August 26, 2022 — At 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 6, 2018, in Guayaquil, Ecuador, Benner Valencia picked up his phone. The person at the other end told him that his second son, biologist Edison Geovanny Valencia Bravo, had disappeared on board the tuna vessel Don Ramón, owned by the Ecuadoran company Delipesca.
The second thing they told him was that his son had jumped from the ship. He didn’t believe it. He still doesn’t believe it now, four years after that evening when he got the terrible news.
Valencia was a fisheries observer, a key role for ensuring the sustainability of marine resources. The job requires keeping detailed records of fishing activities and catches and submitting them to the authorities.
Valencia had been doing this job on the Delipesca ship since January 2018. According to a recent study in the journal Science Advances, Delipesca is one of 20 companies responsible for a third of the world’s reported industrial fishing-related crimes.
Benner Valencia, his father, agreed only reluctantly to an interview to talk about what, in his view, happened to his son. He said he had lost faith in the system and felt frustrated that after four years, there haven’t been any advances in the case and it’s still in the prior investigation phase at the Ecuadoran attorney general’s office.
Benner Valencia filed the document to declare the presumed death of Edison with the Ecuadoran Judicial Council on June 23, 2021. This is a procedure to make the death of a disappeared person official.
The last time Benner and Edison spoke was on March 3, 2018, three days before the call telling of Edison’s disappearance. According to Benner, he said he was fine and the fishing efforts would take a few days longer because the vessel still needed to catch a few more tons of fish. He also said he’d had an argument with the captain a few days before after complaining about his sleeping arrangements.
“He told me it was a bad mattress,” Benner Valencia said. “Apparently that caused frictions on board. They told him that was the only thing they had and no other observer had complained.”
Benner Valencia also said he’s received other calls from “people who pretended to be journalists” to get information from him and from whom he never heard again.
Mongabay Latam and Ecuadoran online news outlet La Barra Espaciadora had access, through Valencia’s attorney, to an expert report by the Ecuadoran Army’s National Directorate of Aquatic Spaces, written after Valencia’s disappearance. The report says there’s no record of “documents that can be used to offer a bigger analysis of the casualty,” such as a national traffic permit, a document to certify minimum security, a certificate of safety inspection, or a fishing permit.
All vessels are required to have these documents. The report concludes that the captain and the owner of the vessel are responsible for negligence, including lack of safety on board and little attention paid to the biologist whom they saw “acting weirdly” and who had said “someone wanted to hurt him.”