NOVEMBER 2, 1999
A bank of low, ashen clouds scuds across the northern Virginia sky, grazing the treetops as sheets of soft morning rain sweep over the gridlocked traffic below. Bumper-to-bumper headlights bend from one horizon to the other, like a necklace of wet, glimmering beads. A soft autumn breeze lifts swirls of amber leaves from roadside thickets as bleary-eyed commuters inch their sedans through a suburban crossroad called Falls Church.
Ahead to the east, across the Potomac, lies the low-sprawling skyline of Washington, D.C., where most of this traffic is bound. Drive-time radio crackles with the morning’s top stories: Divers have begun searching for the wreckage of a downed Egypt Air jet in the ocean off Nantucket Island; Disney executives have announced plans to build an amusement theme park in Hong Kong.
At this asphalt intersection in downtown Falls Church, across the street from a Christian bookstore, on the second floor of a bare redbrick building, down a carpeted corridor past a row of identical doors, each marked with the nameplate of the occupant—an accounting firm, a family counseling service, a commercial realtor, a Weight Watchers franchise, the National Association of Bail Enforcement Agents—sits the office of the executive director of the Charles Darwin Foundation, Inc., a woman named Johannah Barry.
This is not a good morning for Barry. The principal at her son’s elementary school is on the phone, and Barry is listening silently, her elbows propped on her desk, her lips pursed. She’s a redhead, and this morning her hair is pulled back in a bun. A pair of black slacks and a vermilion sweater drape her slim, angular frame. She peers out through wire-rim glasses.
The principal talks for some time. Barry’s staff, a man and two women, come and go from a set of small cubicles near the door, silently laying sheaves of documents on her desk. A framed photo of Lyle Lovett is perched on the bookcase behind her. A Polaroid of Andy Warhol is pinned to her bulletin board. On a shelf of their own sit a neat row of videotapes, their titles hand-penned in black Magic Marker: “Incident on Tower Island”; “Sea Cukes”; “CNN 12/22/95”; “Invasion Pescadores.”
The rain is falling harder now, pelting the office’s lone window, which looks down on an empty parking lot and a franchised restaurant.
“I understand,” Barry finally speaks, glancing out at the darkening day. “Thank you.” And then she hangs up.
The papers on her desk are not heartening—news reports from Ecuador, where students and Indians are burning tires in the streets of Quito, and armed soldiers have been dispatched to guard every ATM in town. The volcanoes surrounding that capital city have been erupting for weeks now, spewing nine-mile-high columns of smoke and fine ash, closing off major roadways and shutting down the airport. Tourists waiting to fly into Quito, including dozens bound for the Galápagos, are turning away as terrorist threats have been issued by the Colombian rebel army to the north, which is incensed that Ecuador has allowed U.S. antidrug forces to establish outposts on the border between the two nations.
Just another day in the life for Barry, who is a soldier of sorts herself, an officer in the environmental army fighting to protect the fragile little cluster of islands called the Galápagos. As ecowarriors go, Barry is an odd bird. She’s not really the outdoors type, never has been. She might join her husband Dave now and then for a hike up on Skyline Drive, but when he packs his gear to go climb cliffs out in Joshua Tree in the California desert—where he’s headed this very weekend—he does it alone.
They’ve been together twenty-three years now, half of Barry’s life. They got married the day after she received her master’s degree in medieval literature from the University of Virginia. Her thesis, “Alchemical Parallels in Book One and Book Three of Edmund Spenser’s Fairie Queene,” was not the sort of work that would point toward a career in wildlife preservation. But it taught her two things: how to read with the eye of a hawk and how to write with the clarity of water. Before long, she learned that those two skills led to a third:raising money. That was what the Weyerhauser Foundation—the timber people—asked Barry to do when they hired her to join their development branch back in the late 1970s. She and Dave were living in Seattle at the time, but before long they moved to D.C., where Barry spent the next decade carving a niche as someone with a knack for pipelining dollars into naturalist causes. The World Conservation Union, the Wilderness Society, Rails to Trails, the Belize Audubon Society, American Rivers—these groups and others enjoyed Johannah Barry’s golden touch.
