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Law and Order
It was about three in the morning, and by far the most powerful force operating on me was the desire to go back to sleep—anywhere, and as soon as humanly possible. But along the darkness of the sea wall, I remember noticing that our companions had guns. Big guns. I suppose that there is really nothing unusual about a police officer having a gun, and I was pretty sure that these men were police officers. Still, three guys in fatigues with semi-automatic weapons give off a starkly different impression than a city cop with a holstered pistol. I guess I just haven't seen a policeman with a grenade launcher before. If not for the PNP (Philippine National Police) written on one of their shirts, I would have just as easily believed that these guys were paramilitary, or maybe members of the rebel NPA. Even in my sleep-deprived stupor, I was struck by the image of them passing the guns onboard, standing thigh deep in the inky water of the early morning darkness.
I woke up a little after dawn, just as the sun began to warm us. We were far out in the Polillo strait, easily 10 km from land, and the sea had become rough enough to occasionally kick spray into the boat. The water itself wasn't unpleasant, but its unpredictable shock made sleep difficult, and I begrudgingly abandoned any attempt at it. I moved to the edge of the bangka, which was much larger than any I had been on before. Maybe 10 meters long and one-and-a-half across at its widest, it was stable enough to have narrow bamboo decks along the side. And unlike with previous (and subsequent) bangkas, the shifting weight of a single person had minimal effect. This offered a welcome freedom of movement, even if there was really nowhere to go.
There were maybe 10 of us on the boat, and after an hour of wordless motoring, we docked briefly near the town of Panakulan to take a few more on board. This was a multi-purpose voyage. From the ISO, Danny and I were here to do research on law enforcement, the two program team members were conducting regular business, and Carrie, the newest staff member, was here to report back on what the rest of us were doing. All of us were, in turn, catching a ride with the regional “Integrated Patrolling Team.” The IPT is a mix of volunteer and professional law enforcement brought about largely through the support and agitation of ISO. They have jurisdiction over the entire expanse of Lamon Bay—which spans hundreds of square kilometers—covering nine municipalities and all of the water between them. It is, almost by definition, an impossible job for a single, under-funded team. Combining our two trips helped to spread what funds there were a little farther.
While waiting for a few more members of the patrolling team, we all shared a breakfast of donated, expired, instant Yakisoba. We compensated for a lack of utensils by cutting some woody reeds into chopsticks, laughing at our rather silly improvisation. I sat on the side of the boat, relishing the moment. My legs dangled into the wonderfully cool water and I tried to make out the details of the bottom, perhaps six or eight feet down. Soon, I noticed Yakisoba wrappers and foil top lids floating by, as well as the occasional cigarette. I also realized that the bottom was similarly littered with the occasional plastic bag, mixed in with rocks and corals. That we, of all groups, were contributing to this seemed particularly ironic. I mentioned the irony to Carrie, who had somehow become a confidant of my more wry and caustic observations. Then I made a few attempts to grab the closest debris and almost fell overboard in the process. Of course, when it came to actually confronting the issue by saying something to the members of the IPT, I did nothing.
In Bordeos, our final destination, we parted ways with the boat and patrolling team. We established ourselves at the house of the municipal agriculturalist; they went patrolling.
The next time we encountered the members of the IPT was a couple of days later, on a last-minute summons to the local police office, adjacent to the city hall. Someone had made a comment about interviewing, so we gathered all of our tape recorders and cameras and made our way to the city hall. Tacked onto the back of the two-story city hall building, the police station was little more than a single office with a weedy, gated courtyard. On the door was a small sticker that roughly translated to, “This office is against the practice of extracting bribes.” It may not be a coincidence that Filipino has a specific word for “the practice of extracting bribes.”
