In the first days of other springs, the woman would have returned with her canoe full of fish. But in the last two years misfortunes have fallen like plagues in this neighborhood of artisanal fishermen. In mid-2019, before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Paraná began an intense process of loss of flow that led to its worst downspout in more than 70 years in 2021.

The reduction in the level of the river, one of the bravest in America, is not only abrupt but prolonged. Among the determining causes for the historic downpour is the rainfall deficit in the Brazilian basins of the Paraná, Uruguay and Iguazú rivers, in a scenario of greater climate variability as a result of global warming and profound changes in land use. by the extension of the agricultural frontier throughout the entire basin.

After analyzing the measurements of the average daily flows of the Paraná over 117 years, from 1905 to 2021, researchers from the National University of Rosario concluded that "the decrease observed in the years 2020 and 2021 can be substantially related to average annual rainfall well below those considered normal in the last period”. This highlights a work presented at the XV Conference on Science, Innovation of the Rosario public university that bears the signatures of Pedro Basile, Gerardo Riccardi and Marina García.

The descent of the last two years has transformed the landscape of the wetlands: the shorelines have widened, exposing the sand and silt that give the river its brown color, and various wonders that had been buried by the water have emerged: fragments of an old bridge in the city of Santa Fe, old anchors near Ramallo and, in the city of Paraná, a hermitage of the Virgin of Guadalupe that had collapsed in early 1991 after a flood.

In the island area, the changes were more startling. Many of the streams and lagoons that depend on the main channel of the river dried up and the fish lost part of their place to reproduce.

The five tarpons that María cleans in the shed of the fishermen's cooperative are another face of the environmental crisis: “The lagoons where we went to look for the fish are dry. On the island now there are sown fields, there are machines, there are vaquitas. Everything is devastated”, says the woman and predicts: “if this continues like this, in two years we will run out of fish”.

resist boards

The Fisherton fishermen's cooperative in the town of Pueblo Esther was born ten years ago. It is made up of 19 people, where women are seven, the majority dedicated to the preparation of food based on fish.

María is in charge of the project, which seeks to add value to the work of the fishermen. In the group there are those who fish, those who clean and debone and those who cook the empanadas, meatballs, milanese or cannelloni that, frozen, they sell at fairs and markets.

"The life of the fisherman and his family is very hard," says Marcela Báez, María's sister-in-law and head chef. The adjective is not enough to summarize the many hours of work outdoors, at night, at dawn, with cold, with rain, with sun, with mosquitoes, with a tired body and the humidity that permeates the bones; No fixed salary or social benefits.

The cooperative was born as an attempt to correct this chain of miseries, to improve the income of the fishermen and, at the same time, take care of the resource of the voracity of the refrigerators that pay little for the fish: even in times of scarcity of offer, like the current one, the remuneration for a kilo of sábalo can reach 100 pesos, up to five times less than what is sold in some supermarkets in the center of the city of Rosario, which are barely enough to buy half a kilo of bread.

The community project became essential as the Paraná reduced its flow. In the winter of 2021, the beautiful and brave river, the second longest in South America after the Amazon, attracted the attention of the Argentine press and international media, such as the New York Times or Al Jazeera.

"The Paraná withers" or "The level of the river collapses" warned in titles that tried to summarize the environmental tragedy that stresses the pulse of this torrent through which, in 2020, 70% of the grains circulated, 96% of vegetable oils and 96% of flours, which account for 37% of agricultural exports from Argentina, according to a report by the Rosario Stock Exchange.

But those numbers are not enough to measure the consequences of the receding waters. For Maria, Marcela and their colleagues from the cooperative, the withdrawal from the river not only hurts their weak economy but also their history, and sows concern about the future.

with cumbia rhythm

To get to the “Bajada Balbi” you have to cross the area of ​​the country houses of Pueblo Esther and pay attention to the signs painted with lime, without much typographical effort, announcing “there is fish”. On weekdays, not a soul circulates through those dirt streets. On Saturdays and Sundays, people go to the beach and cumbia sounds.

On Google maps, the area is listed as Bajada Barbi, but it is not the correct name. The neighborhood bears the surname of “Don Balbi”, one of the first fish collectors in the town, who built his ranch on the vertex that forms the Paraná with the mouth of the Frías stream, an archaeological site where the Carlos brothers arrived in 1907 and Florentino Ameghino with his idea of ​​demonstrating the Pampas origin of humanity. Over time, the place was populated by fishing families, whose houses face the river delta. Currently there are about 50, although not all of them live from fishing.

The geography of that area of ​​the river began to change 20 years ago, when Argentina positioned itself as the main supplier of soybean meal and oil worldwide.

