Argentinian Milko Schvartzman has studied foreign fishing fleets for more than 20 years. He defines himself as a marine conservationist, but through his research and investigation, he has uncovered instances of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing that officials have either willingly overlooked or simply missed.
According to Schvartzman, significant human rights abuses, such as slave-like wage withholding and imprisonment, physical and mental abuse, hazardous working conditions, and denial of health care when a crew member falls ill and needs medical attention, occur on deepwater fishing vessels off the coast of South America. When these ships need to unload a dead crew member, more often than not they do it at Uruguay’s Montevideo port, where Schvartzman said officials frequently turn a blind eye.
SeafoodSource talked with Schvartzman – who has collaborated on illegal fishing and human rights issues with numerous organizations, including Greenpeace, C4ADS, the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), Global Fishing Watch, the Pew Foundation, Oceana, and Interpol – to find out more about what he’s discovered in his research.
This is the first of a two-part series regarding the lack of transparency at the Montevideo port and the fishing fleets that take advantage of it.
SeafoodSource: How did you first get involved in tracking IUU practices?
Schvartzman: I began working at Greenpeace Argentina in 1999 after serving several years as a volunteer. In 2012, two Korean fishing boats involved in IUU practices entered Argentinian waters – on the border of the exclusive economic zone – and they docked at Montevideo. At that time, the first satellite vessel tracking systems were starting to be used [and] some of us at Greenpeace had access to that platform.
I had followed illegal fishing somewhat since 2001 – pre-internet – by saving some newspaper cuttings. With access to the platform, I started to follow this more closely, specifically what ships they were and where they came from. I wrote some articles about these ships docking in Montevideo and continued investigating. Around the same time, I began to see some articles being written about human rights abuses covering how crew members jumped overboard to escape the squalid living conditions on board. That really called my attention; many of them died of hypothermia.
In Montevideo, up to five or six ships a year would catch fire. These were intentional or due to fights, which was very strange. I have a file of all the fires over the last 20 to 30 years in Montevideo, and many of those vessels already had a dubious record; they would burn them down to collect the insurance. Now, Montevideo has a cemetery of ships; they’re down to about two ships burned a year, but it all has to do with the living conditions on board that involve semi-slave labor.
I started to focus on those human rights abuses. There was a Chinese ship called Jia De 1 from which 28 African crew members escaped in 2014 and denounced the abuses they suffered in Montevideo. It was emblematic because they stated that they had to work with shackles on their ankles.
I got to know the cases and the people escaping from the vessels. These are not just about abuse but people being abandoned and not being provided medical attention when they’re sick or ailing and end up dying – deaths that are completely avoidable.
SeafoodSource: Did the recent case of the message in a bottle found in Uruguay bring more international attention to the issue?
Schvartzman: The message in the bottle case didn’t surprise me at all, I hear about this all the time. I also have informants at the port of Montevideo – cases where the government doesn’t register a ship when they drop off an ailing crew member and then escape. Some cases are on public record from the Uruguayan government, but this registry was changed in January of this year and is no longer publicly accessible. But one dead crew member is unloaded a month at Montevideo, and that figure is based on an official signed letter from [a high-ranking] naval official.
In 2018 and 2019, I was involved in a project in Montevideo called Oceanos Sanos, where the main objective was to stop China from building a USD 256 million [EUR 241 million] fishing port in Montevideo, with which China was planning to double its fleet to 800 from 400 vessels. The port would be a duty-free zone, but we believed that if this port were to be built, the marine ecosystem would be condemned. I practically lived in Montevideo during that time, and we’d ask for information from the government, visiting the port often. I got to know the officials and the people, and I even met with the current president of Uruguay. I got to know the problem from all angles. I also have informants who let me know when a vessel arrives with injured crew members. That’s how I came up with the information that between 2013 and 2018, there were 53 dead crew members unloaded at Montevideo port.
SeafoodSource: What would be normal for other ports in the region for comparison?
Schvartzman: I asked for information from the prefecture of Argentina to compare over several years, and it’s a big difference. There were some years where there were no deaths. Using information from all of the ports in Argentina, and even during the years of Covid, there was just one crew member who died on board. The captain of that ship is now being processed because he didn’t want to bring the sick crew member to port. One other crew member caught Covid and then passed away when he was already hospitalized on land. It’s completely abnormal for a crew member to die.
There’s the case, for example, of the Chinese ship Lu Qing Yuan Yu 206 from which two Filipino crew members escaped in 2017 and denounced the human rights abuses they suffered. Two months later, that ship returned with a dead Indonesian crew member, and a couple of months later, it returned again with another deceased crew member. In 2021, another crew member died on that ship, but he was unloaded via a reefer ship, which is used for transshipment of cargo. I investigated that and found the registries of the transshipment. There are many such cases that they try to cover up.
SeafoodSource: What are the tools you use to conduct your research?
Schvartzman: I have sources at Montevideo port, including union members and the Uruguayan navy. Up until December 2022, all of the entries into Uruguay’s ports were registered online, so you could click on those to access the forms which specified what they were unloading, the name of the vessel, how long they were at port, and an area marked “observations” where they noted if deceased crew members or those who had suffered accidents were registered. From 2014 until 2022, that registry was available and open to the public, but the government changed the format in January this year; the “observations” field was taken off. It now only lists the arrivals in the past 90 days. The historic information was erased, which goes completely against transparency. If you want to access that information, you need to specifically ask for it, and they rarely respond to these requests.
I downloaded the other cases and have them in my computer, but from January onward, that all changed, which we [Greenpeace] denounced. There are a number of government employees against this change, as they know it runs contrary to transparency. You can also follow the fleets via satellite. I use three different platforms, one of which is Global Fishing Watch.
The majority of affected crew members are Indonesian, and so it is often Indonesia’s honorary consulate that responds to their needs, helping them with medical care or repatriating the body [in case of death]. The fishing companies prefer to cremate the deceased so they don’t have to repatriate the body, as it’s more expensive. They also pressure the honorary consulate to not divulge information.
SeafoodSource: Is the lack of official information now the explanation behind the number of deaths falling?
Schvartzman: No, because the number of official deaths that I’ve been able to access started to fall in 2020, 2021, and 2022, which was one death every two months. That has been maintained, but it’s lower than that registered from 2013 to 2018.
Photo courtesy of Milko Schvartzman
