Undersecretary Salas and copypaste to Sonapesca of parliamentarians: “It degrades legislative activity”

He Undersecretary of Fisheries, Julio Salasreferred to the controversy carried out by deputies Sergio Bobadilla (UDI), Cristian Moreira (UDI) and Bernardo Berger (independent-RN), who presented a package of indications to the Fisheries Law project, of which 211 were a copy and pasted a report delivered by the National Fishing Society (Sonapesca), a union that represents industrial fishing.

In conversation with Al Pan Pan with Mirna SchindlerThe authority said that the fact “was surprising in the sense of the brutality that means generating an exercise of this type without making transparent the source of origin of these indications. The content proposed by the industry was a content that was made public to the commission. They submitted a document with their proposals for indications.”

“What is surprising here is not the approach taken by the industry, but rather that the legislative task is reduced to a mechanical exercise of serving as a mailbox and transfer of these indications without an exercise of its own elaboration. I think that is very significant because it degrades legislative activity,” he added.

Salas delved deeper into this controversy, recalling that “since the return to democracy, there have only been two parliamentarians convicted of bribery and both were involved in the processing of the fishing law, I am referring to Jaime Orpis, senator, and Marta Isasi, deputy, and a company that was convicted of bribery. A company that also constitutes or is part of the same multi-union association that made these indications,” referring to Corpesca.

“So, it is actually much more serious because there is an important reputational problem and it is one of the reasons why a new Fisheries law is presented. In fact, we must not forget that the Chamber of Deputies has already approved a bill that seeks to annul the Fisheries law and that is under discussion in the Senate. So, indeed here there has been a significant action to try to repair the discredit that the current regulations on fishing matters have,” he added.

In this particular case, Salas explained that it involves “just over 270 indications that the deputy presented. 252 of which correspond to the Fishing Zone document and 211 of those 252 are a textual copy and paste without modifying a letter or a comma of it. I believe that, I say again, The center there is in the degradation of legislative activity and in not having verbalized what the origin of these indications was because citizens have the right to know.”

“Certainly the industry has the right to express its views and in fact has done so throughout the commission and in the pre-legislative work at many times. And you also have the right to present a report with proposals. But what cannot happen is that citizens do not know that a legislator decides that more than 80% of his proposals are to reflect the point of view of a multidimensionality of the industry and that these indications also represent just over 30% of the total the indications that were presented to the project. In other words, there is a certain over-representation of this action that, I say again, we know that parliamentarians have advisors, they have work teams, one would hope that they become familiar with the law and not carry out a mechanical exercise of this type alone,” he concluded. .