Crisis and catastrophe on Chiloé: Collective memory and the (re)framing of an environmental disaster

Abstract

In May 2016, residents of Chiloé in southern Chile blockaded their island to protest the contamination of their fishery by aquaculture operators as well as the state’s failure to adequately regulate this new industry. Media coverage of events on the island, particularly the scarcity of food resulting from the blockade, constituted a discourse of images that invoked the mobilization of “respectable” women during other moments of political crisis—specifically the bread shortages during the Popular Unity government (1970–1973) and the widespread human rights abuses of the Pinochet Dictatorship (1973–1990). These images helped protestors transform an environmental crisis into a humanitarian catastrophe, mobilizing collective memory of suffering and gaining widespread support for their cause. This article argues that media coverage of the protest and subsequent support for the protestors in other parts of Chile strengthened the hand of those whose livelihoods had been affected by the crisis and led to greater compensation for fishing families.

Keywords

aquaculture catastrophization Chile collective memory contamination political ecology

There were bonfires on the big island of Chiloé. For nearly a week, fishermen and their families had been protesting the government’s temporary ban on fishing—a response to a red tide that rendered much of the archipelago’s shellfish toxic. The unprecedented scale of this red tide, caused by a massive algae bloom, was the result of unusually warm ocean temperatures but also likely exacerbated by the dumping of waste from salmon farms offshore and the constant accumulation of fish meal and fish feces below the archipelago’s numerous salmon cultivation centers (Bouwman et al., 2013). Thus, Chile’s largest island was now effectively closed, thanks to a coalition of fishermen, students, and environmental activists who demanded compensation for their lost livelihoods and stricter regulations for aquaculture operators. During the day, the fishermen marched in the streets carrying signs that read, “They only care about us for our curanto,” invoking their famous regional cuisine and disparaging the government. Although the protests were peaceful, the fishermen who staffed the roadblocks by the ferry terminal in Ancud had taken to burning tires at night. The island-wide mobilization was going into its sixth day, which meant that for nearly a week the island and its inhabitants had been cut off from the mainland. Residents were on edge. Government bureaucrats had been dispatched to negotiate with the protesting fishermen in Puerto Montt, on the mainland, but they seemed unlikely to come to any agreement.

Chiloé is famous for being distinct from the rest of Chile (Daughters, 2016b). It was the last part of the country to join the fledgling Republic after it won independence from Spain. Its wooden churches, built in the same style as the wooden fishing boats produced here, are UNESCO World Heritage sights (Hayward, 2011: 92). Above all, Chilotes, as people from the archipelago are known, are famous for their relationship to the sea. So they had every right to be furious when it was reported that aquaculture firms dumped some 9000 metric tons of decomposing salmon offshore further contaminating their fisheries at the peak of the crisis (Segovia, 2016). Irate Chilote fishermen could not go to sea, so they went to the streets.

I was watching these events unfold beside Juan,¹ an administrator at SERNAPESCA, the state agency tasked with regulating fishing and aquaculture in Chile. Although we were in Puerto Aysén, both of us listened intently as the reporter for TVN, the national television network, described the situation on Chiloé. Aysén, immediately to the south of Chiloé, had 148 salmon cultivation centers in operation as the crisis unfolded, accounting for 49% of national salmon production (SERNAPESCA Aysén, 2016). Although these centers had not been directly affected by the algae bloom devastating Chiloé, most of the fish raised in Aysén are processed in plants in Quellón and other towns on the main island of Chiloé rather than in Aysén itself, where lack of connectivity, expensive utilities, and an ambivalent labor force have thus far discouraged most firms from building or maintaining processing plants.² In an acknowledgment that the situation to the north could have dire implications for Aysén, Juan was going to be on the radio the next morning to talk about the crisis and its implications for the local aquaculture sector. He was also going to try to explain how the government was doing everything it could to address concerns about contamination, even if he didn’t necessarily believe this himself.