“There are lots of ways to be an environmental activist,” she told the reporters as her reputation grew. “Some people tie themselves to trees, and that works. Some spend their time on Capitol Hill, and that works. And some of us write proposals and get the movement underwritten, and that works. That’s what I know how to do. That’s how I contribute.”
Barry knew as much—or as little—about the Galápagos Islands as most people when she got a call from the Darwin Foundation in December of 1990. They wanted her, naturally, to raise cash. And naturally, before she would say yes, she needed to know what she was stepping into.
It wasn’t pretty. The Foundation itself had an honorable, even noble history. It was created in 1959, the same year the nation of Ecuador declared the Galápagos Islands a national park, exactly a century after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Such a park had long been a dream to an international network of scientific and environmental organizations, all of whom regarded the Galápagos as a fragile, priceless crown jewel of nature, an undisturbed petri dish of biologic adaptation and evolution, the mecca of natural scientists from every nation on Earth. To Ecuador, however, which had owned the archipelago since annexing it in 1832 (three years before young Charles Darwin passed through), this cluster of volcanic outcrops had long been little more than a worthless pile of rocks. It had provided a handy garbage dump, a nice target for Ecuador’s small navy to take artillery practice, and a convenient location for penal colonies. Other than that, as far as the Ecuadorian government was concerned, the Galápagos Islands were essentially useless.
It would seem that somehow the Ecuadorians were suddenly struck by the light when they made the move to create that Park in 1959. But they would never have done so if wads of cash—more specifically, the promise of tourist dollars—hadn’t been waved in their faces. The word “conservation” meant virtually nothing at that time to the military generals, bureaucrats, and businessmen who controlled this country, the second smallest nation in South America, roughly the size of Nevada. These power brokers cared little about the esoteric needs and desires of the foreign scientists wringing their hands over the fate of the Galápagos. The question that mattered to the Ecuadorians was, what were they supposed to get out of this deal? The answer, included in the very language of the charter that was eventually written for the Park—a charter hammered out behind closed doors by representatives of the Ecuadorian government and by leaders of an international coalition of conservationists that included UNESCO’s Julian Huxley, a German ecovisionary named Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, and an American zoologist named Robert Bowman—was tourism.
Until then, the only tourists who visited the Galápagos were occasional millionaire yachtsmen bound west toward the Marquesas Islands. They would pull into a cove, drop anchor, snap a few photos, maybe swim with the sea turtles. They were free, if they had the room and the resources, to grab an iguana or two, a flamingo, or even, God forbid, a tortoise to take home with them as a living—or dead—souvenir. Anything they liked. Rules and restrictions were few, and enforcement was nonexistent.
Outrageous, said the scientists, that these precious islands should remain such a killing ground, even as humankind was launching missiles into space. A treasure such as the Galápagos should be closed off to humans forever, they said. The planet was shrinking, they warned, and places like this, pockets of nature still virtually untouched by human hands, must be protected, preserved at all costs.
The Ecuadorians saw things a bit differently. If they had their way, if the forecasts of a tourist boom just around the corner were correct, the best use of these islands would be to throw them wide open, allow the construction of luxury hotels, beachfront cabanas, roadways up to volcanic overlooks, with cafés and restaurants perched on the craters of those mist-enveloped peaks. The Caribbean couldn’t hold a candle to something like this.
The agreement finally reached in that summer of 1959 was a compromise. The ninety-seven percent of the islands still uninhabited at that time would remain so forever, patrolled and protected by the government of Ecuador. The Galápagos National Park Service would be created to provide that protection. The newly formed Charles Darwin Foundation, spearheaded by a Belgian professor named Victor Van Straelen (which explains why the group’s operational headquarters were placed in Brussels and why, to this day, the King of Belgium puts his signature on all CDF statutory procedures) would be permitted to establish a “Research Station” on the islands, a command center for the handful of scientists who fanned out each year to conduct studies there. The Station would also serve as a watchdog, helping the Park Service protect this natural treasure. The three percent of the Galápagos where people lived—those four fishing settlements and a smattering of highland farms—would be free to go on as they always had.