In the steep ravines of this section of the Paraná, the ports of the multinationals Cargill, Louis Dreyfus or Toepfer grew, barge repair industries such as Ultrapetrol, which smoothed out the water's edges, and also gated communities with bucolic names such as Campos de Esther, Land of Dreams or Azahares del Paraná.

Each new venture was celebrated as a sign of progress. But the illusion, they say on the way down Balbi, quickly vanished. "Some of our kids managed to get in to work with the barges, but in three months they were kicked out," some of the fishermen say. It hurt us a lot. He made our fishing ground smaller, forced us to abandon it and run away”.

The "fishing ground" is something like the sacred place of fishermen. It is the area of ​​the river where they can work in peace and cast their nets, without fear of hooking them, breaking them or losing tools. The size of these areas is measured by the time it takes to traverse them with the canoe.

Traditionally, the fishermen of the Balbi descent cast the line over the mouth of the Frías stream after sailing for an hour. But the growth of industries forced them to move further south and shrink the sector, dangerously approaching the edge of the navigation channel, the deepest and most flowing part of the river. "Currently, we have little more than half an hour left on the field," grumbles Barrios.

The women of the descent

María Barrios has brown skin, black eyes and long hair, but she hides it under a white cap while she de-pins fish in the cooperative's shed, a brick building with a sheet metal roof, built by the community itself, which that afternoon smells like bleach The woman came to the Balbi descent when she was a child. More than once, in times of flooding, the river approached a few meters from the building erected without much plan on the ravine.

Now, through the downspout, to get to the Paraná it is not enough to retrace that slope, but you have to advance approximately another 70 meters, sinking your boots into the mud, among tall reeds, fragile willows, aromatic bushes and weeds that occupied the space when the water began to recede, slowly at first, violently this past winter.

Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, the days exempted from the commercial fishing ban extended by the provincial government as a result of the downpour, the woman walks that path to earn a living. In the province of Santa Fe alone there are 4,020 families that depend on fishing and some 1,628 are artisanal fishermen, according to the latest survey by the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change in Santa Fe.

Women are a minority in this universe of hard work. According to that same list, only 85 fisherwomen have commercial fishing permits and another 80, for subsistence - that is, only for their own or family consumption. Traditionally the activity is taught and learned from parents to children. And in this capriciously masculine world, women have other tasks: they are the ones who clean, fish or cook the fish. Not the ones that take it out of the river.

María says that she learned to fish from her father. Although her father never encouraged her, she started fishing to feed her children. If people's stories could be summed up in a series of significant moments, María's would go more or less like this: she At the age of 9 she worked with her mother in a strawberry farm. At the age of 13, she and her brothers were already “sharecroppers”, that is, they cultivated a farm and shared profits with the owners of the land. Later she worked in a factory, just a few months because she never got paid and at 20 she told her father that she was going to start fishing. She rented the canoe from him and went out on the river.

She learned to weave and build nets, to cast them, to cast lines, pots and hooks. She learned the cycles and arrivals of the different fish; she to look for them in the river, in the lagoons of the island and she, especially she -she says- she learned to defend the price of the fish. So, she took charge of the cooperative.

Maria knows by heart the comings and goings of the river. However, she never saw a downspout like the current one.

The flow of the Paraná dances to the rhythm of the rains recorded in its upper basin, especially in southern Brazil, Paraguay and northern Argentina. Those who are in charge of studying these fluctuations have measured lows and highs within the same year, falls in autumn and winter and rises in spring and summer, and also in longer periods, with dry years and wet years. In their favor, these investigations have a long history of records that date back to the construction of the port of Rosario, in the last years of the 19th century.

Photo: Celina Mutti Lovera / The Capital

During the summer of 2020, while the news spoke exclusively of the growth in covid-19 cases, at the Rosario University Center for Hydro-environmental Research (CURIHAM) it began to be noticed that the downspout was running from the usual margins. In the following winter, when the height of the Paraná was below zero for almost a month on the scale used to measure the river in the Rosario port area -while the average height for that time of year, according to the National Water Institute, is three meters - there was no doubt that it was an extraordinary situation.

According to CURIHAM researchers Gerardo Riccardi and Pedro Basile, numerous severe events are included in the history of almost 140 years of measurements of the levels of the Paraná. But since the beginning of the 1970s, the hydrological regime of the river shows a change, with more extreme maximum and minimum values.

The current downspout is comparable to that of the years 1944-45, when two minimum annual limit levels were recorded: at the height of Rosario -1.39 and -0.81 meters were measured, respectively.

