VIP Lab Non-Residential Fellow
Areli Palomo Contreras co-founded Linea 84 Collective of Ethnographic Journalism and Community Action. She has been developing ethnographic journalism as a tool to bring in to the news “headlines” the conflicts, problems and perspectives of Latin American communities and groups at the margins of our global market system. Areli’s research topics always revolve around undocumented migration from Latin America to the United States, and has always included violence as a crucial element of this type of migration process. Keeping in mind the Collective’s slogan “ wherever migration takes us” Areli has followed migrants’ footsteps on their way to the United States and to their countries of origin, always tracing the structural components of human mobility.
The Disappearing Fishermen is one of a series of ethnographic journalism stories about the violence embedded in the web of power structuring our global market system and descending as multiple forms of harm and damage into the daily lives of artisanal fishing communities in the Honduran wetlands of the Central American Gulf of Fonseca. Powerful international institutions such as the World Bank and development agencies such as USAID through loans, and in complicity with the Honduran government through land-use right concessions, created the structure for the shrimp farming industry to settle in the wetlands to supply the “need” of shrimp for rich countries of the North. For five decades, the expansion of shrimp farms has stripped artisanal fishing communities of their fishing spaces and unleashed severe social conflict, resource depletion, and a deep, unspoken environmental crisis. In addition to discussing the community's experiences of harassment and violence by state institutions and the shrimp farming companies' private security, this story delves into the Traditional Environmental Knowledge of artisanal fishing communities to explain the significance and dynamics of the wetlands as they are continually depleted.
Read Areli's research, The Disappearing Fishermen.
Read Areli's article about land defenders on the Oaxacan coast.