For a time, things went as intended. The seedling ecotourism industry indeed began to take shape, in much the same way as both sides had foreseen. The Foundation had proposed early on that a system of boat-touring be created, with the vessels serving as self-contained hotels and restaurants. Along with its crew and passengers, each ship would carry at least one naturalist guide, trained and certified by a coalition of National Park and Research Station instructors. These guides would accompany each group of visitors as they journeyed ashore. Specific landing sites would be established, to provide the tourists with a wide range of experiences while disturbing the islands as little as possible: Only eight percent of the islands’ 4,500 square miles of land would be open to tour groups.
The Ecuadorian government, in exchange for agreeing to such restrictions, created a Park “entrance fee,” collected in cash from each visitor. That money, along with the taxes and licensing fees paid by the tour boats, would go straight to the mainland and into the government coffers, where it would supposedly then be funneled back to protect and maintain the islands.
Not a bad plan—on the face of it.
But things haven’t turned out quite as planned, which surprises no one with even the slightest knowledge of what a cesspool the government of Ecuador is and always has been. On the face of it, Ecuador should be racing headlong into First World status rather than mired as it is in the muck of Third World disarray and confusion. It has the agriculture: verdant plantations of coffee and bananas, sugar, and cocoa. Its forests are thick with timber; besides being the world’s largest exporter of bananas, Ecuador also produces more balsa wood than any nation on the planet. The country’s coastline, fed by frigid Antarctic currents, embraces some of the richest fishing waters in the world, especially for shrimp. Minerals, particularly gold, are abundant. Vast deposits of oil, discovered in the 1960s beneath the Amazon forests along the nation’s eastern border, have pumped billions of dollars into…well, into somebody’s pockets.
And then there is tourism. The sheer geography of Ecuador has long been a beacon for travelers. From the snow-coned peaks of the inland Andes, to the rain forests, to the ancient towns and cities rich with their blends of Indian and Spanish cultures, to the beaches along the coast, and—most significantly, as they have emerged since the 1960s—to the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador has established itself as a prime destination for South American vacationers. More than half a million tourists cross its borders each year.
With such riches, there seems to be no reason for this nation to be spiraling downward like the swirl in a flushing toilet. No reason, that is, except for a government that has become so horrifically convoluted and corrupt that onlookers have taken to calling this country “Absurdistan.”
Ecuador is supposed to be a democracy. It has been since 1973, when its military rulers, who drafted that ’59 deal with the Darwin Foundation, handed the government over to the people. It has a constitution. It has courts. It has a congress and a president, all directly elected by the nation’s roughly thirteen million citizens. But in survey after survey conducted during the past thirty years, Ecuador has consistently ranked among the ten most corrupt countries in the world.
Estimates are that eighty-five percent of Ecuador’s wealth belongs to roughly fifteen families, most notably the Noboa clan, whose fortune was built during the mid-twentieth century on bananas (this is, indeed, a “banana republic”). Today, the Noboas have not only cornered the country’s fruit market, but they also own several hundred Ecuadorian businesses, ranging from banks to department stores to shipping conglomerates.
Little of the cash flowing into the bank accounts of families like the Noboas is cycled back into the nation’s economy. Tax collection in Ecuador is a joke. The rich avoid paying by bribing inspectors, hiding ownership of property, and spiriting away millions of undeclared dollars into overseas deposits. The poor, watching this cash drift away while they receive next to nothing in terms of government support—education, health care, land reform—refuse as well to pay taxes, creating a downward spiral of evaporating public resources and services.
Stoking these flames of instability and corruption is the office of the presidency itself. Typically, an Ecuadorian presidential candidate campaigns as a populist, seizing on public unrest, aligning himself against the rich who control the congress, and promising the poor majority of Ecuadorians that he (and it is always a “he”) will overhaul the system with reforms and justice. Once he takes office, he is either overwhelmed and ultimately rejected by the fractured, feuding congress, or he simply joins the system and lines his own pockets as swiftly as he can during the time he has, which is usually not much. The Ecuadorian public is as impatient as it is passionate. As soon as they see little or no change occurring in their own largely lamentable lives, the people, typically with the encouragement of the congress, take to the streets, call for the president’s head, and begin hunting for another.
