Cartel Fire

by Tom Riggs

  She paused again, and took a slow sip of water before continuing.

  “The scene in there was something I’ll never forget for the rest of my life. Most of the village seemed to be in there. Old people, mothers, babies, children. But no young men. They were all just lying there, on the floor. Sick. They were all really sick. The whole place stank of vomit and excrement. But none of them were injured, or had any marks. No rashes or anything. They were just lying there, staring into space, too weak to even bat off the flies. Whatever they had, had made them too sick to move. It was really weird and really scary. I ran out and was sick from the smell. I’m ashamed to say that, but I was. It was the most…it was the most harrowing thing I have ever seen.

  “Richard and the other guide stayed up there. The villagers were from the same wider tribal group as the guide, so he could talk to them. Eventually one of the older men came out to talk to us. He was really weak, but he managed to tell us what had happened.” Again she paused. Munro knew he was close, but did not want to hurry her. He said nothing. Eventually she went on.

  “He said a year earlier, lots of white men with big boats and helicopters had come to the village. They had said they were building a mine upriver and they needed men to work in it. They offered the men a lot of money to go, and most of them went. There is no real work there, and they jumped at the chance. It may have been a remote village but they still knew the power of money. Anyway, the old man said that they didn’t see the men for three months after that, and one day some of the older men went up river to have a look at the mine. But after half a day’s journey they were stopped by some men with guns. White men he called them, which means non-Indian Brazilians not necessarily European. When they asked to see their sons and brothers, the men with guns beat them back. They broke one of the old mens’ arms. They said the young men were working and could not be disturbed. They said that if anyone from the village ever came upriver again, they would come to the village and kill them all.

  “It was around then, the old man said, that people started to get sick. They had noticed the fish dying soon after the men with helicopters had arrived. But they had continued to eat what fish they could, it was their staple diet, the only protein they really had. There aren’t any supermarkets in the Amazon. But pretty soon they worked out it was the fish making them sick, so they stopped eating it. But still people started to get sick. It was a strange sickness, he explained. People first began to feel very weak, and then they could hardly move their legs or arms. The village elders, him among them, got really worried and canoed down to the nearest town, Tefe, to get a doctor. They had hardly any money, but the whole village clubbed together to pay for it. The doctor arrived, she was a white woman too, he said.”

  Gaby paused and looked around the room, seemingly unwilling to go on.

  “Go on, Gaby, what did the old man say.”

  “Ok, well he said this doctor from the south came. She stayed in the village for a few days and did tests on all the sick people. According to the old man, she said that it was the river water that was making them sick. She said that poison from the mine was going into the river and killing the fish. She said that if they continued eating the fish and drinking the water, they would die too.”

  “Mercury poisoning,” said Munro.

  “Right, it was the most extreme case of Mercury poisoning we had ever seen. Of course we know it’s a problem in the area. Small scale gold miners use mercury in their sluicing as it combines with gold. The resulting combination, an amalgam I think is the technical word, is easy for them to sluice out of the water and mud. It’s a problem as they then burn and wash the mercury off, which in turn goes into the ecosystem. Mercury is poisonous in large quantities and has been known to kill fish, and damage people’s health…but never on this scale. I mean what we saw was a whole village dying. The old man told us that over twenty people had already died. It meant the mine upriver must have been enormous, and being run totally contrary to any environmental laws.”

  “So why didn’t the doctor get help? You said this had been going on for over a year.”

  “That’s it,” said Gaby looking away and taking another deep breath. “The old man told us that on the doctor’s last night, the men with guns came back. He said they took the doctor into the middle of he village…” She paused, before continuing slowly. “He said that they had then tied the doctor to the ground.”

  She paused again.

  “Go on,” said Munro, “I know this is difficult, but I really need to know what happened.

