MARCH 8, 2000
The muffled heaves of a child’s sobbing float through the warm evening air over the lantern-lit path from the Red Mangrove Inn. Polo Navarro is there, in the apartment above the hotel’s lobby and bar, where he and his wife Monica and her three daughters make their home. But Monica’s gone, flew out of Baltra this afternoon with a man named Ulysses, a young Venezuelan surfer Polo hired not long ago to help put up a “sports club” across the road from the hotel.
The club—the Mangrove Adventure, Polo calls it—is actually more of an open-air bar, with a durable pool table and a cooler stocked with sodas and beer. Candlelit tables and chairs sit under a thatch-roofed outdoor arbor. They rent surfboards and bicycles during the day to the tourists, and there’s a tree-shaded racquetball court of sorts off to the side. So it’s fair enough, the townspeople figure, to call it a sports club.
This time of night, there are typically at least a few people there. Polo is usually among them, wearing one of his bright, flowered tropical shirts unbuttoned to his belly to show off his tanned chest, whacking the pool balls around, laughing, listening to music, having a few beers. But tonight the place is empty, dark, and deserted.
It was only this morning that Monica stopped into the TAME ticket office down by the police station and booked two seats on the day’s second flight to the mainland. By the time the plane lifted off, the entire town knew Monica was on it with her lover, Ulysses, headed for Guayaquil and…well, who knows what their plans will be after that.
Some saw this coming. After all, hasn’t Monica had a history with this sort of thing? Three daughters by three different fathers. Her first girl, the nineteen-year-old, she had with that guy Norman, a languid character who lay around in his hammock nine or ten hours a day. People still laugh about the day Monica finally got fed up with Norman’s routine, marched right out with a large kitchen knife and cut the thing down, with Norman asleep in it. Then came the musician from Boston, with whom Monica had her second daughter, who’s now fourteen. And then there came Polo, with two kids of his own from a previous marriage, who now live in the United States with their mother.
Lest anyone be too quick to judge Monica for leaving, the fact is that Polo has been no more faithful than she. Neither has he been gentler: Monica has had to explain away the occasional black eye or bruise during the years they’ve been married. She and Polo have one child together, who turned seven not long ago. It’s she, the seven-year-old, who is up there in the bedroom above the hotel crying so deeply because there are no words to console her, no way to explain why her mother has left.
Down the road, in town, where the bars and restaurants are busy on this early March evening, a squad of camo-uniformed police officers, a half dozen of them led by a baseball-capped lieutenant, is sweeping in and out of each nightclub, checking the passports and papers of the people inside. They are checking the patrons as well as the employees, spot-checking for undocumented nationals—Ecuadorians without IDs or papers. It’s the authorities’ way of sending the message that the laws will be enforced here in the Galápagos—at least some of them. They already shut down one business about an hour ago, the Galápason, and no one knows when it will reopen. The CERRADO sign hung on the club’s padlocked front gate doesn’t say.
Farther downtown, a few blocks from the waterfront, a crowd is gathered outside the Hotel Palmeras. No police are in sight. And they won’t be, not tonight, not tomorrow, not as long as the mayor’s family is running the place.
The crowd is waiting to get inside. You can hear it out on the street, a vibrant hum filling the stairwell inside the front doors, rising from the building’s basement, where the El Bucanero gambling casino is now open for business.
A large, bearded man wearing a red soccer jersey, baggy swim trunks, and flip-flops stands outside the front door, looking like a bouncer. His name is Luis Solis Macias, but most people in town call him Galaxy. Or so he says. He points to the sign hanging over his head, over the hotel’s front door, with a bearded pirate and the words “El Bucanero” drawn on it.
“I did that,” he says. That’s what Galaxy does for a living, he says. He paints signs. “Is like a Las Vegas,” he says, sweeping an arm toward the commotion inside. “You like?”
Galaxy shows the way downstairs, where a bank of five glittering slot machines leads into a brightly lit, cavernous room festooned with twinkling Christmas lights. Japanese lanterns and ornate Asian fans are displayed on the high, whitewashed walls. A crowd is standing three-deep at the green-felt poker table, where the game is five-card stud and the minimum bet is 20,000 sucres (eighty cents).
The roulette and blackjack tables are even busier, with waitresses in white blouses and black miniskirts fetching mixed drinks and fresh packs of cigarettes for the players. Behind the metal bars of the cashier’s cage in the corner, a redheaded woman hands out cups of slot-machine tokens and poker chips to a line of men waiting for their turn to play. Above the din, out of stereo speakers mounted up near the ceiling, drifts the sound of a love song—the theme from Titanic.
“Here you are, my friend, please,” says a small Korean man, holding out a glass of iced Coca-Cola. “Free, for you.”
The man is the casino’s manager and part-owner, which explains the décor on the walls. The mayor’s connection to this business is unclear. The Korean man shrugs and won’t answer when asked. He just smiles and asks if you’d like a refill on your Coke.
Winter is winding down, spring is coming on, and Carnaval has arrived with its tradition of soaking passersby with buckets or jugs of cold water. The locals all know at this time of year that they’re in for it if they venture outside during the day. They take the precaution of wrapping some plastic around anything they don’t want to get wet. They walk the backstreets, avoiding the busier thoroughfares, where the kids and teenagers lie in wait to ambush their prey.
