November 19, 2012, Costa Azul, Mexico
At nine a.m., when Alvarenga’s SOS was received on the docks of Costa Azul, a debate erupted. Several fishermen wanted to launch an immediate rescue—send out boats and begin a search. Others thought it was too dangerous to embark. It was a moot argument; almost all the boats had gone out fishing that morning and were battling to return in the same stormy conditions. Two boats besides Alvarenga’s were already missing. Ashore, there was only a skeleton crew available. The Coast Guard and port authority were notified but nobody expected much from those quarters. Their meager search-and-rescue resources were already tied up looking for yet another boat of missing colleagues who had disappeared in a storm two days earlier.
By noon, a desperate rescue plan took shape; a single boat would be launched. Trumpillo, a veteran helmsman, would take charge. Ray, Alvarenga’s regular partner, volunteered to join the makeshift rescue operation. A boat was stripped of fishing gear and loaded with extra jugs of gasoline. The two-man crew donned foul-weather gear, packed a fully charged radio, food for two days, gallons of fresh water and heavy-duty line in case they needed to tow their companions to safety. The rescuers had only a rough guess of where they could find the stranded boat. Alvarenga—in his last radio broadcast and adrift with a dead motor—described seeing the mountains behind Boca del Cielo (“Mouth of the Sky”). This landmark indicated he was no more than twenty miles from shore. With exact coordinates it would have been a dangerous but direct operation. Without the GPS coordinates it was a guessing game. Was the lost boat fifteen miles from shore? Twenty-five miles? The difference added two hundred square miles to the search area—an area roughly four times the size of the city of San Francisco. With visibility marred by high seas, it would take almost a head-on collision for the two boats to find each other.
“It was brutal. The waves were huge—eighteen to twenty feet high,” said Ray as he described the initial rescue mission launched at noon, roughly three hours after the SOS. “We got as far out as twenty-five miles but the waves were drowning us. Our boat was half filled with water. I thought we were going to sink,” he said. “Trumpillo—the captain—said it was too dangerous, that we might die trying to rescue them. We turned back.”
Trumpillo and Ray spent the day searching closer to the coast, then came back into the lagoon at nine p.m.; they entered alone, having failed to find Alvarenga and Córdoba. It was too late and too dark to do anything but wait for daybreak. Instead of celebrating Doña Mina’s birthday and getting drunk, the men held vigil at the table in the beachside hut, attentive to the radio and the hope that Alvarenga might recover a few seconds of battery power. Perhaps his radio was just wet and would function again when dry. Two other boats were missing and another four colleagues from along the coast had disappeared, never to be heard from again.
The crowd grew as the word spread. Versions of what happened to Chancha, or what might have happened, crossed the table. They laughed as one Alvarenga story after another was recounted. Lubricated by cases of Corona beer and piles of marijuana, the men avoided talking about him in the past tense—Chancha would surely be back to recount his latest tales of adventure and regale the crowd. The gathered crew lionized the missing fisherman with a series of greatest memories. “Remember when he was taking care of Salomon’s house and they didn’t leave him any money or food so he ate the dog food, you know those little square nuggets?” said Willy, laughing. “I saw him with a bowl of pellets and he poured milk atop it and was eating it like cereal. I told him, ‘Man, you are going to get sick.’ He looked at me and said, ‘You don’t see the dogs dying, do you?’ ”
No one doubted that Alvarenga had a chance to survive. When they held strongman contests, Alvarenga often won. He could lift the sixty-liter gasoline jugs overhead in a set of six repetitions. Who else had the ability to eat everything from raw raccoon to dog food? Drowning was unlikely, they thought, as Alvarenga was a strong swimmer. An expert navigator with a cool head, he had all the tools to survive a raucous storm at sea. “We heard him speaking on his radio and his boat had not sunk. That was a good sign,” said Ray. “But I felt guilty that I had abandoned him. I was not with my captain when he needed me and he was out there with someone so inexperienced.”
Alvarenga’s contagious sense of humor had earned him many fans, ranging from fisherman colleagues to a pair of fifty-year-old women, Doña Celia and Doña Mina, who regularly benefited from Alvarenga’s generous gifts of fresh catch—mainly shrimp and fresh tuna. His kindly attention to Wendy and Indra, two children in the village whom he quietly furnished with coins to buy bubble gum, had not gone unnoticed. Nor had his solidarity with fellow fishermen. “When my sister—my little Carmelita, God bless her—was dying he was the only one to help,” says Ray. “He gave me money so I could visit her. No one else would do that.”
