported 18 fatalities caused by blast fishing — the hawksbills’ leading cause death during that period.
Due to the bay’s thousands of acres of mangrove trees, it was declared a Ramsar site— an international recognition for wetlands — in 2005. Mangroves are not only important breeding grounds for marine life; they’re also a key player in preventing coastal soil erosion. Officials suspect that human activity, including blast fishing, has contributed to a 10 percent loss in the bay’s mangrove cover.
“When it comes to blast fishing,” Gonzalez added, “it’s just not a good idea. It means putting an end to all the fish.”
