The last fishing trip of the "Nddanddu" in January might have gone unnoticed like so many others . But videos recorded by the crew themselves on their cell phones, and which SOMU ended up releasing, exposed the exact mechanics of industrial predation.

José Rodríguez , the ship's first fisherman, decided to break the silence: " We made four hauls a day of about 300 crates each. We threw in more than 3,000 crates of hake to collect 80 crates of squid," he told Puerto magazine.

The order, which came down from the shipowner through the captain, was unequivocal: only squid in the crates . For three days, while the ice melted and the cold chain became unsustainable, the crew simply followed the directive.

Throwing hake back into the sea became routine. Rodríguez estimates that some 90 tons of the Argentine Sea's most precious resource ended up as food for seabirds, while on land, with nutritional deficiencies affecting large sectors of the population, that fish could have fed thousands of families.

When the first fisherman decided to stand his ground and demand to return to port, the company's response was to attempt to forcibly disembark them. The videos then became the workers' only shield. The Secretary General of the SOMU union in Mar del Plata was tasked with disseminating the evidence, waiting for the opportune moment since the fishermen of the "Nddanddu" hadn't even received their wages.

A model without oversight

Article 21 of the Federal Fisheries Law is explicit in its subsections c and m and o : it prohibits fishing methods, techniques, and gear that threaten the sustainability of the resource, discarding bycatch at sea, and any practice that undermines responsible fishing. However, miles offshore, the regulations seem to dissolve into the vastness of the South Atlantic.

The National Directorate of Fisheries Coordination and Control , when consulted about the case, asked for time to "look into" what happened and never responded again. The unloading report prepared by the dock inspector, which the press obtained, makes no mention of the sock that appears in the videos. There is also no record of the 90 tons of fish dumped into the water.

Chubut decided to revoke the 1,000-ton social quota allocated to the Santander Group , owners of the "Nddanddu," although the vessel continues to operate from Mar del Plata using quotas transferred from other ships belonging to the same company. Meanwhile, companies in Santa Cruz have already requested that provincial authorities not allocate their social quotas to vessels belonging to the group in question.