Most of the IPT was milling around the courtyard. On one side, the most paramilitary looking officer—the one with the grenade launcher attachment, full fatigues, and a ski hat—was cleaning and assembling his gun. By the station entrance was a cardboard box filled with grey plastic bottles. Ling, the head ISO staff member, asked me to take a picture of it. It seemed like a pretty boring picture, but I obliged. As I was snapping away, one of the non-police members of the IPT began to pull the squirt bottles out of the box. They were followed by dozens of small plastic bags, each filled with a lump of white powder, about the size of a child's fist. They called it “sodium,” which turned out to be an abbreviation, since sodium tends to come bonded to another ion. In this case, cyanide.
The IPT had evidently had a “good” morning, apprehending seven cyanide fishers on four separate boats. Five of those fishers were just inside the station, sitting on a bench under the window. They had a tape recorder thrust in their direction, and as I entered the room, a video camera followed me. The oldest man might have been around fifty, the youngest couldn't have been older than sixteen. Several of them looked resigned and frustrated. The eyes of the man in the corner were deeply bloodshot and seemed to burn with antipathy. The youngest just sat with his head in his hands, looking like a teenager about to face his parents after being busted for drinking, or pot, or a similar teenage transgression.
I wasn't sure exactly why I had been summoned. It was either to take photos or to ask questions (maybe both), and either way, I wasn't comfortable. Hanging from my neck, my camera felt gigantic and obtrusive, and I wished that it could magically disappear.
Instead, I was invited to join the interview. Over the past few months, I had been consistently commenting on how important it was to understand illegal fishers' views on law enforcement, and now, they seemed to suggest, was my chance to ask them directly. Somehow, the police station didn't seem like the ideal venue. I tried to express my discomfort, but I had trouble finding the appropriate or diplomatic words. I don't think that I did very well, but something must have been communicated, and I was promptly assured that the fishers had agreed to be interviewed. I tried to think of a question that would indicate empathy and curiosity, rather than condemnation or voyeurism. I couldn't come up with anything, so instead I focused on trying to understand the details of the situation and searched for an expression that might communicate my desire to make these men's situation no more degrading than it must already have felt.
After a while, the fishermen began to look increasingly irritated, and the two who had been talking to us stopped responding. The man in the corner continued his angry, bloodshot glare, and the younger boy maintained his look of tortured shame. It was clearly time for me to go. Outside the station, the IPT wanted to pose with us for a picture and this time I obliged, though still rather ruefully. It took me a few days to settle in on the metaphor, but it felt like the kind of photo that might have been taken at the end of a successful game hunt, with everyone smiling around a slain elk or bear. In this case, thought, the catch was thankfully allowed to remain inside the police station.
I left the scene feeling very uneasy. It's not that I'm a big fan of cyanide fishing, but there was something that felt off about the whole situation. I kept trying to put myself in the shoes of the detained fishermen, to imagine how the whole experience must have felt to them. I don't expect that there was anything that could have made it pleasurable—they had, after all, just been arrested and had their boats confiscated. Anger and bitterness might have been nearly inevitable responses. Perhaps there isn't much value in considering what things look like from their perspective.
But of course there is, and for several reasons. The biggest may simply be that these fishermen are the demographic that ISO is trying to help. For many environmental NGOs, the focus is on protecting the resource—the corals, the fish species, the mangroves. Helping the people who depend on these resources often enters only as an afterthought or as a practical measure (since these people are often the ones damaging the resource). Sometimes it doesn't enter the equation at all. But for ISO, the logic is reversed. ISO is not so much an environmental group as a religious, social-justice group that has traced the problem back to the environment. They are out to help the fishermen and protecting the environment is a logical consequence of this intention, rather than the other way around. That logic (except for maybe the religious part) was precisely what drew me to ISO. So if we are to help the fishers, it seems as if there is a practical and ethical obligation to think about how they see the situation, even if these particular men are engaged in the destruction of their resources.