The tourists are the primary victims of the dousings, which have taken a nasty turn in recent years. Used motor oil and sacks of flour are dumped on the unsuspecting pedestrians, as well as on their cameras and belongings. Still, things are not nearly as vicious here as they are on the mainland. Walk down the wrong street in Guayaquil during Carnaval, and you’re apt to get battery acid thrown at you. Or a bucket of urine. Or worse.
The mainland is in a state of suspension right now, with the Indios maintaining their threats to Noboa, and Noboa still pushing ahead with the dollarization, although it’s become clear after a mere six weeks in office that he’s no trailblazer. He’s just an interim figurehead, a bridge between the coup two months ago and the next presidential election two years from now. Noboa’s always been a survivor, and that’s what he aims most to do between now and that next election—survive.
But it won’t be easy. The political stakes are rising each day. Not only are the Indios continuing to turn up the heat, but the Colombians are pushing to force Noboa’s hand as well. Everyone knows it was the Colombians who were behind the mail bomb that blew up two weeks ago in the office of a Guayaquil newspaper reporter and former politician named Rafael Cuesta. A group calling itself the People’s Liberation Army claimed credit for the bombing, which sent Cuesta to the hospital with face and hand wounds. The group says it’s Marxist, says it’s Ecuadorian, but the leaflets it mailed out following the incident read like a laundry list of the Colombians’ agenda, with a pointedly anti-American tone. “No U.S. citizens can circulate quietly in the country,” the leaflets proclaimed. The U.S. Embassy in Quito has responded by issuing yet another warning to American travelers to stay clear of Ecuador.
That’s put a bit of a damper on tourism in Quito and in the Amazon, but oddly enough numbers are up around the Tungurahua volcano—“Little Hell,” as the people who live in its shadow call it—which has been erupting for weeks now, prompting an entirely new tourist market. Even as thousands of Ecuadorians who live in the volcano’s shadow have been evacuated, hundreds of foreign visitors have arrived to hike up the mountain and even camp overnight on its slopes. Tour companies are now packaging trips to the craters of Cotopaxi and Chimborazo as well. “A whole volcano industry appears to be developing,” one newspaper recently reported, quoting a Quito tour agency selling the Tungurahua climbs. “It’s a pure adrenaline experience,” said the agency’s spokesman, “to feel the earth rumbling and hear rocks falling down the sides of the ravines.”
No matter that the Ecuadorian government is advising all travelers to beware in this region, warning that they might be killed on the slopes by rock slides, lava, or raining debris. Despite the danger—or because of it—business is booming.
It’s booming in the Galápagos as well. Academy Bay is packed as the tourist season peaks with this first week of March. The boats anchored out in the harbor are almost completely booked. There are more private yachts passing through than have been seen since last spring. And more tour boats as well—ninety at last count.
Just this morning one of the newer ones pulled in, a gleaming 210-footer with three eggshell-white decks stacked like a sandwich on its navy-blue hull. The Eclipse is its name. On board is the American movie star Michael Douglas with his partner, Catherine Zeta-Jones, who is seven months pregnant. They were in town this morning, hiking up Darwin Avenue just like any other tourists. There was no mob scene, just a couple of nervous requests for autographs from a group of Americans. When the pair got to the Station, Roz Cameron gave them a personal tour. They were both “lovely people,” says Roz. “Very pleasant, very down-to-earth. She didn’t even bother with makeup.”
At this peak-season time of year, a boat like the Eclipse charges each of its forty-eight passengers between $3,890 and $4,475 for a six-day stay in one of its twenty-seven cabins. It’s that kind of cash that Braden Escobar—who’s still running his hunting expeditions in defiance of the Park Service—will tell you is behind everything that is happening in the Galápagos these days. Everything.
The hammer finally came down on Escobar just one week ago. He arrived in Puerto Ayora on a morning flight from Quito with a couple of American customers, a husband and wife named MacCollum from Phoenix. The husband was a surgeon in his late sixties. He’d been to Africa a half-dozen times, and he’d hunted in Mongolia, and Spain. But this was his first trip to the Galápagos. He’d read about it in The Hunting Report and booked this vacation for himself and his wife.
The day they arrived, the doctor, his wife, Escobar, and a few local men took off in a boat for the northeastern part of the island. After a morning of shooting they headed back toward town for some lunch. Halfway there, they were stopped by a boat carrying Park Service wardens and Ecuadorian naval personnel. The doctor thought it strange that Escobar and the others scrambled to stow their rifles and spear-guns as the government speedboat approached. And he was a little upset when the wardens asked to see his and his wife’s papers right there on the boat.
But what really aggravated the doctor was when he and his wife got into town and were taken, albeit politely, to the Naval Station down near the wharf, where their bags and equipment were searched. By then the doctor was wondering if this Escobar fellow was on the up-and-up. When the authorities let the doctor and his wife go back to their hotel—although they held on to the doctor’s rifle for the night—the couple noticed that Escobar wasn’t released. He was under arrest. Or so it appeared.
“It felt like an arrest,” says Escobar. “Actually, I was just detained by the navy. They put me in a room, but after they saw I was no criminal, I just hung around outside and slept on the beach.” He’s not apologetic at all. And he’s not afraid of the Park Service or their laws. “If we want to get nasty,” he says, “I could tell you some stinking shit about Eliecer Cruz.”
Escobar doesn’t say what that “shit” might be. He’s happy to talk about his agribusiness degree from Louisiana State University, about his childhood in New Orleans, where he was born, and about Ecuador, where he’s spent most of his twenty-seven years and where he makes his home today. He’s eager to describe his outfitting business, the hunting and fishing tours he leads on the mainland. And he’ll tell you that his motivation to start such tours in the Galápagos is “with the sincerity of wanting to help.” Help the local people who need jobs and money, he says. Help get rid of those goats and wild pigs that breed in the highlands like rats. But he also admits he’s in this to make money.
