Chimbote in the Blue Revolution, 1940-1980

Abstract

This paper looks at how the export-led growth and dependent development pursued by Peruvian politicians and capitalists produced a new nature in Chimbote. Starting in 1955, Peruvians extracted incalculable wealth from its ocean, and erected the world's largest fishing industry, centered on the production of fishmeal, a high-protein hog- and chicken-feed additive. Two decades of unrestrained exploitation of the country's natural resources and unregulated industrialization produced an ecological catastrophe in Chimbote, the center of the fishmeal industry. In 1940, it had been a serene village of 4,000; thirty years later it had become the world’s biggest fishing port, a ‘tragic city’ in which some 200,000 people lived amid thirty disturbingly polluting fishmeal processing factories. The once clear and fecund bay had become a cesspool of industrial and human wastes: Chimbote had been sacrificed to the nation's pursuit of capitalist development. This chapter decenters narratives of economic development and the environmental impact of industrialization. Most studies of Peru’s postwar industrial boom have focused on the Lima-Callao metropolitan area, to the exclusion of the vast majority of the rest of the nation. By shifting the focus from Lima to the intersections of nature, labor, and politics of rapid industrialization on the postwar Peruvian coast, we can better understand how elite schemes emanating from the metropole have impacted the people and ecologies of the periphery.