More often than not, their behavior is justified. The roster of Ecuadorian presidents during the past quarter century includes a dizzying array of lunatics and thieves, spinning in and out of the presidential palace as if it has a revolving door. One, a white-haired heavy drinker named Leon Cordero, who held office in the mid-1980s, went nowhere without an automatic pistol—“my best friend,” he called it—openly strapped on his hip. The low point of Cordero’s term in office was when he was kidnapped by his own troops, of whom he was supposedly commander in chief.
Ecuador has had as many as three presidents in one day. Few have survived an entire term. But none can compare to the one they call El Loco, or “the Crazy One,” a former mayor of Guayaquil named Abdala Bucaram.
“I do as I damn well please,” Bucaram spat at the press and the public when he was criticized in the mid-1980s for extorting payments from Guayaquil’s wealthiest businessmen during his tenure as that city’s mayor. Those charges of corruption finally chased him out of the country in 1990. It took six years for Bucaram to return, but when he did, it was with a bang. He launched possibly the most bizarre campaign for a nation’s presidency in the history of man.
Rotund, balding, sporting a tightly trimmed moustache reminiscent of Hitler’s (he did, in fact, once declare that Mein Kampf was among his favorite books), the forty-four-year-old candidate took to the presidential hustings and…sang, backed by a Uruguayan rock band. He toured the poorest provinces of the nation by bus, passing out free bags of rice, his face dripping with real tears as he emotionally denounced the “oligarchy” that was running the nation into the ground and derided the current administration as a herd of “burros.” It was a classic populist campaign, spiced with Bucaram’s blatant showmanship.
“Do you want me to sing or talk?” he would ask the roaring crowds at each rally. They would always shout back for him to sing. His unabashed whiskey swilling and skirt-chasing only made the cheers louder. Bucaram won that 1996 election in a landslide, carrying twenty of the nation’s twenty-one provinces.
Bucaram as a candidate, however, was nothing compared to Bucaram as a president. In the classic tradition of patronage that typifies embryonic democracies and that plagues Ecuador to this day, Bucaram’s first act was to fill his cabinet with family and friends. He appointed his brother Adolfo, who had no political experience to speak of, as minister of social welfare. He put his eighteen-year-old son, Jacob, in charge of the customs service (the Ecuadorian Customs Service has always been a lucrative channel for bribes and kickbacks), then threw a lavish party six months later (with reporters and photographers invited) to celebrate the boy “earning” his first million dollars. He pardoned and brought home from exile in Panama his sister, Elsa, who, like him, was also a former mayor of Guayaquil and, like him, had fled the country several years earlier in the face of charges that she had stolen millions from that city’s vaults. He named his best friend, Alfredo Adum, a man who made his own tainted fortune in Guayaquil’s notorious La Bahía black market district, as minister of energy, then immediately dispatched Adum to spring Bucaram’s brother Gustavo from a police station where Gustavo had been held after being found in a stolen Jeep outside the U.S. Consulate’s office. (The Jeep, it turned out, had been used extensively during Bucaram’s campaign.)
Upon taking office, Bucaram immediately shunned the presidential palace—“too gloomy,” he called it—and moved his family and a cadre of close friends into a cluster of suites in Quito’s most expensive hotel, instructing the manager to bill his personal account rather than the government.
And then Bucaram partied. He skipped a cabinet meeting to spend an afternoon drinking and dancing with Ecuador’s “Miss Banana.” He cut a music video featuring himself crooning a tune titled “A Madman Who Loves.” He invited Ecuadorian-born Lorena Bobbitt to the presidential palace and hailed her as a “a national heroine” for cutting off her husband’s penis. “She would be a better ambassador to the world for Ecuador than anybody we’ve got,” he proclaimed to the press. “I welcomed her to the palace, just as I would have welcomed the Pope.”
