Chile’s Indigenous people say salmon threatens way of life : NPR

Reinaldo Caro unloads his catch from the shoreline of the Almirante Montt Gulf, Chilean Patagonia.

John Bartlett for NPR

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John Bartlett for NPR

PUERTO NATALES, Chile — Out beyond Isla Focus, a bare island in the fjords an hour off the coast of Puerto Natales, southern Chile, the waves pick up and the Calipso rocks alarmingly from side to side.

Reinaldo Caro is the swarthy captain of the tiny fishing vessel, and he has spotted something amid the pristine Patagonian woodland high above the shoreline: a single, white-bark tree.

“There!” he exclaims suddenly, his thick eyebrows lifting as his face softens into a broad smile. “That’s where I was born.”

“And then that’s what I’m fighting against,” he says, tracing a path down the hillside with a finger, fixing it on a pontoon floating directly below his birthplace.

It belongs to one of the many salmon farms that dot the fjords, although from the surface, there isn’t much to see. A control room sits alongside several floating walkways.

The salmon farming industry operates along great swaths of Chile’s coastline, from the center of the country and down through Patagonia.

And Caro, 78, decries the effect it has had on his ancestral home.

He is one of the very last Kawésqar fishermen sailing these fjords, one of the seminomadic Indigenous peoples who navigated the channels for millennia in carved wooden canoes.

Today, there are fewer than 1,000 Kawésqar left.

“There are loads of these farms,” Caro says over the throb of the Calipso’s diesel engine.