“The Galápagos isn’t what people make it out to be,” says Escobar. “All this stuff about saving the animals, that’s bullshit. It’s all about money. The big boats, the tour companies, the Park Service. It’s a moneymaking machine, that’s what it is.”
His overnight stay—call it an arrest or a detention—doesn’t deter Escobar one bit. He says he was “set up” by Cruz and his people, by Johannah Barry and those bleeding-heart conservationists with the Darwin Foundation. “She called me herself and pretended she was a tour operator wanting to get her clients lined up with me,” he says. “I had no idea it was a trap.” Barry says that’s ridiculous, but Escobar insists that it’s so.
Cruz has warned Escobar and hopes that will be enough. Cruz doesn’t need the hassle of a full-scale arrest any more than Escobar does. The Park Service has much bigger fish to fry. But Escobar says he has no intention of stopping, no matter what Eliecer Cruz does.
“He can throw me in jail as many times as he wants,” says the young businessman, “and I’ll keep going.”
And so comes the spring. March turns to April, and finally Jack Nelson returns home from Thailand—alone, without Forrest.
Jack had thought this might happen. He knew before going that the old man had no desire to leave Chiang Mai, even though he could hardly stand anymore because of the arthritis riddling his knees. But Jack had hoped he might be able to convince his father to face the facts once Jack arrived, to acknowledge that both Ken Calfee and Forrest were close to the point where they could no longer care for themselves. As Forrest himself put it more than once in recent conversations with Jack: “The only problem with living so long is you get so damned old.”
This was the third time Jack had visited his father since the old man had moved to Chiang Mai, but this was the first for the purpose of bringing him back to the islands. When Jack got there, however, and saw once again the life his father had carved out, the same kind of charming, idyllic retreat Forrest had created with the Hotel Galápagos so many years ago, Jack could see it wasn’t going to be easy to pry the old man away. One look at the flower-festooned compound Forrest and Ken had built on their own rai of land—a small, tree-shaded estate 120 feet on each side, each man with his own deck-rimmed geodesic home linked by a common veranda, with ferns and hibiscus and a private fishpond out back, and even an in-ground swimming pool, where the Thai kids from the orphanage two doors down came every day to the delight of both Forrest and Ken—one look at all this, and anyone could see Forrest Nelson had found just what he was looking for when he’d fled the Galápagos fifteen years ago. Books, music (Ken had his own radio program on a local Thai station, playing Beethoven and Bach CDs one hour a week), and a circle of friends, most of them female; young, neighborhood women who would visit with Ken and Forrest each day, sharing food, drinks, and laughter. Who in his right mind would leave something like that?
Not Forrest. Jack made the most of the visit. He saw a bit of Chiang Mai, enjoyed the time with his father, then flew back to the islands knowing chances were good that it wouldn’t be long before he’d have to make this same trip again, under less pleasant circumstances.
Meanwhile, the Galápagos are changing at warp speed. In late March, while Jack was making his journey to Thailand, Margaret Wittmer passed away. Not long after that, Steve Divine flew his mother, Doris, to Guayaquil, where she moved in with some friends while Steve and his wife and kids prepared to make that move to the United States—not to Arkansas, after all, but to Plantation, Florida, near Fort Lauderdale.
By late spring there are BellSouth pay phones along Darwin Avenue, an oddity that puzzles more than a few townspeople. Many have never seen such machines, and the phones take only U.S. quarters, not sucres. There are now cell phones as well, with a new satellite linkup activated just for the Galápagos. Some guides have taken to carrying the cellular phones with them on boat tours to keep track of families and friends back in town. The tourists are discouraged from using theirs, though a few can’t resist, checking their voice mail back home in Munich or Montreal while riding one of those pangas to shore.
Out in Academy Bay, visiting yachtsmen are facing an odd little crime wave: the theft of their anchors. Eight yachts have had anchors stolen in the past two weeks. Word is spreading among traveling boatsmen to keep someone on watch if they visit this port or to simply steer clear of the Galápagos altogether.
The town has a new mayor. Franklin Sevilla was defeated in April’s election by a man named Alfredo Ortiz. There’s actually hope that Ortiz, a fairly sensible sort who may actually have the balls to stand up to the fishermen, might turn a few things around.
Fanny Uribe, meanwhile, kept her congressional seat. There’s a new port captain now, who’s been handing out fishing permits and tour-boat licenses as if they were candy. Jack’s convinced the guy’s either corrupt or “just doesn’t give a shit.” Either way, the “pickle-heads,” as the pepiñeros have come to be called, are having their way. And still they want more, threatening each day to take drastic action if the gates to the cucumbers—and the sharks, and the lobsters—aren’t thrown wide open.
In late May the government-sanctioned pepino season begins. Within five weeks six divers are dead and dozens more are permanently disabled by decompression accidents.
In mid-July comes word that Ken Calfee has passed away. Forrest is in emotional shock when Jack speaks to him on the phone. The old man is fuzzy about the facts, but apparently he and Ken had a group of friends over and were getting ready to go out. Ken went to lie down for a few minutes to rest. When Forrest checked on him, Ken was sprawled out on the floor in his bedroom.