For specialists, the variation in the hydrological regime of the river since 1972 is explained by various factors observed in the basin from the 1960s, such as increases in rainfall on a regional scale, deforestation and changes in land use, which contributed to increased runoff in the basin.

One thing is clear: the river of the 44 downspout is no longer the same as the current one. Among other factors, because in seven decades the population of the cities located around it grew, the urbanizations multiplied and also the industries based on its coast, the cultivated hectares in the entire basin and the transit of ships that transport the harvest. Everything changed.

The river in emergency

A week before the end of July 2021, the national government declared a water emergency for the territories located on the banks of the Paraná, Paraguay and Iguazú rivers.

The document, signed by President Alberto Fernández, points out that the rainfall deficit in the upper basins “is one of the determining factors for the current historical downpour, considered the most important in our country in the last SEVENTY-SEVEN (77) years. ”. The capital letter is from the original.

Photo: Celina Mutti Lovera / The Capital

The loss of levels in these channels, the decree continues, can harm "the supply of drinking water, navigation and port operations, the generation of hydroelectric power and the economic activities linked to the exploitation of the Basin."

The area affected by the downspout is not only extensive but extremely diverse. The withdrawal of the waters prints its consequences in seven provinces: Formosa, Chaco, Misiones, Corrientes, Santa Fe, Entre Ríos and Buenos Aires that add up to 809 thousand square kilometers of extension, a third of the continental surface of the country, and 24 million people or more than half of the Argentine population.

For some environmental organizations grouped in the Multisectorial de Humedales, the emergency in the river was declared too late and was leveraged above all by the need for works to adapt the drinking water supply systems and the losses generated in the transport of grains. According to data from the Rosario Stock Exchange, only between January and mid-September 2021, the decrease in the height of the river meant a loss of 620 million pesos in exports of soybean meal and oil. The economy, they warn from that organization, prevailed over the need to protect the environment.

After declaring the emergency, the national government announced that it had begun to negotiate with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) for the possibility of adding 100 million dollars to the 300 million that it had already committed to this year with the agency to deal with events such as floods and earthquakes.

In September, the then chief of the Cabinet of Ministers, Santiago Cafiero, reported that works were authorized through the Water Emergency Fund, which is administered by the National Entity for Water and Sanitation Works (ENOHSA) and involves investments of 1,000 million pesos for the assistance to the affected provinces and localities.

Santa Fe adhered to the water emergency in August, a month after the national decree. But, as indicated by the local Ministry of the Environment, the provincial accounts had not yet received a single peso from the emergency fund at the end of October 2021. “We have already sent all the documentation, with the corresponding requirements, to the Chief of Staff of the Nation. Now we are waiting for the allocation of resources”, they explained.

a summer storm

Micaela Tosco is 24 years old and her eyes are very similar to those of María, her mother. She does not live on the Balbi slope, but in a humble house in the southern area of ​​Rosario. Every morning, she travels an hour by bus to go to work at the cooperative.

She was very young when Maria started fishing and she no longer remembers the first time she accompanied her in the canoe, but she does remember the last time. It was after a summer storm, the kind that forms quickly and comes to land with violence, found them in the middle of the river. The waves were huge, she remembers the young woman. Her mother barely managed to throw her and her brothers on her belly on the floor of the canoe and ask them to cover their eyes. While the woman was fighting the river, she thought that they would not come out, but she managed to tame it and reached the shore. Since then, none of Maria's seven sons have fished with her again.

The memory arrives like a bird at the table where the women turn about ten kilos of minced fish into empanadas, cakes, meatballs, rolls or sausages, all homemade.

Photo: Celina Mutti Lovera / The Capital

In the background, the radio talks about the climate summit in Glasgow. More than 10 thousand kilometers -and many other things- separate Pueblo Esther from that Scottish city, but the concerns are the same. “All of us who are fishermen are aware of what is happening with the climate”, comments María and adds that it is no longer so easy to anticipate the arrivals of species such as tarpon, boga or pacú; and that the time between storms brewing in the sky and rushing down is getting shorter and shorter.

And there is something of that. The fish of the Paraná reproduce the popular saying: the big one eats the small one. At the beginning of this chain is the sábalo, whose eggs and larvae feed other species such as the boga, the surubí or the dorado. But the sábalo requires for its reproduction the natural oscillations of the level of the river and the lagoons of the delta where its offspring develop.

The Biological and Fishery Evaluation of Species of Sports and Commercial Interest (Ebipes) project, in which the National Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries and the provinces of the middle and lower Paraná participate, was conceived in 2005 to improve knowledge about the fishing resources of that area of ​​the river. To determine the state of the situation, studies are periodically carried out on the variety, quantity and size of the species.