When Bucaram’s energy minister, Adum, stirred up a ruckus by detailing his sexual appetite to an Ecuadorian magazine reporter (“I would have liked to have lived in the caveman era when there was more freedom, less prejudice. Then if I liked a woman I could grab her by the hair and drag her off to my cave and eat her.”), the president defended his good friend by proclaiming his own healthy lust. “I admit I love women,” said the married commander in chief. “Besides, what’s so bad? What would be terrible would be if I loved men.”
Bucaram’s act was entertaining for a while, but soon it wore thin. Contrary to his campaign promises, the inept administration he assembled simply worsened the lot of Ecuador’s poor, few of whom were earning the then-minimum salary of $30 a month. And he alienated the already splintered congress with his embarrassing behavior and his erratic handling of the nation’s economy. By early 1997, the people took to the streets by the hundreds of thousands, banging pot covers, burning garbage, and demanding the resignation of El Loco. Forty-four of the eighty-two members of the congress responded by voting to remove him from office for “mental incapacity.” The Ecuadorian supreme court issued a warrant for Bucaram’s arrest on grounds of misuse of presidential funds, but by then, after a mere six months in office, Bucaram had already skipped the country. He fled to Panama, taking with him between $100 and $300 million of the government’s money and leaving the manager of that chic Quito hotel with more than $50,000 in unpaid bills.
A new president named Jamil Mahuad was elected that same year, prompting hopes among many observers that decades of governmental rot and ruin in Ecuador might finally be turned around. Mahuad, a former mayor of Quito, was Harvard-educated, dignified, and respected as an honest, effective public servant. The candidate he defeated that summer, banana tycoon Alvaro Noboa, was supported loudly and strongly by the exiled Bucaram, who was now spending his days playing blackjack and lying by the pool at a Panama City hotel famous for taking in deposed despots. (Among recent guests who have enjoyed asylum in the sweet sunshine of this Central American sanctuary are Haitian strongman Raoul Cedras, accused of hundreds of killings committed by troops under his command, and former Guatemalan President Jorge Serrano, who packed his bags in 1993 after a Guatemalan court accused him of lifting $22 million from a presidential fund.)
But Bucaram’s backing wasn’t enough to give his good friend Noboa the presidency. Instead, the Ecuadorian public offered the forty-nine-year-old Mahuad his chance. In his inaugural address, Mahuad raised hopes by pledging to create nearly a million new jobs, to build new housing for a quarter-million of the nation’s people, to improve education, and to bring water and sewage services to the many towns and neighborhoods throughout Ecuador that did not have them, including those in the Galápagos.
Less than a year later, however, Mahuad’s popularity was already bottoming out. The belt-tightening he demanded in order to restore some solidity to the nation’s ever-more-worthless sucre was too painful for most Ecuadorians to endure. Mahuad was not stealing from them. He did not fill the government with members of his family. But neither was he able to stabilize the sinking value of his nation’s currency. Day by day, thieving political leaders and corporate executives continued to sink their teeth into their own nation’s coffers, transferring millions of U.S. dollars into overseas bank accounts, with more than a few of those accounts being in Miami. Economic sirens sounded throughout the country. International newspaper reports described Ecuadorian banks defaulting in droves on foreign loans, to the point where the cost of bailing them out came to equal a third of the country’s gross domestic product. In response to the crisis they had created themselves, the bankers jacked up their interest rates to nearly 150 percent, prompting individual Ecuadorians to descend like rabid dogs on their shrinking savings accounts, pulling their devalued sucres out of the banks and stuffing them in private safety boxes or under mattresses in their bedrooms.