From that point on, Forrest’s story gets disjointed. All Christy and Jack know is that Ken was cremated a few days ago, his ashes scattered on Chiang Mai’s Ping River. Now Forrest is all by himself, with only a Burmese woman named Pin to care for him. Pin has worked for Ken and Forrest for ten years now, riding through the city each morning on the motorbike Forrest bought her. She comes at dawn, sweeps the yard, cleans the house, runs errands, and cooks before leaving each afternoon to go home and tend the bar her family runs in the house where she lives. Pin has been like a niece to Forrest, and now she’s all he’s got left in Chiang Mai. Still, he won’t even talk to Christy or Jack about the idea of leaving.
Not until August, that is, when Jack gets a late-night message from Thailand, from a friend of Forrest’s, a New Zealander, who tells Jack that Forrest is in the hospital. It seems he slipped in the bathroom, fell and broke his pelvis, cracked it almost clean through.
Five days later, Jack is at Forrest’s hospital bedside, setting up a couch right there in the room. He sleeps there for the next five nights, watching the Thai nurses and attendants lift his father—who’s near-delerious, wearing diapers, unable to even roll onto his side—in and out of the bed like a large sack of rice. Forrest can’t stand it, the helplessness. But it’s going to be this way from now on. If he’s able to stand on his own legs again, it will be with the help of a cane or crutches or a chrome walker.
Now there’s no question Forrest will come home with Jack, whether the old man likes it or not. It takes two weeks after Forrest is released from the hospital to pull things together in Chiang Mai, to gather Forrest’s essential belongings and see that everything else will be taken care of. Then it’s on to Bangkok, where Jack learns Forrest’s U.S. visa has expired (he took Ecuadorian citizenship back in 1969). Father and son check into a Bangkok hotel where they stay for three days while Jack wrangles with government officials. Three times a day he wheels Forrest down to the hotel’s dining room for his meals.
By the time Forrest’s papers are ready, it’s September. The journey back home goes smoothly, except for a stop in Costa Rica where the plane is refueled, new passengers come aboard, and Forrest’s wheelchair is thrown off. The weight of the archaic Russian-made chair, airline officials explain to Jack, is too much for the aircraft to safely take off.
When they finally arrive home in mid-September, Christy has set up a room behind her own house for Forrest, a studio apartment where Corina stays when she visits. The place is quite spacious, with gleaming hardwood floors, high, expansive windows flooded with sunlight, and the emerald glow of the surrounding foliage. It’s only a hundred yards or so up the road to the hotel, where Forrest will now take his meals every day. But the only way to get there, until his new wheelchair, bought during their stopover in Guayaquil, is assembled by Jack, is by taxi. Three times a day by cab, seventy-five cents each way: That’s almost five dollars a day, complains Forrest. Unbelievable, he tells Jack. That’s a hundred and fifty dollars a month.
That is a lot of money just to get back and forth for such a short distance for something to eat. But the money doesn’t bother Jack half as much as hearing about it over and over and over. Then again, Jack knows what’s going on. The old man repeats himself now. He’s straight on some memories, completely lost about others. He knows where he is, how much things have changed in this town, on these islands. But it all kind of hovers around him, a bit cloudy, like vapors that don’t seem quite real. And so Forrest doesn’t quite feel it, the sharp sting of just how different this place is from the small, sleepy settlement where he lived a half-century ago.
By October, the refitted wheelchair is ready to roll, and now three times a day Forrest greets his “pusher” at the apartment’s front door—one of the young Ecuadorian men on Jack’s hotel staff who comes over and rolls Forrest to and from the dining room at mealtimes. Forrest chuckles at the term “pusher”; he came up with it himself.
The guests at the hotel’s dining room tables, tourists studying their guidebooks while they’re eating their food, have no idea the old man sitting over there by himself with that thistle of soft, white hair, that delicate, pink skin, and those amazing blue eyes is the person who built this place half a lifetime ago.
November arrives, and on a bright Friday morning in the middle of the month, Christy rushes up the stairs to the small office above the Bodega Blanca, sits down at José’s computer, and types out an e-mail dispatch to a long list of addresses all over the world:
From: Christy Gallardo
Sent: Friday, November 17, 2000, 10:15 a.m.
Subject: Disaster in Galapagos
Dear Friends of Galapagos:
Today we have the worst news of years, for both obvious and more subtle reasons. The “fishermen” in Isabela are “protesting” limits on lobster fishing in the same way as they did against limits on sea cucumber fishing, plus other matters they do not agree with. They have destroyed both National Park and Darwin Station offices, cars, equipment, records, removed all the tortoises (we don’t know to where) from the Centro de Crianza (tortoise raising center), and even rammed dinghies full of tourists to prevent landings (so far as I know, no injuries). Of course, the State Department has already been informed and will undoubtedly issue a travel advisory against any Americans coming here, which affects absolutely everybody EXCEPT the fishermen, including all conservation projects (because the funding disappears almost immediately). My news is only a couple of hours old, at most, so I will try to revise as more comes in, and I cannot yet guarantee all details, but I will.