If most of the town considered Chancha a friend, his young mate Córdoba was a wild card. Few of the Costa Azul clan knew his story or had even met him. The fragments they began to piece together were not promising. Wolfman explained how he had patched together the unlikely duo of hardened Alvarenga and the rookie Córdoba. Wolfman had been working for a full year with Córdoba, who was a coastal lagoon guy inexperienced in the deep sea and just beginning to learn the ropes of the open ocean. Wolfman fancied himself a one-man training academy and had taken the young Córdoba under his wing. But he had doubts whether he could make a deep-sea fisherman of the skittish Córdoba. “He was a happy kid. No enemies. A mama’s boy,” said Wolfman. “But he was worried about a prophecy from a Christian woman [in his village]. She went on a fifteen-day fast and after that came out with a vision that Piñata was going to die at sea. He talked a lot about that.”
Wolfman described how Córdoba had been stuck in a deep funk for the last several weeks. “Piñata was scared by the prophecy,” says Wolfman. “I could see he was sad.”
Córdoba was from El Fortin, a dusty village half an hour north of Costa Azul with fewer than two hundred inhabitants. Surrounded by mangrove jungles, El Fortin is largely cut off from the world and the pace of life remains a dusk-to-dawn routine, little altered by the arrival of electricity. It is a town that lives from the sea and a place where more homes have a motorboat than a car.
When Córdoba’s concerned family members arrived at the fishing shacks in Costa Azul that night, they were already coping with a gruesome loss. One of Piñata’s brothers had been stabbed in a street fight less than two years earlier. The blade severed an artery in his arm and he bled to death on the street. Now the Córdoba family was facing the possible death of Piñata. Córdoba’s surviving brothers pressed Willy and Mino—the two highest-ranking fishermen—for an expedited search. Wolfman recalls it was a tense situation. “Córdoba’s mother attacked me, she said it was my fault. That I had sent him to his death. My wife was worried; she said that his family was going to kill me. But I had nothing to fear. I hadn’t done anything wrong.”
Mino regretted not having more details about Alvarenga. He had no way to contact the lost fisherman’s family. “He liked to talk but he was very reserved about his life in El Salvador and the things that he had left behind. He only talked about things that happened here in the ocean. About El Salvador? With me, at least, he never mentioned anything. He did not want to go back. He told everyone he was Mexican.”
The fishermen ate, talked and drank throughout the entire night as they awaited daybreak. During the night, the owner, Willy, and his right-hand man, Mino, drove around the coastline buying up a stockpile of fuel. In the kitchen, Doña Reina, the in-house cook and Alvarenga’s confidante, cooked extra plates of chicken, rice and fish. Alvarenga’s colleagues imagined his suffering: bashed in the Gulf with no motor, no radio and an inexperienced mate.
Harbormasters along the coast had issued each fisherman a GPS chip. Many of the men attached the chip to a post on the boat, but the government never installed the antenna needed to track the signal. “The only real safety feature is a barrel that we bring on the boat. If the boat sinks, you can tie yourself to the barrel and float,” says José Guadalupe, a colleague of Alvarenga. Like many fishermen, Guadalupe knows firsthand the dangers of fishing in the Gulf of Tehuantepec. “Every March 19, I remember my dad. He was lost at sea thirteen years ago and I was orphaned,” he says. “My grandfather José Luis, he was also lost at sea. My uncle too.”
At the first sign of light—5:30 a.m.—four boats prepared to launch, each with a two-man crew. The rescue team made final adjustments to their gear, stashed food for twenty-four hours and mounted a second outboard motor on two of the boats. Each boat carried 120 gallons of gasoline—the weight of the fuel sinking them inches closer to the waterline. No one was forced to join the rescue mission—it was an all-volunteer force and there were more than enough men to fill the eight spots. Loyalty to Alvarenga was fierce. Experienced captains, including Willy and Mino, would lead the way.
The weather on the second morning worsened—winds were forecast to top 60 mph and the waves fifteen feet. Yet no one balked at going out to find Alvarenga. Safety precautions in the zone were minimal. Despite the always-growing list of local casualties at sea, in the entire village there were barely a dozen life preservers and even those were rarely used. Some of the fishermen could not even swim. Heading out to sea at the peak of a Norteño was a huge gamble.