This is the situation that confronts Johannah Barry as she riffles through her paperwork on this rainy autumn morning. It is the situation she foresaw when she was hired by the Darwin Foundation back in the spring of 1991. It was clear even then that the Galápagos were under siege on a variety of fronts. Tourism had exploded during the 1970s and ’80s, and with it had grown issues of crowding, control, and safety. Projections made in the 1960s had warned that no more than 12,000 tourists could ever visit these islands in a single year without causing damage; by 1990 more than 40,000 people a year were boarding those tour boats. Where a study done in the early 1970s warned that these waters could safely sustain no more than fifty such boats at most, ever, by the turn of the ’90s more than sixty vessels were licensed to tour the archipelago, with more being added each year.
Some of those ships carried but four or five passengers; others were full-fledged cruise liners, with swimming pools, elevators, carpeted dining rooms, lavish buffets, and live music. More than a few of those ships, large and small, were hardly seaworthy, and the Ecuadorian Navy inspectors responsible for licensing them were notoriously inept. The results were occasional nightmares, such as the Bartolomé disaster.
The Bartolomé was a seventy-four-footer, fitted for sixteen passengers, which was what she was carrying on the evening of October 26, 1990. It was around four A.M. The guests were asleep in their berths below deck, and the boat was moving from Genovesa, where its passengers had spent that day hiking, to the island of Baltra. This is how almost all Galápagos tour boats travel—at night. When the sun sets, they are at one island; when it rises, they are at another. In between, while the guests sleep, the ship sails.
But on this night the passengers on the Bartolomé were awakened not by the gentle voices of the crew, but by the stench of oily smoke in pitch-black darkness, the sounds of clamoring on deck, and slivers of flickering light crackling through the ceilings above them.
The boat was on fire. What none of these passengers knew when they’d booked this tour months earlier, was that the Bartolomé had caught fire several times before. Those mishaps had been electrical, nothing to worry about according to the inspectors who continued to license the ship and allow it to sail. The boat’s owner, a woman well known on the islands, was “ordered” after each incident to fix the ship’s wiring. In response, she not only ignored the repairs but did not even bother to replace the burnt hull; she simply had her crew paint over the scorched, blackened wood.
The fire that began that October evening was sparked by a short circuit in that unrepaired wiring. The crew, rather than disturb the sleeping guests, tried quelling the flames with extinguishers. When that didn’t work, they panicked, flung the extinguishers aside, reached for the boat’s lifejacket supply, and began buckling the jackets on themselves.
A dinghy was tied to the stern of the ship, and the first man to board it was the captain. By the time the lifeboat was loaded with crew and those passengers lucky enough to climb out through the flames—some wearing pajamas, others half-naked, burned, and in shock—the heat was too intense to untie the line securing the skiff to the ship. They had to wait for the fire to melt it away. The last man off was an American guide named Richard Polatty who, unlike the crew, had stayed aboard to save what passengers he could.
As the survivors looked on in horror from their panga, they could hear the screams of people still trapped inside the boat’s burning, buckling shell. One passenger burst out from below, his body in flames, his arms flailing as he stood for a moment, outlined against the night sky, before collapsing to the deck.
Six people perished that night; an Austrian couple, an Ecuadorian crew member, and three women from the United States. Lawsuits ensued from the survivors of the Americans, but in the tangled legal and political web that connects two nations like the United States and Ecuador, those lawsuits vanished like smoke. To this day, the woman who owned the Bartolomé is still running cruises in the Galápagos. Her insurance money from that loss allowed her to buy a bigger boat.
Tour boat safety remains a hot-button issue in the islands. One or two go down every year…the Albacora, the Resting Cloud, the San Juan. The list goes on and on. But just as important to Johannah Barry and the Darwin Foundation, to the scientists manning the Station, to the Park wardens patrolling those forests and shores, and to anyone with the slightest concern for the fate of these islands, is the impact on the Galápagos not from the tourists or the $120-million-a-year industry built around them, but from the people who inhabit this place and will do anything they must to survive. That small handful of souls who called these islands home in 1959 now numbers close to 20,000, a figure undreamed of when the officials who created this Park allowed that slivery three percent of inhabited land to remain so. Even more mind-numbing are predictions that the Galápagos population, which has been growing at a rate of six percent a year for ten years, will swell to more than 30,000—half again what it is today—by the year 2010.
