“Fed up with lies”

Madrid - “Amongst Galicians in the fishing industry, the general feeling is that Spanish society has been punished for crimes it did not commit. They were all acquitted? Can’t you see that we’re the ones being treated like criminals? We’ll be the ones to pay for the damage, while the elites are protected”. Natxo Castro, who manages the fishermen’s cooperative of Muxía, a fishing village on the Costa da Morte in Galicia, Spain, which was “ground zero” for the Prestige oil spill, is sitting in a bar called Wimpa, in the port, listening to the radio as the verdict in the environmental case is handed down. It’s been 11 years since the worst natural disaster in the history of Europe, and the court has acquitted the only 3 people ever charged in the case. The captain of the supertanker, Prestige, was sentenced to 9 months in prison for “non-compliance”, and then his sentence was suspended because of age. Resignation, bordering on indifference, is the prevalent feeling among sailors and percebeiros [i.e. shellfish collectors], about this long-awaited - and feared - verdict. Many feel that the verdict was politicized.

“In this period in our history we have experienced two episodes of pollution, one physical, and the other moral, the Popular Party Government has fed us so many lies”, recalls writer Manuel Rivas, one of the promoters of the “Nunca Mais” (Never Again) movement, which brought the lawsuit. It is clear that along the 1,700 km of coast from Portugal to the South of Spain, which was polluted by 77 thousand tons of oil, no one will forget the tragedy: “The fishermen came back covered in ‘chapapote’ (a mixture of sand and crude oil, NDR) up to their mouths”, remembers Juanco, a fisherman from Vigo Ria. “It was a nightmare, with thousands of volunteers breaking their backs to clean the beaches with their bare hands - and the beaches turned black again the next day because of the tide”, recalls Pitu Pineiro with tears of gratitude in his eyes. Pineiro works at a fishing cooperative in La Coruña. “We couldn’t fish for years. For example, the crabs had vanished, and it took three or four years for them to come back to our rocky coastlines”, he added. And this profoundly injust sentence is driving him mad: «I just don’t understand how commonsense justice can be denied to such an extent». The more than 4 million Euros in environmental and economic damages established by the court’s examination , which will not be paid because no one is being held responsible, do not even begin to account for the full dimensions of the catastrophe.

“In 2002 and 2003, all the marine ecosystems were transformed”, says Victoriano Urgorri, the Director of the Marine Biology Station at El Ferrol and a member of the scientific committee created after the incident. “There was a lethal effect on all the organisms that came into contact with the black tide. The ‘chapapote’ killed any organism that it came into contact with, and damaged the reproductive patterns of many species for years”. However, the mobilization of thousands of Galicians and other volunteers to remove the contaminated sand helped to reduce the long-term damage. “The ecosystem had recovered only five or six years after the incident, there have been no chronic or persistent effects, and one can say that 99% of the consequences of the Prestige oil spill have disappeared”.

Nevertheless, no government body and no public health system has ever taken on the challenge of investigating the possible effects of the incident on the health of the population. Among the few studies on the subject is Blanca Laffon’s work. Laffon is a researcher at the University of La Coruña who has arrived at some troubling conclusions: “People who were exposed to the toxic tide have mutations in their DNA which could constitute a risk for their health, because they increase the probability of cancer”.