The 2021 evaluations indicated that, due to the downspout, there are already two years in which the reproduction of the tarpon was not supernumerary. Gaspar Borra, an environmental lawyer and advisor to the Santa Fe Ministry of the Environment, warns that the situation casts uncertainty on the future of the resource. After two years of very scarce breeding, "we have to see what happens this summer because, although the river is rising, the projections are not very encouraging and, if the flows remain low, this would not be a good breeding season either."

That is why, says Borra, measures were put in place to reduce fishing pressure, prohibiting the catch on certain days and limiting the fish export quota. In 2019, the Argentine coast exported 18 thousand tons of tarpon. That year, all the coastal provinces (Entre Ríos, Santa Fe, Corrientes and Chaco) agreed to lower the export quota by one third. "For there to be fish tomorrow, there must be fish today," Borra points out, but in any case stresses that the environmental variable cannot be dissociated from the social or the economic. “There are communities that subsist from the river for cultural reasons. We have to find the balance,” he adds.

Biodiversity

Some 200 species of fish live in the Paraná with a "unique" dynamic in the world, due to its ability to adapt to the irregular flows of drought and flooding of the river. If you look at all this wealth, not only in fish of commercial interest, "it can be said that very little is known about what happens in the river," says Andrés Sciara, dean of the Faculty of Biochemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences from the National University of Rosario and specialist in Biotechnology applied to aquaculture of native species.

In this confusion, there are already species that have practically disappeared from these coasts. The pacú is a clear example: many fishermen in the area do not even identify it, they confuse it with palometas or piranhas. The same happens with the manguruyú, one of the largest fish in the basin. At least one scientific study also shows the vulnerability of some rays, especially the giant river ray, affected by accidental overfishing and habitat loss.

Vanina Villanova is a doctor in Biological Sciences, a researcher at Conicet and the Joint Aquatic Biotechnology Laboratory that works at the Paraná River Aquarium in Rosario, and every so often the fishermen bring her catches that are strange to them. The last one was, precisely, a baby manguruyú, which her captor considered an exotic species.

The scientist explains that the fish fauna is a resource to take care of stressed by fishing, whether it is large-scale for export, incidental or sport. The modifications that occur in their environment, such as the dredging of the river and the modification of the watercourses on the islands, conspire against the good health of the species.

"Although the dynamics of these fish allow them to avoid the river's downspouts, now we also have a greater human activity of all kinds: pollution, fishing, transportation, change of land use in wetlands and ditches that affect the entire chain" , says the expert.

Specialists consider that a good practice to preserve these species is the conservation of natural areas -especially in the areas where the fish reproduce- and also the control of export quotas. Some suggest eliminating the international sale of freshwater fish as another preservation tool. "These are measures that have a political cost and are a bit drastic, but we should think about them," says Villanova.

"I wouldn't trade my life for anything"

In February 2005, the first meeting of the Provincial Fisheries Council was held, an organization with the participation of 20 people, representatives of the legislative chambers, provincial, municipal and community officials, collectors, refrigerators, tourism entrepreneurs, sport fishing clubs, NGOs, universities and regional fisheries committees. The fishermen also sit at that table, which meets about six times a year to analyze the reality of the sector.

Photo: Celina Mutti Lovera / The Capital

The descent of the Paraná and its consequences on fishing was the "great" topic of the last meetings where, María points out, they can discuss as equals with biologists and politicians. "To be there we had to learn, a lot to prepare, and little by little we are making ourselves heard," she says, and assures that the voices of the river workers enrich the debate.

Traditionally, she affirms, "we fishermen have been persecuted for everything that happens in the Paraná." However, she points out that the real estate pressure on the coastal land, the dredging of the river, the intense traffic of ships or the use of pesticides is what damages the river. "We fishermen always appear as the only ones to blame for everything," María complains. Micaela and Marcela share the anger.

"I wouldn't change my life for anything anyway," says María, and she shows a tattoo that she wears proudly with the image of a beautiful goldfish jumping over the water. She stamped it on her buttock a few years ago, when she turned 40 and rheumatism and asthma pushed her to stop fishing.

But she, she says that the river keeps calling her, that the water calms her. And that later came the downspout, that many fishermen left the river to do other odd jobs and that the cooperative began to lack fish. She still couldn't stop fishing.

This story is part of "Territorios y Resistencias", the federal and collaborative investigation of Chicas Poderosas Argentina, which was carried out between October and December 2021, with the support of the United States Embassy in Argentina, by a team of more than 35 women and LGBTTQI+ people from all over the country in a collaborative way.