The day before New Year’s Eve 2001, I returned to the Galápagos for the fourth time in three years. It had been almost six months since my last visit, and even as our morning flight closed in for its landing at Baltra, at least one change was apparent: A smaller number of tour boats was anchored in the cove near the airport than at any time I had been here before.
Indeed, the number of ships licensed to tour the islands had dropped during the past year from ninety to eighty. The ailing worldwide economy, which had set in during the summer, had something to do with that. The September terrorist attacks on the United States had made it even worse—the Galápagos’ tourism rate had plunged thirty-six percent in the three months since those attacks. Still, according to the Park Service, the total number of visitors to the islands for this calendar year was a record-high 81,500.
Furio Valbonesi would say amen to that. His “Royal Palm Resort,” now allied with a Singapore-based resort hotel consortium, had officially opened in early December with a great deal of fanfare, including a brief item in the New York Times and a visit from Ecuadorian President Gustavo Noboa, who arrived for the opening ceremonies as Furio’s guest of honor. The Baltra airport itself now bore Furio’s stamp—a newly constructed private lounge for the Royal Palm’s guests, with frosted cut-glass doors opening to a tile-floored waiting room arrayed with sofas, chairs, end tables, and a uniformed, English-speaking bartender.
A week after Furio’s hotel opened, President Noboa was in the news again, this time with the announcement that he would not be a candidate in Ecuador’s 2002 election. Someone whose name would appear on the ballot, if he had his way, was…yes, Abdala Bucaram. Speaking from his hotel penthouse in Panama, El Loco announced in late October his intention to return from exile to lead his nation back from ruin. Officials of the Partido Roldocista Ecuatoriano—Bucaram’s political party—were working at the moment to devise a law that would allow El Loco to be pardoned of the corruption charges that had led him to flee the country in 1997.
Whoever would become Ecuador’s next president was going to inherit a wasp’s nest of crises: with the economy, with the Indios, and with Colombia…all of which are interconnected, and all of which ultimately affect the Galápagos.
Two weeks before Christmas, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released a $95 million loan to Ecuador, but the money came with a caution. Yes, said the IMF, Ecuador’s shift to the U.S. dollar seemed to be working. The nation’s rate of inflation had dropped in one year from 91 percent—the highest in South America—to below 20 percent. But the IMF warned that the country’s almost complete dependence on oil exports was dangerous. The past year had been a time of healthy oil prices. If that market dropped, Ecuador’s economy would again collapse.
But oil had become all Ecuador was left with—oil and bananas. The corruption and instability that continued to riddle the nation’s government and business leadership since the coup nearly two years earlier had stripped its economy of just about everything else.
The Indios understood this, and that’s why, as the year 2001 drew to a close, they were still protesting in the streets of Quito, demanding a voice in the government and a share in the control of the oil industry. The oil comes from beneath the Indios’ land; this gives them leverage, at least as long as the international community is watching.
But the Indios’ leverage is nothing compared with the Americans’, and this is something the Colombians understand. Ecuador wants no part of a conflict with Colombia, but because it’s beholden to the United States as its primary oil customer and as the financier of its shaky economy, it cannot say no when the U.S. government “requests” Ecuador’s cooperation with its anti-drug operations.
As the summer and autumn went by, those operations had begun taking shape. A $61-million U.S.-funded renovation was now well under way at Ecuador’s Manta air base to prepare for the arrival within months of more than 200 U.S. military personnel and a fleet of radar-equipped P-3 Orions and C-130 aircraft to fly surveillance missions over Colombia.
FARC guerrilla leaders in Colombia, who pronounced the Manta operation a “declaration of war” by the United States, had responded by stepping up their forays into Ecuador. More than twenty kidnappings of oil workers in the Amazon region were reported by the end of 2001, compared with just three the year before. Armed Colombians had become an everyday sight on the streets of Lago Agrio, prompting 150 Ecuadorian police troopers outfitted in bulletproof vests and armed with assault rifles to be dispatched there, supported by 11,000 Ecuadorian soldiers deployed to the Amazon region by President Noboa. With even more violence on the horizon, Noboa announced a plan to recruit 24,000 more policemen during the next six years, “to improve national security.”
All of which would explain why the Ecuadorian government continued to ignore and even impede the laws written to protect the waters around the Galápagos. The conservation of these islands was simply not among the government's priorities at the moment. Meanwhile, there were far too many tuna and sharks swimming in those waters for Ecuador’s cash-starved industrial fishing interests to ignore.
As the year 2001 drew to a close, the battle between the Galápagos National Park Service and the illegal fishing fleets had reached pitched proportions. Eliecer Cruz did indeed return from his sojourn to Spain, and by the end of the year, supported by the Sea Shepherd’s Sirenian, the Park Service had seized sixteen fishing vessels for an array of violations.
The government’s response in each case was to either release the ship and its crew, or at the most, to delay legal action. In mid-October the case of a long-liner fishing boat named the Maria Canela II made national news by actually appearing before Ecuador’s Constitutional Tribunal—the first time such a case had reached this high court. The Canela II had been seized back in March near the Galápagos’ Wolf Island with a twenty-five-mile line in tow. Seventy-eight shark carcasses and 1,044 shark fins were found on board the vessel. The Park Service and its supporters had high hopes for this hearing. But it wound up “postponed” at the last moment when two of the tribunal’s five judges decided not to appear. As of New Year’s Eve, that case had still not been heard.