In fact, there is a special need to understand their perspective because they are the ones actively destroying their resources. Not only are they part of the general group that we are trying to help, but they are also part of the smaller subgroup whose behaviors we need to help change. That's the whole reason that we are supporting the IPT, whose job it was to arrest them. And ethical questions aside, we might not have to worry about illegal fishers' opinions if the IPT could simply catch all of them. One of the detained fishers told us that this was the first time he had been caught in the course of 10 years of cyanide fishing. So with odds like that, understanding the impressions that fishers have of law enforcement starts to become pretty important.
And so with five men sitting inside the Bordeos police station, I can't help but wonder: What did they think of us, of the IPT, of the whole situation? I don't know, but the looks on their faces weren't encouraging. I can't think of a single person who wants to admit to being the bad guy, so I imagine that they were looking for reasons to feel like victims. My fear is that we gave them plenty of such reasons. It doesn't help that Philippine National Police have quite a reputation for corruption. Sitting in these fishers' place, I expect that I would have rationalized that the police were simply serving themselves rather than the public good. “This wasn't a case of right and wrong,” I would have thought, “but of lucky and unlucky.”
Maybe no amount of professionalism could have countered that sort of opinion. Still, I had a lingering fear that our circus of photos and microphones only served as fodder for such rationalizations. Or worse yet, perhaps they suggested that a more cynical view of law enforcement was actually well founded. Maybe this really was more of a case of luck than of moral high-ground.
Whatever my sympathies towards these fishers' might have been, a visit to the confiscated boats the next morning reminded me of the environmental realities. The four bangkas were in quarantine a few hundred meters out into Bordeos Bay. Two of them were tiny, single-man bangkas, more like undersized canoes with outriggers than anything else. They had been stripped of their outriggers and hauled onboard the larger boats. Bangkas are beautiful and graceful boats, but these were so small and simply made that they seemed slightly pathetic. If anything, seeing these boats increased my sympathies for the detained fishers. Never mind that there were countless equally poor fishers who refrained from fishing with cyanide—it still felt like we were picking on the little guy.
The next confiscated boat seriously complicated that impression. It was not more richly adorned but was much larger, maybe 30 feet long. The entire surface of the boat was covered in long, thin tubing that looked like slightly green spaghetti. There was a massive, rusty oxygen tank lashed across the center of the boat, both ends extending over the water. Farther back and set into the hull was the motor. But instead of running only to the drive shaft, a thick rubber belt connected this rusting contraption to another one. The second contraption turned out to be an air compressor. Finally, and with some helpful nods of affirmation, I pieced the whole thing together. This boat was a serious cyanide fishing operation. It had several drivers, and rather than making brief dives from the surface, they could stay under indefinitely, breathing compressed air pumped through hundreds of feet of tubing—a sort of poor man's SCUBA gear. As the improvised plywood fins reminded me, these fishers were hardly high-rollers. Still, this was a much bigger, more technical operation than the smaller boats, requiring a serious investment in breaking the law and destroying the environment. My emotional response was much less sympathetic.
The situation did not get any simpler over the next 24 hours. The IPT apparently got in an argument with the local police about who would get credit for the arrests. The police decided that if they weren't going to get anything out of them, they weren't going to help either, and they refused to house the fishers in the municipal jail. Eventually, it was decided that the best course of action was to take the offenders to the regional jail in Mauban, about six hours away by bangka. The IPT didn't really have a better option, but I doubt that the lack of coordination made them seem any more legitimate in the eyes of the fishers, who would now be held so much further from home.
I don't know what became of the men when they went to Mauban. And more importantly, I don't know what will become of them after they return. Will they return to cyanide fishing, or some other destructive practice? What will they go away thinking of the police, or of ISO, or of the efforts of any outside NGO? What will their neighbors think, or their children?
I'm not terribly optimistic about the answers to these questions. And while I can definitely think of things that might have been done differently, I'm not really sure that there is anything that we or the IPT could have done to significantly change those answers. The conflict, or maybe the contradiction, seems to run much deeper.
We are trying to help people by policing them. We are the ones standing there with guns, saying that we are only doing this for their own good. And especially in a place where no one even begins to think that the government is looking after the common good, that seems like a particularly tough sell.
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