It is these people, the residents of the Galápagos themselves, who hold the fate of these islands in their hands. Or so virtually everyone with a stake in the future of this place believes. They all say that the people who inhabit those four seaside communities are the best hope for these islands’ salvation. But they are also the greatest threat. Outsiders—from the burgeoning worldwide ecotour industry to international industrial fisheries to the mainland Ecuadorian businessmen and politicians eager to get their slice of the Galápagan pie—ceaselessly bang at the door of these islands, but it is the islanders themselves who choose whether and how to let them in. It is the Galápagos people who decide whether to make these outside forces their partners, their foes, or a combination of both.
Right now, by all indications, they are making these forces their partners. Barry can spread out a map on her large conference table and point out two fronts in the war that she and her colleagues are fighting.
“This is where the people are,” she says, tapping her forefinger on the town of Puerto Ayora. “And this,” she says, sliding her hand over to the western island of Isabela and the village of Puerto Villamil, “is where the trouble is.”
The people she refers to are the flash flood of migrants who have arrived from the Ecuadorian mainland during the past ten years, half of whom have settled in Puerto Ayora. The “trouble” is the rampant introduction of life-forms—animals, plants—that don’t belong among these islands, along with the wholesale slaughter of life-forms that do. These are the Foundation’s top two concerns at the moment: “Getting rid of what’s there,” says Barry, “and stopping what’s coming in.”
“What’s there” are nonindigenous animals (feral goats, rats, dogs, cats and pigs), insects (wasps, cockroaches, fire ants), and plants (mora blackberry vines, lantana, quinine and guava trees) introduced over the years by unthinking or uncaring humans. Like toxic waste, these life-forms have oozed out across the islands, wreaking havoc among the native wildlife that get in their way. The goat problem on Isabela alone has become an apocalyptic nightmare relatively overnight. Just seventeen years ago, scientists were alarmed by the appearance of a handful of goats left behind on the northern part of the island by local fishermen. Today, the feral goat population of Isabela Island numbers more than one hundred thousand. Hillsides that were once lush with green foliage now stand denuded, stripped bare by ravenous leaf-eating goats, and littered with the carcasses of dehydrated, malnourished tortoises.
Mounting counterattacks to such assaults costs money, much more than the dues collected from the memberships of the web of well-meaning organizations created worldwide to support the Galápagos, groups ranging from the Friends of the Galápagos to the Darwin Foundation itself. And that’s where Barry comes in. Her fund-raising targets are the heavy hitters—international agencies and organizations for whom a couple of million dollars is no great shakes. Sitting on her desk this very morning is a grant for $10 million from a group called the Global Environmental Facility Fund. That money has almost made its way through the bureaucratic pipeline. When it does, the Darwin Foundation will send it down to help fund the extermination of those Isabela goats, to help pay for the helicopters, sharpshooters, automatic weapons, and supplies for dozens of ground troops that will constitute the saturation-spray assault on that island. The “eradication,” as the scientists call it, is not set to actually begin until the fall of 2002, but word has slipped out, and animal rights groups in several nations have already begun to launch protests against the slaughter of the innocent creatures—just one more headache Barry and her colleagues must deal with.
They’re in a tough situation, delicately balancing themselves on a tightrope between diplomacy and the truth. Their priority, of course, their very reason for being, is the preservation and restoration of these islands. It’s helped that international organizations such as UNESCO, which declared the Galápagos a “world heritage site” in 1978, thereby throwing the considerable weight of the United Nations behind efforts to preserve the islands, have over the years joined the battle. But what makes things sticky is the unfortunate fact that the primary threat to the mission of all these agencies (the Darwin Foundation and all of the others) is the ineptness, instability, and ignorance of the powers-that-be who control the nation to which these islands belong.
It was not until 1998 that the Ecuadorian government reluctantly responded to the burgeoning crises in the Galápagos by passing a package of legislation that had real teeth to it. The Special Law, as it is called, is aimed at such issues as stemming the flood of immigrants from the mainland, extending the authority of the Park Service, educating the islanders about the necessity of conserving the resources that too many of them have been plundering, placing limits on local fishing, widening the boundaries that protect the islands’ waters from industrial fleets, and establishing an effective quarantine system to block the invasion of nonindigenous plants and animals.