Meanwhile, the Sirenian was now patrolling the islands without Sean O’Hearn aboard. In mid-August, Paul Watson followed through with his promise to bring down the Sea Shepherd’s flagship, the Ocean Warrior, to support the Sirenian. When Watson arrived, however, the Ocean Warrior was detained in Academy Bay by an Ecuadorian naval gunboat armed with Exocet missiles. After an eight-day standoff between Watson and a battalion of Ecuadorian lawyers and middling bureaucrats, the Ocean Warrior agreed to leave the Galápagos, and O’Hearn was informed by Ecuadorian authorities that he was to leave with it. His visa, he was told, had been rescinded. When O’Hearn refused to go, he was arrested by none other than Puerto Ayora’s Police Chief Proáno. After a brief detention at the town’s police station, O’Hearn flew to Guayaquil to plead his case to return to the islands. As of the year’s end, he was still pleading.
Some of these dramas, large and small, were subjects of the muñecos that began taking shape New Year’s Eve day along Darwin Avenue and up into the village of Puerto Ayora. Fiddi Angermeyer’s party this year would be not at his house but at a new restaurant he opened a few months ago on the “other side,” not far from Gus Angermeyer’s old place, right on the barranco. Gus no longer spent time over there. It had become too hard for him to get around. He was now living in town, staying with relatives up in the village, lying in a hammock in a dusty side yard, talking to the chickens and goats and the occasional passerby.
Fiddi’s new place had become quite an attraction, with water taxis ferrying customers back and forth from the town’s wharf to his restaurant’s waterfront cement steps. Anchored not far from those steps, paint-peeled and rotting, sat what was now left of the Symbol. Bico Rosero sold the boat early in the year, and the new owners left it uncared for for months, until the mast decayed and broke, a plank or a fitting came loose in the hull, and finally, one morning in early December, the old sailboat sank to the bottom of the bay. She was refloated not long after that, but nothing more had been done. The Symbol was now just another derelict in a harbor speckled with the ruins of old vessels.
As night fell on this New Year’s Eve and the revelers took to the streets, it was striking how sparse the crowds appeared and how few white faces were among them—nothing like two years before, when the tourists seemed to outnumber the locals.
Jack Nelson would attest to that. The reservation board mounted on a wall in his office is normally filled this time of year, not just for the holiday but for the next couple of months. This night, however, the blank spaces on that board far outnumbered the reservation tags.
But Jack’s chin was still up, in spite of it all. He was excited about plans now afoot to build a new school at the west end of town, a modern academy that would extend its reach into the community, beyond just the classroom and into the lives and needs of the families on this island. The Sapienza University of Rome was behind the project, and just last month a delegation of forty people had arrived in Puerto Ayora to survey not just the educational but also the social services needed here. Forty people. And they stayed for two weeks, not just a few hours. This was not simply lip service or political window dressing. This looked like it might actually happen, something that could truly make a difference for these islands, and that had Jack excited.
So did the news that the Research Station had decided to go ahead and bring in the ladybugs to save the Galápagos’ mangroves from dying. Finally, something was going to be done about the dead, blackened branches sagging from the trees shading the town’s shoreline. Within the next month, the Station had promised, the Australian ladybug would be officially released to combat the cottony cushion scale insects spreading over the islands.
Good news. Meanwhile, even with all those blank spots on Jack’s board, there was still business to do on this evening, guests to take care of. Some of those guests had already left for Fiddi's restaurant, to ring in the new year with an outdoor buffet. Christy and José-Luis would be there. And Jason and Monica. And Georgina Cruz and her husband Augusto. The Balfours would be there, with their son Andrew, who was now done with his studies in England. Jack and Romy had been invited, but decided they’d skip it and stay home this year.
By eleven o’clock most of the town had gathered down by the waterfront. A live band was playing, and the sound—the guitars and drums—carried across the harbor to the backyard of Jack’s hotel. He stood out there, alone, in the dark, by the water, with a small box of fireworks he’d bought earlier in the week.
Half past the hour red flares began arcing from the boats in the bay and from the skyline toward town. Jack pulled one of his rockets from the box, lit it, and stepped back as the small missile shot skyward and burst high above him. He smiled, lit another, and stepped back again.
Out by the hotel’s front entrance, a muñeco was propped by a hand-printed sign. The figure wore sunglasses and a bright blue–striped shirt. A camera hung from its neck. And a pair of snorkeling goggles. And a bottle of suntan lotion. Inscribed on the sign were the words: EL TURISTA QUE NUNCA VINO—“The Tourist Who Never Came.” Jack and his staff had put the thing together that afternoon.
At a quarter to midnight, Jack walked out front. The street was deserted. A pool of white light fell from a street lamp, casting Jack’s shadow on the cobblestoned road. Romy and Audrey came out to join him. He took down the muñeco, laid it out on the road, and splashed it with gasoline.
The countdown to midnight had begun. The chants of the crowd down in town drifted over the treetops as Jack lit a match and stepped back.
The muñeco puffed into flames, its sawdust stuffing glowing bright orange as its face and its clothing peeled away.
And now it was midnight, the start of another new year. Jack turned to kiss Romy, and the three of them—Jack, Romy, and Audrey—watched as the figurine lay on the stones of Darwin Avenue, surrounded by darkness, burning away.