That the situation on Chiloé was now leading the nightly news broadcast on every television station throughout the country was something of a victory for the protestors. Indeed, Chile’s economic “miracle” has come with significant environmental costs that until recently failed to achieve long-lasting media coverage. As political scientist David Carruthers (2001) notes,

Chile’s fiercely unregulated economy provides ample reward for producers who push negative social and environmental costs onto future generations, vulnerable ecological systems or the poorest and most marginalized populations. From the strip mines of the arid north to the scarred forests of Patagonia, the export boom has put the hard squeeze on nature. (p. 347)

In this context, the dumping of aquaculture waste into the Chiloé fishery should not have been news. For decades, environmental devastation had been deemed by the government in Santiago—and perhaps by many citizens—to be an acceptable cost for economic growth in the export sector (Gerhart, 2017; Pitchon, 2015). And yet, the Chiloé “crisis” was not only being reported throughout the national media but was being discussed by citizens from Arica on the Peruvian border to Punta Arenas on the Strait of Magellan. Moreover, by the time the protestors took down their barricades and went home, they had gotten much of what they asked for from the government. How did Chilotes manage to draw national attention to an environmental disaster when such things have been the rule, rather than the exception, in neoliberal Chile? What made this mobilization different than previous mobilizations against other state sponsored development projects with negative environmental impacts?

This article argues that Chilotes performed a kind of “catastrophization” (Ophir, 2010) by appealing to national collective memory through images of empty supermarket shelves and women and children waiting in line for food (Stern, 2006: 62–64), effectively turning their fellow citizens into witnesses who authenticated their status as victims (Brauman, 1992; Calhoun, 2010). In so doing, they turned a regional environmental crisis into a national humanitarian crisis that demanded action.

Research for this article was conducted during May and June 2016. The research combined participant observation, media analysis, and semi-structured interviews with aquaculture workers and public employees. Research was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Economic development and “accumulation by dispossession”

Chile’s role as a laboratory for neoliberal economic policies is well known. Following the coup that deposed—and killed—democratically elected Marxist president Salvador Allende in 1973, dictator Augusto Pinochet set about restructuring the national economy. His policies included widespread deregulation, the rollback of land and labor reform policies introduced under Allende and his predecessor, Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei, and union busting. These policies created favorable conditions for the growth export-oriented industries—especially those in the Chilean south (Henne and Gabrielson, 2012: 152; Klubock, 2004: 347–352; Winn, 2004: 19–20, 347–352). Under Pinochet’s “National Security Doctrine” free market principles became the basis for so-called “political liberty” (Valdez, 1995: 31). Pinochet’s team of University of Chicago-trained economists, the so-called “Chicago Boys,” had free reign to impose their neoliberal ideas in southern Chile, where low population density and abundant natural resources encouraged state planners to undertake massive infrastructure and development projects. When he was appointed to finance minister in 1985, Pinochet’s advisor Hernán Büchi continued to emphasize this development of the Chilean south, though he preferred some state intervention (albeit on a limited scale) and therefore broke with neoliberal orthodoxy. He sought to reduce the country’s dependence on copper from the Atacama Desert by growing other export-oriented sectors like timber and aquaculture (Stern, 2006: 349).

Beginning in the early 1980s, aquaculture initiatives undertaken with the help of international experts, tax incentives, and wage subsidies (Latta and Cid Aguayo, 2012: 172) ensured that Chilean salmon would appear on tables around the world. Then, as now, the industry was largely based in the X Región de Los Lagos—the region containing Chiloé—and XI Región Aysén del General Ibañez del Campo.³ Although Chile returned to democratic governance in 1990, state economic policy remained largely unchanged. By 2001, farmed salmon accounted for nearly 5% of Chile’s export earnings (Schurman, 2004: 320), and today, southern Chile is second only to Norway in the production of farmed salmon (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, 2016: 64).