  “They tied her to the ground and covered her with gasoline fuel. Then they just dropped a match on her. They burnt her alive in front of the entire village, Mr Munro. After that they said that the doctor had told them lies and that the water was fine to drink. They said that if anyone ever tried to go to town again, they would burn the whole village down. After that the villagers had been too afraid to do anything. All their young men were gone in the mine. They knew the water was bad, but it was all they had to drink. Those that weren’t too sick had gone inland, into the jungle. But the majority of the people had just stayed there, to die a slow horrible death.”

  Munro sat back.

  “My God, so that’s what Richard saw on the Japura.”

  “Oh no,” said Gaby, “that’s not the half of it. After the old man had told us the story, I wanted to get out of there more than ever. I said we should get help for the village, go back to Manaus and speak to the authorities. But Richard said that that wouldn’t be any use if we had no evidence, and he was right. There are illegal gold mines all over the Amazon. Not on the scale of this one, that was for sure. But it was hardly a new problem. Richard said, and he was right, that he had to get evidence. He was doubly angry because all this was happening on land that was actually owned by his father. In some way, I think he felt he had a direct responsibility to help these people.

  “So Richard and one of the guides, the local guy, they stayed on. They took us back to the nearest town and then set off, back up the Japura, with cameras and a tent. I know maybe I should have gone with them, but the truth was that I was scared, really scared. The men who protected the mine had burnt a woman doctor alive. There was obviously something up there that they didn’t want the world to see, and they were doing a good job of hiding it.”

  “So you stayed in the local town? How long for? I assume you saw Richard when he came back?”

  “Oh yeah, I saw him. Him and the guide came back four days later. They’d been doing some real James Bond stuff, really brave of them. They both had video cameras and they had trekked the last part of the route, through the night.”

  “Video cameras? So they got footage of the mine…did you see it?”

  “I saw a bit of it, but Richard was a bit funny about it. He kept on saying that it wasn’t what he expected.”

  “What did he mean by that?”

  “Well…” she paused, “we thought it would be your average Brazilian alluvial gold mine, you know, guys panning through the river bed to find nuggets of gold in the water. There are small alluvial mines all over the Amazon. So we thought it would be one like that, albeit on maybe a really big scale. But the pictures that he showed me were of something altogether different. He was right, it wasn’t what we had expected.”

  Munro paused a beat and looked around the room. It was a windowless inner partition of the main room. There was little on the walls except for a tack board and some faded posters advertising a charity bike ride and fair-trade coffee. They were a long way from the Japura. Gaby paused too. Recounting the story about the doctor and the villagers had clearly been hard for her. Munro guessed it would be a long time before she ever went back to the Amazon again.

  “So what did the pictures show Gaby?” said Munro eventually, quietly.

  She paused and looked at Munro, as if unsure as to how much more to tell him. Eventually she started speaking. Whatever test there had been, Munro had passed.

  “The first thing th
ey saw going up river were the mining boats. We’d heard stories of some companies using mechanised mining boats to dredge the Amazon, but we had never seen them. Richard saw four of them on the Japura. Four. On a river half the size of the Amazon. He showed me the pictures, they were enormous, ugly things. Like floating industrial platforms, with cranes and a huge metal conveyer belt that brought up the sifted silt and rock. I couldn’t see from the pictures, but Richard said that it was these boats that were causing the mercury poisoning. They had taps that poured the mercury into the silt as it came up from the riverbed, in the hope that it would combine with gold. But of course there was run off. It was being done on such an industrial scale, by four huge boats, on one river, that it was no wonder the villagers were being poisoned. I mean, it was the worst kind of environmental rape that I’ve ever seen. It was completely outrageous. They were ploughing up the riverbed like you would a field.

  “But that wasn’t the half of what they saw up there. They followed the boats another fifteen miles or so up river, I think they wanted to see where they docked to try and get some evidence as to who owned them. But what they found up there was absolutely…well, I was going to say mind blowing, but that’s the wrong word. It was horrific.” She paused before continuing. “Have you ever seen pictures of an open cast, or open pit gold mine Mr Munro?”

  “I’ve seen them personally, in Central Africa. They can be pretty terrible places.”