In the long term, I would say the effects are even worse than they first appear. If the President of the Republic himself is not willing and able, at this point, to send in the troops to haul these criminals off to the continent and pitch them in the pens, it will be yet another lesson to them, one in a long line of EXACTLY the same lessons, that they can get whatever they want by acting against the law. There is nobody left at a lower level, UNLESS IT IS THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY, who can undo these lessons because all other authorities right up to his level are heavily compromised by the industrial fishing sector. The local authorities—our own mayor, our own deputies to congress—have fishing boats and march and protest right along with the fishermen, supporting them in EVERY way, right up to using the trucks of the municipality to block the roads. If any among you know of anyone at all who might raise his voice—in the newspapers or anyplace else, be my guest. Tourism, and our own business, will be shot regardless, so I am only hoping to see some radical action which will be a help five or ten years down the line. I only have another hour now before we close the store so our family and employees can go form up with the few others who understand what is happening and have our own little protest march, but it is useless. I cannot TELL you how many of these bleeding marches I have participated in, and the result so far has been DIDDLY SQUAT.
Sincerely Yours, Christy
The protest march ends up canceled. Those who planned to take part have been threatened, even a group of schoolchildren who wrote a letter to Ecuador’s minister of the environment criticizing the fishermen. The children were promptly denounced as “puppets of the scientists and conservationists” by none other than the Galápagos’ provincial director of education, one Clemente Vallejo Velasco, who demanded that the names of all teachers involved be turned in to him. The next morning, Christy types out yet another dispatch.
From: Christy Gallardo
Sent: Saturday, November 18, 2000, 9:43 a.m.
Subject: Update
Dear Friends of Galapagos:
Yesterday I promised to update you all. So here it is, and it is only worse. The terrorism in Isabela yesterday took place mostly around midnight. The marines were flown in to Isabela, but did not arrive until about 4 am, too late. And, of course, they are only there to prevent further obvious depredations, but no arrests so far as I know, by the police or anybody else. The damage was far more extensive than I had thought—even the private homes of the directors of park and station operations were totally destroyed, right down to breaking up the toilets and burning all their clothes and distributing the Christmas presents (that were stored in one of their homes) to everybody in the streets. The Park sent a couple of boats over there to rescue their employees, and this was totally necessary—they had been hiding in the mangroves and actually had to swim out to the boats. In other places, including at Hood, divers and tourists have been prevented from landing or leaving their boats by the flotillas of terrorist-“fishermen.” I still have no reports of injuries. We are without regular phone connection to the mainland because the repeater on Cristobal has been damaged, so the cell phones are in heavy use. Here on Santa Cruz we have escaped the worst of it because we have the largest population, outnumbering the “fishermen” by far, and also larger numbers of police and navy and so on. Still, it has not been pretty. I have no idea whether anything will be done to the perpetrators of all this, but the track record indicates that it will NOT. We have not seen the last of it. I will keep you all posted, if I can.
Please pass it on. Christy
None of this surprises Jack. He’s watched the number of licensed fishermen in San Cristobal and Villamil nearly double in the past year—from 500 to over 900—courtesy of the new regime of local authorities. The fishermen—many of them recent arrivals from tough towns on the mainland coast—feel the strength of their numbers and have become more aggressive than ever. “Storm troopers,” Jack calls them. They’ve never directly threatened tourists before, but tour pangas were actually rammed during this Isabela attack, with Ecuadorian naval personnel firing tear gas to push the protesters back. A ramming even took place here in Academy Bay, an assault described in a report sent to the Galápagos Tour Operators Association by a tour group from Ithaca College:
A group of 11 tourists and 2 crew left our boat on our panga to go to the Darwin Station to see giant tortoises, the Station, and then take a bus trip into the highlands. But that was the morning the local fishermen went on strike. A fast motorboat of 4 or 5 fishermen then swooped over to cut us off, partially rammed us (side-swiped us with a hard hit), and grabbed the rope of our panga to pull us over to a place along the shore where they wanted to take us. Our boatman realized what was happening and reversed the outboard motor enough for us to pull the rope free, leaving a fisherman with rope burns. We quickly pulled in the rope, turned around, and returned to our boat midst lots of yelling in Spanish.
Local civic leaders brave enough to raise their voices against these “lobster mobsters,” as some townspeople have taken to calling the fishermen and the professional thugs brought in by the fishing companies in Manta to support them, have received death threats. As Thanksgiving passes and the month comes to an end, the renegade fishermen are enjoying their celebrity. They’ve become front-page news as far away as Great Britain. At least four of them were captured clearly on videotape burning and looting Park and Research Station property in Villamil. Thirteen arrest warrants were issued based on witness reports and photographic evidence. But only one arrest has actually been made. In fact, the government’s response, rather than prosecution, has been appeasement: The lobster season has now been extended through the end of the year, and catch limits have been raised.
As Christmas approaches, word comes from the United States that reinforcements are about to arrive, the ecocavalry, as it were, riding down to the rescue.
The Sea Shepherd, it seems, is now on its way.
Godfrey Merlen’s been working on this for some years now, quietly, behind the scenes. For nearly a decade, he and another longtime scientist with the Station, an Englishman named David Day, have been exchanging letters and e-mails with a Canadian named Paul Watson, founder and director of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the oceangoing vigilantes famous for ramming and sinking illegal fishing vessels all over the globe. Godfrey and Day, along with Eliecer Cruz and his Park Service staff, have been exploring the possibility of bringing what Eliecer calls “an international voice” to the Park Service’s battle with the islands’ illegal fishing fleet.
Godfrey has known all along that it’s a dicey decision asking a man like Paul Watson to come help the Galápagos. On the one hand, Watson is not unlike Godfrey himself—a creature of action, impatient with words. Anyone with even a passing interest in the history of environmental activism knows Paul Watson cofounded the Greenpeace organization in 1972, then quit five years later because the group had become too bureaucratically meek for his taste—“Avon ladies of the environmental movement,” is what he called them—Watson subsequently turned to the ocean, creating the Sea Shepherd in his own image with a hell-bent-for-leather, ecovolunteer crew of bearded young men and braided young women. They took an overhauled fishing trawler, rechristened it the Rainbow Warrior, and began going mano a mano against the world’s pirate industrial fisheries.