However, this economic boom has come with social and environmental costs. As several scholars who have studied this period of economic growth in the Chilean aquaculture sector have observed, “dominant governance regimes favored production—capital—over labor and nature, leading to high growth rates in these sectors at the expense of labor (fewer safeguards, greater flexibility) and nature (reduction in environmental quality and services)” (Barton and Fløysand, 2010: 742). Sassen (2010) has been blunter, identifying the organizing logic of this period of extractive capitalism as one centered around the expulsion of people and traditional practices for the sake of natural resource speculation (p. 25). Crucially, in developing his definition of this “accumulation by dispossession,” Harvey (2003) emphasizes the role of the state in supporting capital. As Barton and Fløysand (2010) observe in the case of the Chilean south, aquaculture firms have been able to grow with comparatively little regulation and their state backing and financial capital allow them exercise significant political power over workers and in the communities where they operate (p. 742). Indeed, the power of the aquaculture sector is such that when The New York Times published an article critical of the industry in 2008, the Chilean government launched a massive international campaign to defend its aquaculture operators and restore consumer confidence (Latta and Cid Aguayo, 2012: 170).

During the Pinochet era, the state was able to make citizens who opposed its policies “disappear” through extrajudicial killings and imprisonment, but even after the return to democracy, the structural violence of environmental degradation and economic policies that favored aquaculture firms over fishermen led to the widespread expulsion of the latter (Alexander, 2009). Moreover, although the highly visible abuses of the dictatorship years led to nation-wide opposition and international condemnation, the structural violence inherent in Chile’s contemporary extractive capitalism did not garner widespread attention until relatively recently.

Furthermore, while environmentalists can point to their successful opposition to mega-projects with significant environmental impacts like the now-stalled HidroAysén project, which would have constructed five dams across the Baker and Pascua Rivers (Vince, 2010) and to the contamination of waterways by CELCO⁴ pulp mills in the Los Ríos and Maule regions, the Chilean right—particularly current Chilean president Sebastian Piñera—has successfully campaigned on a pro-business stance and dismissed environmental protests as extremists unwilling to compromise. In the Chilean south, this problem is compounded by the influence of so-called “eco-barons,” who have bought up vast tracts of land to set aside for conservation but alienated locals in the process. Successful challenges to outside projects that will have significant environmental impacts, such as the mobilization in Mehuín against a proposed pipeline (Guerra and Skewes, 2002), remain the exception rather than the rule.

Catastrophization from below

Ophir (2010) has defined “catastrophes” as events that constitute “large scale or mega-disasters that affect multitudes or whole populations and leave their marks on many people’s space and time” (p. 61). That the events in the Chiloé archipelago in 2015–2016 constituted a catastrophe seems self-evident. Indeed, the archipelago was even declared a “Catastrophe Zone” by the Chilean government (Fernando González, 2016) prior to being closed to fishermen. But Ophir is less concerned with catastrophes and far more interested in “catastrophization,” which he considers inherently governmental, and which he breaks into two planes, “objective” and “discursive.” The “objective plane” of catastrophization is one in which “men and (socialized) nature, in concert or separately, cause … massive dislocation, severe shortage and deprivation, deterioration of health services and hygienic conditions, desolation of entire regions, and destruction of the fabric of life of numerous people” (Ophir, 2010: 63).

This is an apt description of the events that led to the declaration of the “Catastrophe Zone” and the state of emergency that accompanied it—and that justified the ban on fishing. Indeed, one could not ask for a better description of aquaculture and its effects than “socialized nature.” The devastating red tide that killed roughly 40,000 tons of salmon in early 2016 (Fleitas, 2016) was likely the result of warmer ocean temperatures off the Gulf of Ancud caused by El niño and climate change combined with contamination from antibiotics and fish feces from the 400 aquaculture platforms operating in the region. With so many dead fish to contend with—40,000 tons constitute nearly 12% of Chile’s annual salmon production—and little regulation or oversight, thanks to the state’s neoliberal economic policies and the political power of aquaculture firms, it is not surprising that workers simply dumped their waste in the Pacific, thereby amplifying the unfolding catastrophe.

However, it is Ophir’s second, “discursive” plane of catastrophization which enables us to examine the events on the island after the fishing ban took effect. This “definition of events as ‘humanitarian emergency,’ ‘catastrophe,’ or ‘natural disaster’” sets the terms for what can be considered an appropriate response and enables “emergency claims” by those most impacted (Ophir, 2010: 63).