  “Terrible is an understatement, I mean, if Richard’s video was anything to go by.”

  “You mean they were open cast mining as well as dredging the river?”

  “They were taking the whole place apart Mr Munro, literally ripping it to shreds. They had cut down an area of rainforest as far as you could see, I mean it must have been at least a hundred acre site. And then they’d dug…they had dug this pit. This enormous brown, muddy pit maybe fifty meters deep, at least four hundred metres across, I mean the thing was enormous. All around the edge of the pit narrow ledges had been cut into the earth, like little platforms made of mud. Some of them were supported with wooden platforms, but most of them were just hacked into the mud. And all along these ledges were men. Small, thin emaciated men. And these men were hacking away at the earth…they were mining for gold. I watched the video several times, and I counted several hundred men. It was hard to tell what a lot of them looked like, because they were covered head to toe in mud. But some of them were obviously indigenous, you could tell, Kayapo I think.”

  “So there was an open pit mine, Gaby,” said Munro. “As you say, everyone knows they can be terrible places, especially in developing countries. But the men who work there know what they’re doing, they may be poor and desperate, but they’re taking a calculated risk.”

  “No Mr Munro, I don’t think I’ve made myself clear. This wasn’t your average mine, with poor prospectors working their little bit of mud, desperate to find that big nugget. The men working this mine weren’t there because they wanted to be there, they were slave labour.”

  Munro stopped and looked at Gaby closely.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, they were being forced to work there. All around the pit, and even in the pit, there were tall metal platforms. On the platforms were guards, guards with guns. If ever any of the miners slowed down, the guards would shout at them, sometimes come down and beat them. Richard saw the whole thing. At the end of the day the miners were led away and had to hand in any gold ore they had found. Richard said that the guards thought one of them was hiding something, so they took him out of the line and shot him. Shot him right there and then in cold blood. After the men had handed in their ore, they were led to these cabins at the edge of the jungle and locked in. All around them were these metal platforms, with armed men on, watching their every move. I saw some pictures of the miners lining up to leave the pit. You could see their ribs, they were hobbling…I mean it was truly horrific. And that pit…I mean, it had this pool of stagnant water at the bottom of it. Richard took pictures of it. Some of the miners were so exhausted that they’d collapsed on the job, fallen off their ledge and into the water. The guards had just left them there to die. I saw at least three dead bodies at the bottom of the pit.”

  “Slave labour,” said Munro, almost to himself.

  “It was horrific,” she said, “just so awful. Like something out of a biblical nightmare…or a concentration camp. I mean, you just don’t think that kind of thing exists any more. I mean, who could treat other human beings like that?”

  Who indeed? thought Munro. Who indeed.

  “Was there anything else you saw in Richard’s pictures, anything else that might be relevant?” he asked.

  “Do you think this has something to do with Richard’s death? I thought he was killed by some robbers?” asked Gaby.

  Munro paused, unsure as to how much to tell her.

  “To be honest Gaby, we don’t think Richard was killed by robbers. He was killed by professionals. Assassinated. And we are trying to work out why.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, “that is…” She trailed off, as the implications of what Munro said became clear.

  “But you don’t have anything to worry about,” he said quickly, “I can assure you of that. But you do need to tell me everything that you saw in those pictures.”

  “I’ve told you pretty much everything,” she said, “the dredging boats and the open cast pit were the main environmental crimes going on there.” She paused and looked guiltily at Munro.

  “We did try telling the UNEP about it, I even wrote a long report. But no-one was remotely interested. They told us totally openly that these things happen all the time, all over the world. Unless you have first class evidence there’s nothing the UN or anyone else is going to do about it.” She hesitated again before continuing, “but I really did try to do something about it Mr Munro, I really did.”

  “I’m sure you did Gaby. Is there anything else?”

  She thought for a moment and continued.

  “Well, the only other thing is the helicopters. And now I come to think about it, it was those that Richard was most excited about.”

  “Helicopters? What about them?”