The Sea Shepherd’s motto, printed on T-shirts its crew passes out wherever they drop anchor, is “Sailing Into Harm’s Way.” This is all well and good, but this cottage-industry kind of success and the massive celebrity that comes with it worry some here on the islands. Wherever Watson goes, the press follows, and frankly he loves it—some say a little too much. Just last year Time magazine declared Paul Watson an environmental hero of the twentieth century. Just last month, it was announced that Paramount Studios will begin production this summer on a $60-million film about Watson and the Sea Shepherd, starring Billy Bob Thornton, Aidan Quinn, and Paul Watson’s real-life pals, Martin Sheen and Pierce Brosnan. Rumor has it that Quinn, in the name of research, is at this very moment aboard the Sea Shepherd vessel Sirenian, bound for the Galápagos with Watson and a volunteer crew.
Four days before Christmas, the ninety-five-foot Sirenian, with a nine-member crew aboard, pulls into Puerto Ayora, dropping anchor in Academy Bay not far from the Park Service patrol boat, the Guadalupe River, just off the point where the Hotel Galápagos sits. Aidan Quinn is indeed aboard, but he jets off immediately upon arrival. Paul Watson, however, hangs around town for three weeks, doing some diving with Mathías’ Scuba Iguana staff and spending a few nights holding court at the newest hot spot in town, a place called the Bongo Bar, up a flight of stairs from the Panga Discoteca. When Watson takes off in mid-January, he leaves behind the ship and one crew member and an autographed photo of himself for the Bongo Bar’s owners to hang on their wall.
The crew member’s name is Sean O’Hearn Giminez, a twenty-seven-year-old Sea Shepherd volunteer and former Wall Street computer engineer from Brooklyn. O’Hearn looks fittingly Irish: pale skin burned bright pink by the sun, close-cut coppery hair. But he speaks fluent Spanish—with a Caribbean lilt, no less—thanks to a childhood spent in Puerto Rico. “Deception by perception,” he says, introducing himself with a well-practiced smile.
For the next God-knows-how-many months, O’Hearn will be the face and voice of the Sea Shepherd Society in the Galápagos. The arrangement hammered out with Eliecer Cruz and the Ecuadorian government is that the Sirenian will be “loaned” to the Park Service for five years. It will be manned by a Park Service crew, with Ecuadorian naval personnel aboard, and with O’Hearn riding along as an “objective observer” (O’Hearn’s term). The idea is to raise the ante in this war with the poachers, adding muscle to the Park Service resources—a speedy, agile patrol boat—as well as providing the international spotlight that follows the Sea Shepherd Society wherever it goes. O’Hearn is poised to tap out a slew of e-mail press releases following each raid and capture.
It’s a nice concept, but O’Hearn and, from a distance, his boss Watson soon learn it won’t be quite that easy. The Park Service may want the Sea Shepherd here, but the powers-that-be on the mainland—government officials with ties to the fishing magnates in Manta, even some of the top brass with the Ecuadorian Navy and the Merchant Marine themselves—are not so excited. They can’t simply throw the foreign interlopers out; too many people are watching, and the Park Service is within its legal rights to bring the Sirenian here. But the authorities can certainly make things difficult for these outsiders.
Before the Sirenian is allowed out on patrol, it must be inspected by Ecuadorian naval officials. Is it any surprise that it flunks the initial inspection? Or that the ensuing paperwork takes weeks to process? And then comes another inspection, and another denial. There is no portable water pump to be found on the ship, although no one was told such a pump is required. The labels on the control panel are written in English, not Spanish, although again no one was told such translation is needed.
O’Hearn can see he’s being sandbagged, and he’s furious. As the days pass, he bides his time, handing out Sea Shepherd T-shirts all over town and hanging out at the Bongo Bar, where a Sea Shepherd videotape—provided by O’Hearn—has replaced the standard surf tapes as a favorite on the bar’s TV sets. The video, titled “Blue Rage,” mixes shots of ship-rammings with footage of extreme sports—snowboarding and surfing. The crowd—tourists and locals alike—loves it. O’Hearn is champing at the bit to get out and go hunting, but Watson’s orders are to hang loose and sit tight, at least for the time being.
And then comes the spill.
The first message sputters across marine radio channels a few minutes past ten on the evening of Tuesday, January 16. An oil tanker, the Jessica, radios that it has run aground at the entry to San Cristobal’s Wreck Bay, eight hundred yards off the island. The vessel, owned by an Ecuadorian shipping company called Acotramar, is carrying 160,000 gallons of diesel fuel bound for a dispatch station on Baltra, and 80,000 gallons of bunker fuel to be delivered to none other than the Galapagos Explorer II. The Jessica reports that it’s grounded on a sandbar but that surf conditions are calm and that no oil has spilled. Not yet.
By Wednesday, the next morning, Cruz’s Park Service people have begun arriving, intent on removing the fuel from the ship as swiftly as possible before a spill occurs. Ecuadorian Navy and Merchant Marine crews arrive as well, and it soon becomes clear that they’re here at the behest of PetroEcuador, the state-owned oil company to which the fuel in that ship belongs. PetroEcuador is more concerned with salvaging its product by removing the fuel and oil slowly and carefully so it’s not contaminated with seawater, than with protecting the surrounding waters and land from disaster.