Many scholars have described how states of emergency are produced by governments in order to justify periods of exception (Schmitt, 2014), the exclusion of certain bodies or populations from the body politic (Agamben, 1998), or periods of indefinite detainment and legal exception (Butler, 2004; Gregory, 2007), and this is certainly applicable in the Chilean case. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how citizens and civil society organizations can also define events as “emergencies”—what I will call “catastrophization from below.” In the case of Chilote fishermen and their families, this is precisely what took place, as islanders took advantage of the suspended moment of ecological catastrophe to mobilize discourses from Chile’s recent history to create a sense of moral urgency among their fellow citizens.

Creating a nation of witnesses

By 12 May, the big island was well into its second week cut off from the mainland, and the fishermen showed no signs of abandoning their blockades. Even those who were not directly affected by the contamination of the fishery, the fishing ban, or resulting lack of work stood with the protestors. “Estoy totalmente con los pescadores … cien por ciento” one woman said, “I am totally with the fishermen … one hundred percent.” This kind of solidarity is a hallmark of life on the archipelago, and as Daughters (2016b) has noted, islanders’ identity as such can be “a determinate force in the collective decisions of a community” (p. 329).

On television, however, the situation appeared to have become very dire indeed. Cameramen from TVN and Mega had taken to filming B-roll of the empty shelves of the Unimarc (a Chilean grocery store chain) in the island’s largest city, Castro, to show how the islanders were running out of food. These were juxtaposed with images of protesters carrying signs that read “Chiloé is deprived!”⁵ (Daughters, 2016a: 61). One reporter interviewed a group of women who were organizing food redistribution efforts. One of the women showed a bushel of cilantro and a zucchini to the reporter. Behind her a man held a single head of cabbage aloft. “The situation has become more and more complicated,” she said.

While the protestors at the blockades were mostly men, the images broadcast over state television mostly showed women and children, often waiting in line for dwindling supplies. These women and children, who by now were appearing nightly on national news broadcasts, were assigned what Brauman (1992) has called “the symbolic status of ‘victim,’ which can only be granted in cases of unjustified or innocent suffering” (p. 164). Writing on how the dominant contemporary sense of emergency comes from a sudden disruption, Calhoun (2010) observes,

This sense of suddenness and unpredictability is reinforced by the media, especially television. The continuous stream of reporting on gradually worsening conditions is minimal and usually consigned to the back pages of newspapers and specialist magazines; it doesn’t make the cut for headlines—let alone half-hour broadcast news programs. So when violence or vast numbers of people lining up at feeding stations do break through to garner airtime, they seem to have come almost from nowhere. (p. 32)

That Chilote women and children were shown nightly on national television lining up for food—and not carrying placards and shouting slogans—mattered a great deal.⁶ By emphasizing images of women struggling to fulfill their responsibilities as caregivers, media outlets helped assign women the role of “innocent victims” and “non-participants” (Brauman, 1992: 164) experiencing the devastating effects of planned policies carried out by state apparatuses and economic firms (Ophir, 2010). These devastating effects came about gradually and systematically—the contamination of the fishery began long before the 2016 crisis—and didn’t make for good television.⁷ But the empty shelves of normally well-stocked supermarkets and the faces of hungry women and children surely did. These images constituted a media discourse that transformed its consumers into “active participants” in the discursive construction of the crisis (Hier and Greenberg, 2002: 491) in part by broadcasting images that conformed to “iconic templates and norms” (Calhoun, 2010: 33).

The images broadcast from Chiloé drew on Chileans’ collective memory of past political crises—and crucially, of crises that are remembered as the result of both left and right-wing policies. Specifically, they called up images of “respectable women”—the kind of middle-class mothers and caregivers normally considered outside the messy theater of Chilean politics—who mobilized “in response to political and economic conditions that undermined their ability to fulfill traditional family expectations” (Pieper Mooney, 2007: 975). In December 1971, middle-class women took to the streets of Santiago to protest the scarcity and rationing that had accompanied the ascension of Allende’s Unidad Popular (UP) party.⁸ More than 5000 women marched banging empty pots and pans to vent their frustration over economic shortages and breadlines and express their opposition to the UP movement (Pieper Mooney, 2007; Power, 2002: 153). “Women,” historian Steve Stern writes, “took on the role of people driven into political activism to defend families and values unhinged by the Unidad Popular” (Stern, 2006: 63). In the 1988 plebiscite that ultimately led to Chile’s return to democracy, Pinochet’s supporters showed images of these women protestors and breadlines in Santiago in a series of ads for the “Si” campaign, seeking to mobilize the respectable women they considered a vital part of their base of support.

