Faced with a humanitarian emergency caused by a storm, in an unprecedented manner
the Navy allowed 290 fishing vessels to enter within the 200 nautical miles of Argentina
to get away from a storm with 7 meter waves.
This is a figure
four times
larger than the ships that participated in the famous
Battle of Midway
in the Pacific during World War II.
It was between last Saturday and this Tuesday.
The Joint Maritime Command, dependent on the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces led by Brigadier General Xavier Isaac, maintained
“rigorous control and monitoring of this displacement”
unprecedented in Argentine naval history so that they did not fish in those waters.
The Minister of Defense, Luis Petri, launched the surveillance operation at sea in January.
While the Argentine fishing boats
took refuge in the ports of the continent
due to the same meteorological phenomenon.
It happened that on March 1, the authorities of the Central Search and Rescue Coordination of China (whose acronym is MRCC CHINA),
requested the Navy, as the National Authority of the global system called SAR
(for its acronym for search and rescue in English) ) enter the Argentine exclusive economic zone from mile 201 between the 2nd and the 5th of this month due to the approach of a large storm.
The SAR helped Argentina
in 2017 in the search for the San Juan submarine.
After permission from the Navy and in a quick maneuver, the Chinese fishing vessels left their usual fishing zone, outside the Argentine 200 nautical miles, and
were located in two areas ordered by the Navy in front of Comodoro Rivadavia
in order to protect themselves from the stormy wind and waves of up to 7 meters.
The movement was recorded on the radars and other equipment of the Joint Maritime Command (See video).
The Navy explained that "
in order to preserve human life at sea,
it authorized its entry, defining two areas so that the Chinese foreign fishing fleet can weather the storm until the same meteorological phenomenon passes and moves away" as happened days later.
Last week, the radar of the Joint Maritime Command captured 290 Chinese fishing vessels fishing at mile 201, international waters, behind a red line.
The entire operation was supervised by
the Minister of Defense, Luis Petri,
who made the fight against illegal fishing one of the axes of his management.
It is estimated that the Chinese take more than $2.7 billion a year in squid and other species.
The Chinese fleet when fishing for squid turns on its lights and looks like a city at night.
However, the Buenos Aires Operations Center dependent on the Argentine Navy and the permanent analysis of the Joint Maritime Command,
looked to see if there were irregular navigation patterns or anomalies on the part of the Chinese fishing vessels after the storm.
It was “for the purposes of ensuring compliance with the current legal framework and ensuring the vital interests of the Nation in the area of jurisdiction,” a military spokesperson told
Clarín
.
In any case, due to the storm, the fishing boats could not use their nets due to the bad weather conditions if they had wanted to.
In any case, “
the kinematic behavior of the fishing units,
satellite photos provided by CONAE, national state ships in the area of operations and the overflight of aero-naval units of the Argentine Navy once the permit was completed were analyzed.
“These were part of the measures taken in response to events of this magnitude, which is not the first time to occur nor will it be the last,” the sources added, although never of such magnitude.
The head of the Joint Maritime Command, Navy Commodore Rodolfo Eduardo Berazay Martínez, informed
Clarín
that “this year
there have been no captures of foreign fishing vessels fishing illegally
in our waters.
The behavior of the fishing fleet has been observed to remain, until now, clearly outside the EEZ.”
Asked about the maneuver of some fishing vessels
to turn off their radio beacons to enter the Argentine EEZ
and thus not be detected, Berazay explained that "in recent years the Navy has incorporated
four Ocean Patrol Vessels
built in France to carry out the task of controlling the EEZ. ”.
Radio beacons are equipment, like aircraft transponder, through which ships are identified collaboratively with the authorities of each country.
Yesterday, a Navy plane controls the departure of the last Chinese fishing vessel from the Argentine Exclusive Economic Zone (ZEEA).
But a military radar on the P3 Orion aircraft of the Naval Aviation or the ships of the ARA or the Prefecture
can detect ships with paid radio beacons.
To reinforce this deterrence control, the Navy
is in the process of purchasing four more P3 Orion aircraft from the United States.
Likewise, “the Navy has fixed-wing aircraft and embarked helicopters that complement the task of patrol vessels” to search for intruders, Berazay stated.
In addition, “it has operations centers that
compile the information obtained from different open networks
and cooperation with other agencies that contribute to the control task,” explained the head of the joint maritime command.
Yesterday,
an exploration aircraft from the Navy's Maritime Surveillance Squadron carried out a monitoring and control flight of the areas of jurisdiction in order to verify that all of the 290 Chinese fishing vessels have left
the area assigned by the Argentine Navy and are outside the ZEEA (See photos).
Video
The Navy allowed the ships to enter in the middle of a storm.
In addition, the joint command "
verified the speed of the fishing vessels and analyzed the navigation pattern,
AIS position (automatic identification system) of each vessel, added to satellite photos from the CONAE in order to locate the lights on on the jigger vessels to fishing," a military spokesperson told this newspaper.
These naval aircraft, "with a built-in AIS system, and the data fusion program developed by the Argentine Navy called “POLLUX”, also installed on the aircraft, allow
radar and AIS contacts to be correlated in real time and determine the name of each vessel. fishing in the Argentine sea".
This information is then transferred "to all the Operation Centers on land and to the surface units deployed on our maritime coast," explained a naval spokesperson.
Navy patrol boats control Chinese fishing vessels.
The flight autonomy of this reconnaissance plane
is 5 hours
.
"Although it is sufficient to go and return from naval air bases deployed on its own maritime coastline, it is much less than the autonomy of the P3 ORION aircraft, soon to be acquired, which,
with an autonomy of 12 hours, are capable of monitoring the entire maritime zone of jurisdiction in a single flight
," said the spokesperson.
Once the exploration was completed, the aircraft "confirmed that there were
no
foreign fishing vessels within the ZEEA engaged in fishing tasks."
This is a difficult task because the ZEEA has
an area of 2,809,237 km2
and for which a budget is needed for the movements of all these units.
In March of last year, filmmaker Enrique Piñeyro flew over the area with his plane and showed images of supposed Chinese fishing vessels in Argentina's EEZ, but "
due to a technical error what he captured were Argentine fishing vessels
," official sources clarified.
The fishing issue is politically very sensitive.
The deputy of the Civic Coalition Mariana Zuvic said, at the beginning of the year, that it was “a transcendental decision by the Government
to suppress the fishing chapter of the Omnibus Law to safeguard geopolitical interests in the Argentine Sea
.” “With the reform project of the federal fishing regime, it is likely that the Asian giant will achieve its desired objective of fishing in our waters,” warned the representative of Elisa Carrió.