These laws faced stiff resistance from some Ecuadorian congressmen aligned with such powerful lobbying forces as those mainland industrial fishing fleets, which have sharpened their teeth for decades at the prospect of casting their longlines and drift nets into the rich waters of the Galápagos. Such fleets became absolutely voracious at the turn of the ’90s when their own coastal waters—like heavily fished waters all over the world—became depleted and they had to look elsewhere for prey. Those forces continue to work in direct opposition to the goals of people such as Barry and her colleagues, the scientists down at the Research Station, the Park Service staff, and those among the islanders committed to protecting what remains of the Galápagos’ purity.
Few of these people can openly criticize the true sources of their problems and fears (the politicians and private businessmen to whom the islands mean nothing but short-term profit) because it is by the permission of those same institutions and individuals that these outsiders are even allowed to be there. The very existence of the Station depends entirely on the good graces and support of an Ecuadorian government that is riddled by bribes and backroom deals. It could change hands at the snap of a finger. It is, at the moment, facing an economy in utter collapse. And it is reeling from a recent war with Peru on one border and continual clashes with Colombian guerrillas on another. The Galápagos remain low on the list of Ecuador’s priorities, but still, people like Johannah Barry must mind every word that they say—at least openly—lest they anger the bureaucrats, who, for all their rancor, still control these islands. The last thing anyone wants is for an angry Ecuadorian administration to repeal those hard-won laws or even worse, and entirely conceivable, to simply throw all the foreigners out, putting the Galápagos back where they were fifty years ago.
None of this makes Barry’s job any easier. She was heartened, on the one hand, to hear about that protest march down in Puerto Ayora at the start of this year. It was encouraging to see the islanders themselves, at least some of them, taking a stand for their own future. Who could have imagined that they would actually throw that judge—what was his name, Avellan?—off the island?
But on the other hand, it’s been ten months since then, and the judge still has not been replaced. No one knows who will eventually fill his seat. It could be someone even worse. Avellan has powerful allies on the mainland, and they were angered at his ouster. Retribution is not out of the question.
So the march was a mixed blessing, certainly for Barry. It’s hard asking for money under such unsteady circumstances. In fact, on this November morning, murmurs of concern are arising from some of the islands’ chief benefactors, who are alarmed at recent events in the Galápagos and at the increasing shakiness of the Mahuad presidency. They’re happy to give money to help protect those islands, but if they can’t be assured of where that money will actually wind up; if they can’t be certain that it won’t be swept up overnight by the greedy hands of corrupt island officials or by a new national regime in the wake of a coup—an entirely possible scenario, and one that has played itself out all too often—well, then they may just want to hold back for a while, until things settle down.
But things are not settling down. The protests in the capital are growing more intense each day, as the last Christmas of the century approaches, and the Indians and peasant farmers and oil field workers continue to pour into Quito, camping in the parks and the streets and demanding that Mahuad step down. The nation’s top military leader, a general named Carlos Mendoza, just this week made a less-than-reassuring statement to the press. “The elements which make up the structure of the state,” said the general, “are under threat to the point where the possibility of its survival is under question.”
Meanwhile, the volcanoes continue to burst open, with each morning’s newspaper carrying red alert warnings for the people of Quito to stay in their homes. To the north and east, the Colombians are stretching their tentacles further into Ecuador each day. Just last month, four tourists and eight oil workers were kidnapped in the jungle near the Colombian–Ecuadorian border, where American-financed oil operations are centered. The Colombians are unhappy about any American presence in Ecuador at all, and their warnings have lately turned into action. The U.S. Embassy in Quito is concerned enough that a bulletin has been drafted, warning American travelers to steer clear of this country. The bulletin has not yet been issued, but with Christmas approaching and the millennial New Year after that, the warning is ready to go.
Just one more thing to keep Johannah Barry awake tonight.