Part of the reason this effort by the “Si” campaign failed was that by the mid-1980s, the dominant narrative had become women protesting against the dictatorship, and doing so in even greater numbers than they had during the unrest that marked the UP era. Again, women were depicted, this time by the leftist Concertación, as reluctant heads of households forced into the political arena by the absence of their male family members, many of whom had been detained or “disappeared.” Though the reality was far more complicated—some women took up arms in the ranks of the MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria) and the FPMR (Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez)⁹ and thousands of women were themselves detained and tortured—women and leftist politicians skillfully appealed to tradition when the content of their political message failed to garner widespread attention and support. Furthermore, the new political and economic reality that accompanied neoliberalization in Chile—which made it harder for families to subsist on a single income and forced many men to take several, lower-paying jobs—made women increasingly visible as de facto heads of households in crisis (Stern, 2006: 273; Tinsman, 2004: 272).

In blockading the island, Chilotes were performing a complicated double-move to force government officials to hear their demands. They were simultaneously mobilizing discourses that drew on their unique identity within Chile and their historical connection to the sea and discourses that appealed to Chileans’ shared memory of moments in which “respectable women” were forced to take political action because of bad or abusive governance. The slogan, “they only care about us for our curanto,” referenced the former, but the rallying cry, “Chiloé is deprived,” referenced the latter. Performing scarcity for the television cameras as the blockade stretched into its second week, it was the female Chilotes—more than their husbands and sons—who transformed the Chilean populace into a nation of witnesses who could “be in solidarity with those who suffered even when their suffering could not be ended” (Calhoun, 2010: 36).

In several cases, communities and civil society groups in other regions actively tried to alleviate the suffering of the Chilotes they saw on the nightly news. In Las Condes, a wealthy comuna (district) in Santiago that is home to multinational banks and the gated houses of their managers, the mayor announced that the community had taken up a collection and that a truck filled with lentils, cooking oil, soup, pasta, Nescafe, toilet paper, and other staples would be making its way down to the town of Quellón on the big island of Chiloé. Never mind that any number of cities with well-stocked supermarkets were infinitely closer to the archipelago than Las Condes; its citizens, in the words of Mayor Francisco de la Maza Chadwick,¹⁰ “wanted to help.”

This kind of response, of individual comunas and civil society organizations collecting supplies to send to those affected by a crisis, is not unusual when those affected are the victims of a natural disaster such as an earthquake or a volcanic eruption. It is, however, unusual when the victims have been affected by an environmental disaster to which state policies and industrial negligence were contributing factors—particularly when the industry involved is seen as a driver of the national economy. The solidarity expressed by wealthy residents of Las Condes with working-class islanders on Chiloé is a testament to how images of empty pots and supermarket shelves broadcast up and down the country represented a call to action among Chileans across the political spectrum.

Putting a price on pollution

On the morning of 14 May, Luis Cespedes, Chile’s Economic Minister, stood in front of nearly a dozen television cameras to announce another meeting with protestors. When government officials announced the fishing ban, they had promised that fishermen from the archipelago who were properly registered with SERNAPESCA would receive $100,000 pesos (US$150) per month for 3 months. This underwhelming compensation was part of the reason the fishermen had mobilized in the first place (Daughters, 2016a: 64). Now, 2 weeks into the blockade, they were back at the negotiating table with state officials. Protestors’ demands included improved regulations on aquaculture operators in the waters around the archipelago, the removal of the militarized police that had been deployed to deal with demonstrators, greater monetary compensation for their lost livelihoods, and assurance that this compensation would go to the “right” people. Several of the protestors expressed concern that some of their fellow islanders would receive compensation even though they did not participate in fishing or its associated sectors.