As soon as they left the sheltered lagoon and made it through the dangerous surf break the rescue party was assaulted from all sides. “The waves were hitting at an angle nearly parallel to us and we were trying to avoid the breaks,” says one fisherman. “We were riding and avoiding the crashing waves and using the accelerator to keep from being rolled. These waves slap you and can sink you. I had to find the path to weave through. We were playing defense. It was difficult but I got out to forty kilometers [twenty-four miles]. The waves were four meters [thirteen feet]. Chancha’s motor had died, otherwise he would have gotten out of the storm.”
Alvarenga’s last words weighed heavily on his colleagues—“Come now, I am really getting fucked out here!” It was a phrase uttered in despair and over the ensuing eighteen hours, there had been no further word from Alvarenga or any sign of his boat. It was as if the ocean had swallowed him, boat and all. “Usually you find the boat, or at least the gear,” says Wolfman. “The bodies are always gone, they get eaten by the sharks.”
As they searched throughout the day, the four rescue boats stayed in close radio contact both to organize which swath of ocean each boat would search and to respond urgently in case any boat flipped. “The waves were breaking here, breaking there,” says Willy. “You try and avoid where it is breaking but they are crashing one after another. It is common for two to break together. It is all white and you are rising and falling. It is easy to flip.” Willy and Mino searched for twelve hours, optimistic that they would find their colleague and baffled that not a trace of gear washed ashore or was picked up by the multiple patrols scouring the sea. When the varied crews gathered to compare notes, it was a grim summary: they had nothing.
In retrospect, Willy believes the greatest danger his men faced was not the weather but decades of overfishing. “Before, I went out to eighteen or twenty miles with nets. The fish were right here. Now we have to go out one hundred twenty miles. Before, there were more fish and they were closer.”
After three days of harsh winds, the weather eased just enough for several of the fishermen to get up in a small aircraft. Operated by the local rescue authority in Tonalá, the plane had just finished the requisite three days searching (unsuccessfully) for fishermen lost farther south. Now the search shifted to a guestimate of Córdoba and Alvarenga’s position. Given the winds, the currents and the uncertainty regarding their last known position, the airplane searched from Puerto Chiapas in the south to Salina Cruz in the north, a swath encompassing nearly the entire Gulf of Tehuantepec. “It was a small plane with two motors, I went up,” says Mino. “It was ugly. The ocean was all very white and the turbulence was so bad it felt like it was going to take the plane down. It was a northern storm like I have never seen.”
Being spotted by the rescue airplane was a long shot. “Each boat is so tiny, it’s like a drop of water,” says Rafael Gutierrez, a local rescue coordinator in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, pointing to a map of the coastline. The map was divided into rectangles, each one representing a block of vacant ocean sixty miles by sixty miles. Gutierrez has spent thirty years coordinating rescue operations in the Pacific Ocean using planes, helicopters, navy ships and the goodwill of fishermen. “From the air it is difficult. If there is much of a swell, you can’t find anything.”
Four days after Alvarenga and Córdoba’s boat went missing, Doña Reina commenced a tradition for missing fishermen. She bought candles and left them burning outside his beachside shack. She also left a glass of water, to quench his thirst. Mino bought flowers and a group of boats went to sea and held a ceremony in the open ocean. “They each throw a handful of flowers,” says Mino. “I don’t believe in any of that and Chancha knows it, but others said that I had to do it.”
Such ceremonies are symbols of hope, not a capitulation. Fishermen lost in this part of Mexico have an unnerving habit of showing up months later with incredible stories. A passing container ship might find them adrift hundreds of miles from land and bring the starved men aboard. But these ships often continue their course, eventually dumping the castaways at the Canal Zone in Panama, in Long Beach, California, or Buenaventura, Colombia. Even after a rescue it could be weeks before a stranded crewman returned to Mexico. Some of the missing men never wanted to come home. “There are a lot of insurance scams with lost fishermen,” explains Gutierrez. “When the fishermen disappear, sometimes it’s because they are in another village with a lover or have immigrated to the United States.”
Usually search-and-rescue operations continue for just three days, but in Chancha’s case, when the weather permitted, a determined group of fishermen went out searching for nearly two weeks. But as the wind continued to rip from the north and the storm refused to relent, and as the gasoline bills surged, little by little the formal search ended. It was not that the colleagues had given up hope—quite the contrary. Of all the tribe, Chancha was considered the least likely to be found dead at sea, but the Norteño kept howling day after day. For sixteen straight days the wind whistled and the waves churned with menace. Little did the men know that their colleagues not only were alive, but had survived a storm so ferocious it had blown them out of the Gulf of Tehuantepec and into an unknown world.