It’s clear to Cruz’s people—more than sixty of them have arrived at the scene by late Thursday morning—that they’re working at cross-purposes with the Ecuadorian military personnel. By Thursday afternoon, only 20,000 gallons of fuel have been removed from the ship and now, according to the latest weather reports, rough seas are on the way.
Meanwhile, the Ecuadorian Ministry for Environment and the U.S. Embassy in Quito are hammering out details to allow a U.S. Coast Guard oil-spill emergency strike-force team to come down from Mobile, Alabama, and join in the effort. But the talks are laborious, held up by protocol, politics, and, in no small measure on the part of the Ecuadorians, by pride.
Another day passes, and the Jessica begins listing. The surf becomes rougher. By the time the ten-member U.S. strike team gets the green light and arrives Friday with high-capacity pumps and inflatable oil-containment barges—state-of-the-art equipment compared with the Ecuadorians’ improvised gear—the tanker’s cargo hold has cracked open and thick ribbons of black, viscous bunker fuel have begun oozing out into the clear turquoise Pacific.
By then, Roz Cameron’s office computer is clogged with more than one thousand e-mails, offers from volunteers all over the world to come help with the cleanup. Most of those well-meaning souls, says Roz, have no idea there are twenty thousand people who live on these islands, hundreds of whom are already preparing to fan out at various beaches, readying themselves to scoop and soak up whatever oil might come their way with buckets, towels, rags, whatever they can get their hands on.
Dozens of other islanders are already making their way over to San Cristobal, by boat or by air, to do what they can to help. Mathías Espinosa shuts down his dive shop to fly over on Saturday and can’t believe what he sees as he looks down at the ocean between Santa Fé and San Cristobal: The glistening, crystal-blue water is laced by inky tendrils of oil snaking northwest, directly toward Santa Cruz, directly into the heart of the archipelago. A fuel tank split here, a faulty valve cracked open there; the Jessica is falling apart faster than the cleanup crews can surround it. It’s a blessing the spill hasn’t moved east into San Cristobal. That damage would be devastating, perhaps permanent. As it is, only a handful of sea lions, pelicans, and boobies around Wreck Bay have been hit by the oil, and Park Service staff have rescued and cleaned each one of those animals. But worse could lie ahead on the other islands, depending on where the currents and winds carry the spill.
Mathias has heard that there are already quite a few foreign newspaper and television reporters over at San Cristobal, but he’s blown away when he actually gets there. He’s seen plenty of press come through Puerto Ayora over the years—when a volcano blows or when the El Niños hit. He got a close look at a world-class film operation when the IMAX teams dug in to make their Galápagos movie, which features Mathias himself in one of the film’s early sequences. But he’s never seen anything like what confronts him when he lands at Puerto Baquerizo Moreno. Reporters are everywhere in the village, interviewing everyone. Cameras on tripods are set up along the length of the waterfront. Every person who passes—locals and tourists, adults and children—is stopped and asked to comment on the catastrophe.
Mathias is stopped by a film crew from National Geographic. He’s struck by how long the reporter, a woman, takes to prepare her makeup before giving a nod to the cameraman and beginning the interview. This is an image that will stay with him forever. Here is this horrible catastrophe, just beyond this lady’s shoulder, the ocean clouded black with a carpet of oil, and all she can think of is how her lipstick looks.
The whole scene is weird to Mathias. Puerto Baquerizo’s little motels, so sleepy and empty most of the time, are booked solid right now, every one of them. And that’s not nearly enough. Townspeople have taken to renting out rooms in their homes to reporters. Some of them are charging fifty dollars a night, and the reporters are gladly paying it. The reporters aren’t footing these bills; their bosses are. The reporters’ only concern is to get the story, to deliver the drama.
“IT IS AS IF A BOMB DESTROYED THE LOUVRE,” reads a dispatch in a London newspaper.
“HOW COULD WE ALLOW BLACK TIDE TO THREATEN WORLD’S FRAGILE EDEN?” trumpets a front-page Scottish newspaper headline.
“BLACK DEATH THREATENS THE UNIQUE BEAUTY OF GALÁPAGOS’ LABORATORY,” declares a large Irish daily.
“GALÁPAGOS IN PERIL,” says the Chicago Tribune.
“FOR HUMANITY, SAVE THE GALÁPAGOS FROM HUMANITY,” writes the Los Angeles Times.
Some take a different spin on the story. A Galápagan fisherman named Washington Escarabay is described in a British newspaper as angry because the spill has kept him on dry land all week. Never mind the birds and the water, says Escarabay. What about people like him, people for whom this oil spill is just one more thing getting in the way of making a living?
Others tell the reporters this whole thing’s been blown out of proportion. They point out that the Jessica’s load was—what?—a quarter million gallons or so of fuel and oil? That’s nothing, they say, compared with the Exxon Valdez. Eleven million gallons, that’s what the Exxon Valdez spilled up in Alaska. Now that was a disaster. This is what a vice admiral named Gonzalo Vega, the director of DIGMER (an acronym for Ecuador’s merchant marines), tells the press as the weekend passes and the spill slowly spreads west from San Cristobal toward the other islands. This is not a big deal, insists Vega.