Officials at SERNAPESCA were also concerned about money going to the wrong people, but they acknowledged that not all of the fishermen who operated in the islands were registered. Chile’s caletas, the smallest official production unit within the artisanal fishing sector (Fernández Carrasco and Pozo Menéndez, 2013), are actually administered by the Chilean navy rather than SERNAPESCA (Aburto et al., 2009: 647). Furthermore, according to fishermen, because registration requires so many trámites (bureaucratic procedures) much of the information that appears in the SERNAPESCA database—from registered boats to catches to the addresses of fishing families—is out of date.

This highlights an important part of this story: the government bureaucrats dealing with the contamination of the fishery and the subsequent protests were working under challenging and altogether new circumstances. As one state official complained, referring to this and previous crises that rocked the aquaculture industry and required state mediation, “it is insane that we only make changes during these crises!” Because the red tide and its effects were unprecedented—even for a country where environmental disasters are commonplace—state agents had to implement what social geographer Alison Mountz has called “policy on the fly” (Mountz, 2010: 74).

While state agents’ primary objective was the reopening of the archipelago so that the factories located there could resume processing unaffected salmon from south of the “Catastrophe Zone”—the Chilean aquaculture industry had lost US$80 million by May 10 (Marín, 2016)—also had to deal with the wall-to-wall media coverage the crisis was receiving. This “visual evidence” of the situation on Chiloé “precipitated the construction of a crisis in a way that other mechanisms could not” (Hier and Greenberg, 2002: 493).

This was the context in which Cespedes announced the latest round of talks in Puerto Montt on 14 May. By 9 o’clock that evening, state officials announced that they had reached an agreement with representatives from all but one of the comunas on the large island of Chiloé (Ancud, at the northern tip of the island, was the lone holdout). According to the agreement, registered fishermen and their families would receive an initial payment of $300,000 pesos (US$440) and $150,000 pesos (US$220) each month for the following 3 months, raising their total financial compensation to $750,000 Chilean pesos (roughly US$1110). Fishermen who had never registered with SERNAPESCA and were therefore not automatically enrolled could apply to receive compensation through the Ministerio de Desarrollo Social (Ministry of Social Development). By May 16, the ferries to and from Chiloé were crossing once more, and many of the fish processing factories on the island had been reopened. Although tensions between fishermen, state officials, and aquaculture operators remained high, at least for the time being, the fishermen had gotten what they wanted.

Conclusion

Chilotes have long held an identity distinct from that of mainland Chileans. As Daughters (2016a) has argued, the cultural dimension of local identity “is a key motivator for islanders and helps explain their broad support for the protests despite food shortages and other hardships” (p. 65). This certainly seems likely—there was broad support on the islands of Chiloé for the fishermen and their families, and the protests continued even as supplies dwindled. However, this distinct identity alone could not generate significant support from citizens in other parts of the country. Chilote artists and activists have mobilized local symbols and traditions to challenge the displacement of fishermen since the arrival of the aquaculture industry in the 1980s (Hayward, 2011: 106) including during the relatively recent ISA crisis (Cid Aguayo and Barriga, 2016) but while these protests have led to increased scrutiny of the aquaculture sector, until 2016 they failed to garner widespread support or government compensation for those citizens affected by its rapid expansion.

What was it that made the crisis of 2016 different? Certainly islanders’ blockade of processing facilities caused significant financial losses for the aquaculture industry, and the firms with plants in the archipelago would have pressured the government to reach an agreement with protestors in order to reopen their factories as quickly as possible.

However, as I have argued here, the broad support protestors received from Chileans across the political spectrum—and who were geographically distant from the red tides and their consequences—was also critical in bringing government officials to the table and in getting greater, if still insufficient, compensation for Chilote fishermen and their families. This was done not through an emphasis on the ways that Chilotes were different from their fellow citizens, but rather through a collapsing of their differences from Chileans living elsewhere. Images broadcast on television of empty shelves and women waiting in line for food on Chiloé activated collective memory of previous, national political crises and shortages. Through these “iconic templates” (Calhoun, 2010: 33) broadcast night after night, those directly affected by the government’s fishing ban became “victims” and those watching on television became “witnesses.”