  “Well,” said Gaby, her composure regained slightly now that she did not have to talk about the mine, “Richard and the guide went inland a bit. They said they wanted to find out how the mine operators were getting the gold ore out. Usually it would be done by boat, but they hadn’t seen any evidence of that, so they thought maybe they had cut out a road through the jungle into Colombia or something, which would have been another massive environmental crime. But what they found was, I think, pretty boring. But Richard was excited about it. Basically, they were shipping the ore out on these massive freight-shipping helicopters. I saw some pictures of them and they looked really weird. Like the back and middle had been chopped out, so all there is is the cabin at the front and a thin long bit on top for the rotors and blades.”

  “Sounds like a Skycrane chopper,” said Munro, “those things can lift almost a ton.”

  “That’s it,” said Gaby, “Skycranes! That’s what Rich was calling them. His pictures showed them loading the ore into metal containers and then these helicopters lifting the containers and flying off with them.”

  “Interesting way of shipping gold,” said Munro, “must be much more expensive than using a boat. So why was Richard so excited about it?”

  “What got him excited was not the helicopters themselves,” she said, “but who owned them. The helicopters and crates were all branded with the same company logo…”

  Munro leaned forward and tried to keep the excitement out of his voice. “What was the logo, can you remember Gaby?”

  “It was pretty basic, just three letters overlapped in that way that corporate companies love doing. The three letters were F, T and P. And the company name was under the letters. It was called ‘FTP Supply’, in fact to give it its full title it was called ‘FTP Supply SA’”

  Mun
ro took out a piece of paper and wrote it down. “’FTP Supply SA’? Was there anything else, an address, a country?”

  “No, that was all, the pictures were quite blurry, but Richard had been careful to get that logo quite a few times.”

  Fifteen minutes later and Munro was heading north, trying to cross the Thames, stuck in London traffic. Gaby’s boss Jane had come and ended the interview soon after she had told him about FTP Supply. But Munro did not mind. Things were falling into place. He looked out of the window as he edged off Waterloo Bridge towards the Houses of Parliament. Groups of glum looking tourists were fighting against the wind and light rain, wearily making their way from Parliament to the Millennium Wheel. The river looked huge, grey and foreboding below them. Munro wondered how long you would last if you fell in. He thought of the poor miners on the Japura. Tricked away from their villages and worked to death in a pit of mud. Left to drown in filthy stagnant water.

  He called Rudd.

  “Jack old boy! I’m missing you already. How did it go with the tree huggers?”

  Munro quickly recounted what Gaby had told him, the village, the killings, the pollution and the mine.

  “So it was illegal gold mining that Richard saw on the Japura, not drug smuggling.” said Rudd.

  “Looks like it, but how do you know it’s illegal?”

  “I’ve looked into the area. Constantine Lipakos declared it a bio-reserve, but logging and mining had already been banned there by the Brazilian government anyway. Some of them are very keen to protect what there is left of their rainforests.”

  “No wonder they were doubly keen to keep it under wraps then. But what about the helicopters? Isn’t that an odd way to ship gold ore?”

  “Not really,” said Rudd, “It’s actually quite ingenious. It sounds like what these characters were doing was going into a gold rich area and taking as much ore as they could, as fast as they could. Not even bothering to smelt it on site like you normally would. Probably before anyone even noticed. Hence the four dredgers and working the miners to death. Normally gold mining is a far slower, more measured process. By using the helicopters to ship the ore out, they were avoiding any of the authorities further down the Amazon. To be honest, they were probably keener to avoid the Brazilian export duties on gold rather than any environmental sanctions. My guess is that they flew the gold ore over the border, to Colombia, or maybe Peru. From there they probably smuggled it out as something far less valuable. They must have been making a killing, gold can reach over 1,600 dollars an ounce these days. Sounds like those Skycranes were shipping hundreds of kilos of ore at a time. That’s a lot of gold Jack, a lot of money. Quite an incentive to stop young Mr Lipakos telling his powerful dad what was going on on his land.”