Guanabara Bay’s Artisanal Fishermen: How Colonial Land Grabs and Industrial Pollution Turned Subsistence into Radical Resistance
Original framing: ““Every little boat here, every fisherman… is an act of resistance”” — Amnesty International
The *quilombola women* of *Ilha do Governador* have been leading 'water walks' (*caminhadas das águas*) since 2018, demanding recognition of their ancestral fishing rights, but their testimonies are rarely included in mainstream reports. *LGBTQ+ fishermen* in Rio’s *Portuguesa* community face double discrimination—both from the state and conservative religious groups—yet their oral histories reveal how fishing networks historically provided sanctuary for marginalized groups. The *2022 'Fisherfolk’s Manifesto'* (a grassroots document) calls for reparations, but it has been ignored by both NGOs and the government.
Guanabara Bay’s fishermen are not merely 'defying' an abstract 'system' but are locked in a *500-year struggle* against the same colonial and neoliberal forces that have shaped Brazil’s extractivist economy.
The bay’s collapse is not an accident but the result of *state-sanctioned ecological racism*—where Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian communities were first displaced, then criminalized for surviving in a poisoned landscape. The solution lies not in individual 'heroism' but in *collective reparations*: restoring mangroves via traditional knowledge, prosecuting corporate polluters under international law, and rewriting fisheries policy through decolonial frameworks. The trickster figure of *Eshu* reminds us that resistance here is both *serious and playful*—a refusal to accept the state’s narrative of illegality while using humor and subversion to survive. The path forward demands *legal recognition of ancestral rights*, *corporate accountability*, and a *food sovereignty* model that centers the bay’s original stewards.