In their 2010 paper, Barton and Fløysand predicted that “the [2008-2010 ISA] crisis marks a turning point in the industry” and that “new legislation and inspection regimes will create a new structure of aquaculture governance” (p. 739). This clearly did not happen. Even in the wake of the events of May 2016, it seems likely that the aquaculture industry’s “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2003) will continue in southern Chile and that fishermen will continue to be marginalized by aquaculture firms whose financial power yields significant political influence. Furthermore, buyouts for those made vulnerable by state policies or environmental devastation have become an increasingly common tool of statecraft in Chile (Thomas, 2016). This kind of financial compensation—typically provided by the Ministerio de Desarrollo Social—acts as a means for the state to incorporate rather than repress insurgency and subversion (Papadopulous et al., 2008: 8). In this sense, the financial compensation given to fishermen on Chiloé was not unprecedented, but simply another example of the government’s “typical” response to this kind of demonstration.

And yet the fishermen nearly tripled their compensation through their successful blockade. Their “catastrophization from below” recast a regional environmental crisis as a national humanitarian crisis in part by appealing to their fellow citizens’ collective memory of this kind of crisis and its effects on Chilean families. In so doing, the protestors on Chiloé appealed to the historical responsibility of the Chilean state to mitigate the suffering it inflicted through political failures,¹¹ regardless of whether these failures originated on the right or the left. Furthermore, by casting the unfolding environmental crisis in humanitarian terms, Chilote families avoided a repeat of the state response to the 2007–2010 ISA crisis, in which limited environmental regulations—beneficial to the continued growth of the industry—were implemented without accompanying labor protections or concessions for displaced families (Cid Aguayo and Barriga, 2016: 85–86).

“In late modernity,” Ophir (2010) writes, “there are no more natural disasters, because catastrophization is always socially and politically mediated” (p. 60). As the hollowing out of states continues—whether the result of austerity measures implemented in the wake of financial crises or as part of right-wing efforts to eliminate environmental regulations and protections in the name of economic development—citizens’ ability to demonstrate that “natural” disasters are actually anthropogenic in origin will be increasingly important. This is already evident in the increasing frequency with which states and politicians identify emergencies and crises to justify unpopular policies¹² and the corresponding explosion of viral images highlighting the “innocent victims” of these very policies. The so-called “energy crisis” has been used to justify the expanded extraction of oil and natural gas and the shrinking of protected areas, even as the extraction of these resources devastates landscapes and contaminates the drinking water upon which nearby communities depend. Although official declarations of “states of emergency” and “catastrophe zones” have been used to justify state policies of exclusion for centuries, the use of media¹³ to create and propagate a discourse of images that facilitate emergency claims by those impacted by ecological devastation is relatively new. Given that the expulsions generated by the needs of capital appear likely to continue if not accelerate, this “catastrophization from below,” in which citizens and civil society organizations define events as “emergencies” that require political action and financial compensation, demands consideration.

The Chilotes who took to the streets of Castro and Ancud in 2016 discursively constructed the unfolding environmental crisis as a humanitarian emergency by asserting—and then demonstrating—that “Chiloé is deprived!” The extensive news coverage of the situation on the archipelago mobilized other Chileans around the country to participate in this discursive construction, to side with the protestors, and to send aid to the islands. As Chile takes halting steps to reduce the environmental impacts of its export-oriented industries, the events of May 2016 provide a model for citizens to call attention to these industries’ abuses and to make it increasingly expensive for the state to ignore those affected.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the feedback I received on an earlier draft of this paper when I participated in a panel at the SECOLAS Annual Conference held at UNC, Chapel Hill in March 2017. I would like to thank our discussant, Arturo Escobar, panel organizers Paolo Bocci and Samantha King, as well as Peter Redfield for sharing his insights while the events described in this paper were unfolding. I also wish to express my appreciation for John Pickles and Florence Babb, both of whom read early drafts and made suggestions that I have attempted to honor here. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the insights of Michaeline Crichlow and several anonymous reviewers at Cultural Dynamics for their feedback, which I have sought to incorporate.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research for this paper was made possible through a Thomas J. Ferdinand Summer Research Fellowship from the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Notes

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