By now, details have emerged about the Jessica’s background. The thing is a rust bucket, a decrepit twenty-eight-year-old wreck of a ship, hardly seaworthy at all. Its deck is riddled with gaping holes. Many of its valves are so corroded they cannot be closed. Some of its cargo-tank hatch hinges are rusted so badly the covers break off when opened. As the surf pounds the ship and it continues to list, the sound of its bulkheads popping can be heard from the shore. The U.S. Coast Guard team is aghast at the shape this ship is in. When they ask how the thing passed inspection, they’re told by sheepish Ecuadorian officials that the ship was not inspected at all. This was interesting for Sean O’Hearn to find out, considering that the Sirenian is still sitting at anchor in Academy Bay, awaiting permission from its inspectors to take to the seas.
The Jessica wasn’t even supposed to make this trip. The tanker that normally carries these oil shipments was drydocked for emergency repairs, and the Jessica was hastily sent in her place. The Jessica’s captain, a fifty-eight-year-old Ecuadorian named Tarquino Arevalo, it turns out, is certified only for coastal shipping, not for the high seas. He and his thirteen-man crew are currently under arrest at the Puerto Baquerizo naval base. Arevalo has already admitted that this is his fault, that he mistook a signal buoy for a lighthouse and steered the ship straight toward a beacon intended to warn him away.
All these facts are reported by the international press, as well as investigations into the “cozy”—as one press report puts it—relationship between the Acotramar company, which owns the Jessica, and the Ecuadorian Navy department responsible for inspecting all ships in these waters. Allegations of corruption within PetroEcuador are being explored as well; charges that the company has been routinely shipping illegally resold oil (stolen fuel secretly transferred at sea under false documentation), including the very fuel spilled by the Jessica.
By Thursday the twenty-fifth, a week after the spill began, a good amount of the 180,000 gallons of fuel and oil in the water has been corralled by floating booms and barricades. But tens of thousands of gallons have escaped, reaching the beaches of Santa Fé and Floreana. Slick, black ribbons of fuel can be seen from the air snaking their way toward Santa Cruz.
Sean O’Hearn’s been going nuts sitting tight with the Sirenian, so he’s understandably excited when a call comes from the Ecuadorian authorities asking him if his ship could carry a group of dignitaries over to San Cristobal. O’Hearn’s been dying to get to the scene of the spill, to do what he can to help out. But his excitement abates when he learns that the “dignitaries” are a group of local musicians hired to play at an annual municipal celebration in Puerto Baquerizo. Nevertheless, the Sirenian goes, and so this becomes the Sea Shepherd’s first action in the Galápagos: ferrying a band to a street party.
The spill does eventually reach Santa Cruz, coming ashore at the beach at Tortuga, where several hundred townspeople line the shore, wielding towels, blankets, and shovels, chasing down the thick globs of oil as the waves carry the stuff in. The townspeople do a good job, but some of the mess still reaches the shore, where it will remain for years as black layers of goo buried beneath the beach’s sugary white sand.
By the end of the month, the crisis has passed. The islands have been spared the brunt of the Rhode Island–sized spill by the currents and wind, which steered most of the oil out into open seas. The fierce equatorial sun helped as well, evaporating much of the diesel fuel as it floated on the surface. Visible damage to the animals and land is minimal, although it will take thirty more months, according to the Darwin Foundation, to complete the cleanup at a cost of about $1 million. As for the effect on the ecosystem of the untold amount of bunker fuel that has settled to the ocean floor in the shallows around the archipelago’s islands, only time and long-term scientific study will tell.
Of immediate concern is some kind of assurance that this won’t happen again. The Ecuadorian government has agreed to rewrite its regulations to require double hulls on all merchant ships entering Galápagos waters. Others say there should be no commercial vessels whatsoever allowed among these islands, a protest that has been heard since the Galápagos were first opened to tourism. This suggestion brings the same response it always has, that the Galápagos cannot survive in today’s world without tourism.
An even more extreme suggestion, which has hovered for years in the background of the debate over how to protect the Galápagos, is to finally say “enough” to this negligence and corruption and to simply take the islands away from Ecuador altogether, to put them under a United Nations trusteeship whereby the Galápagos Islands would be managed and protected by all nations and owned outright by none.
Even those who embrace this idea know it is not realistic. Fundamental rights of national sovereignty would be violated. But the very fact that this concept is even discussed—in newspaper stories that quote outraged Darwin Research Station scientists who are, understandably, not identified by name—indicates the severity of the shock of this spill.
As the spill subsides, the Jessica’s captain, Arevalo—the only crew member still being detained—holds an emotional press conference and takes full responsibility for the worst man-made disaster in the history of these islands. “It was overconfidence on my part,” he says, his eyes shining with tears. “I am completely to blame.”
Shortly after the conference, Arevalo is taken to San Cristobal’s naval base medical clinic, where he is treated for what a clinic spokesman calls “nerves.” The spokesman tells the press that Arevalo is “psychologically not stable.” At the same time, the merchant marine admiral, Vega, has grudgingly acknowledged the spill’s severity and announces he is now pursuing criminal charges against the Jessica’s captain. If found guilty, Arevalo faces four to five years in prison.
As February begins and the oil disperses and the newspaper headlines abate, the Galápagos is left with a new tourist attraction: the hull of the sunken tanker, which cannot be moved. The wreck is already beginning to crust over with coral, attracting perching birds and schools of curious fish.
“Over time it will become a terrific place to dive,” says Captain Edwin Stanton, the head of the U.S. Coast Guard response team.
“It’s a new habitat,” Stanton tells a room full of reporters. “We have a new island in the Galápagos,” he says with a small smile. “Isla Jessica.”