The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

by Rebecca Skloot

  The men announced that they were going to get some coconuts, walked away, and never came back. After an hour the women decided to make a break for it. Huddled close together, they walked down to the beach and headed south toward the sanctuary. They were terrified and stunned, barely speaking and moving on autopilot. Two hours later they finally reached the gate but found no sign of Mora. Almudena started to sob. A caretaker called the police in Limón, and soon a line of vehicles raced north along the beach track. At 6:30 a.m. the police radio crackled. They had found Almudena’s car, buried up to its axles in sand. There was a body beside it.

  Mora was found naked and facedown on the beach, his hands bound behind him and a large gash on the back of his head. The official cause of death was asphyxiation—he’d aspirated sand deep into his lungs.

  The news spread quickly. A chorus of tweets cast Mora as an environmental martyr akin to Chico Mendes, the Brazilian rainforest activist who was assassinated in 1988. The BBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post picked up the story. An online petition started by the nonprofit Sea Turtle Restoration Project called on Costa Rican president Laura Chinchilla for justice and gathered 120,000 signatures. Paul Watson, the founder of the Sea Shepherd Society and the star of Whale Wars, offered $30,000 to anyone who could identify the killers. “Jairo is no longer simply a murder statistic,” Watson wrote. “He is now an icon.”

  There was a sense too that this killing would be bad for business. Long the self-styled ecotourism capital of the world, Costa Rica relies on international travelers for 10 percent of its GDP. “What would have happened if the young female North American volunteers were murdered?” wrote one hotel owner in an open e-mail to the country’s ecotourism community. “Costa Rica would have a huge, long-lasting PR problem.” Not long after, President Chinchilla took to Twitter to vow that there would be “no impunity” and that the killers would be caught.

  That task fell to detectives from the Office of Judicial Investigation (OIJ), Costa Rica’s equivalent of the FBI, and Limón’s police department. The OIJ attempted to trace the victims’ stolen cell phones, but the devices appeared to have been switched off and their SIM cards removed. Almudena, Grace, Katherine, and Rachel gave depositions before leaving the country, but it was clear that finding other witnesses would be a challenge.

  Moín is backed by a scattering of run-down houses behind high walls. It’s the kind of place where neighbors know one another’s business but don’t talk about it, especially to cops. The hueveros met OIJ investigators with silence. When detectives interviewed Guti, he was so drunk he could barely speak.

  Not everyone kept quiet, though. Following the murder, Vanessa Lizano, the founder of the Costa Rica Wildlife Sanctuary, dedicated herself to fighting for her fallen colleague’s legacy. I e-mailed her and asked if I could come visit, and she welcomed me.

  I flew to San José two weeks after the killing, arriving at the sanctuary after dusk. Lizano, 36, unlocked a high gate adorned with a brightly painted butterfly. “Welcome to Moín,” she said in a theatrical voice, her auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail. The property covered about a dozen acres of rainforest and was dotted with animal pens. Paintings of Costa Rica’s fauna adorned every surface. Lizano opened a pen and picked up a baby howler monkey, which wrapped its tail around her neck like a boa. “I keep expecting Jairo to just show up,” she said. “I guess I haven’t realized it yet.”

  Lizano had been running a modeling agency in San José in 2005 when she and her parents decided to open a butterfly farm near the beach. She leased a small piece of land and moved to Moín with her infant son, Federico, or Fedé, her parents, and a three-toed sloth named Buda. They gradually transformed the farm into a sanctuary, acquiring rescued sloths and monkeys, a one-winged owl, and a pair of scarlet macaws seized from an imprisoned narcotrafficker. Fedé pulled baby armadillos around in his Tonka trucks and shared his bed with Buda.

  Lizano operated the sanctuary with her mother, Marielos, and a rotation of international volunteers, who paid $100 a week for room and board—a common model for small-scale ecotourism in Costa Rica. The sanctuary was never a moneymaker, but Lizano loved working with the animals.

  Then, one day in 2009, she discovered several dead leatherbacks on the beach that had been gutted for their egg sacs. “I went crazy,” she says. She attended a sea turtle conservation training program in Gandoca run by Widecast, a nonprofit that operates in 43 countries. There she met Mora, who’d been working with Widecast since he was 15. Lizano arranged for the organization to operate a turtle program out of her sanctuary, and in 2010 Mora moved to Moín to help run it.

  They soon developed something like a sibling rivalry. They’d psych themselves up by watching Whale Wars, then compete to see who could gather more nests. Normally a goofball and unabashed flirt, Mora turned gravely serious when on patrol. He loved the turtles deeply, but he seemed to love the fight for them even more. Lizano worried that his stubbornness may have made things worse on the night he was killed.

  “Jairo wouldn’t have gone without a fight,” she said. “He was a very, very tough guy.”

  Lizano told me that her mission was now to realize Mora’s vision of preserving Playa Moín as a national park. She had been advocating for the preserve to anyone who would listen—law enforcement, the government, the media. It was a frustrating campaign. The turtle program had been shut down in the wake of the killing, and poaching had continued. Meanwhile Lizano seemed certain that people around Moín knew who the killers were, but she had little faith in the police. On the night of the murder, when Erick Calderón, Limón’s chief of police, called to inform her that Mora had been killed, she screamed at him. Since 2010, Calderón had intermittently provided police escorts for the sanctuary’s patrollers, and by 2013 he’d suspended them because of limited resources. Prior to the killings, Lizano and Mora had asked repeatedly for protection, to no avail. The murder, Lizano said, was Calderón’s fault.

  But there was plenty of recrimination to go around. The ecotourism community blamed Lizano and Widecast for putting volunteers at risk. The family of one of the Americans, Grace, had demanded that Widecast reimburse her for her stolen camera, phone, and sneakers. Lizano told me the accusations were unfair. “The volunteers knew what they were getting into,” she said. “We would say, ‘It’s up to you if you want to go out.’”

  Still, she was overwhelmed with guilt. “I know Jairo was scared, because I used to tease him,” she said. “We’d make fun of each other for being afraid. We’d always kid around that we would die on the beach.” She’d tell him that she wanted her ashes carried into the surf by a sea turtle. Mora was less sentimental. “He always said, ‘You can do whatever, I really don’t care. Just drink a lot. Throw a party.’”

  We sat in the open-air kitchen, and Lizano held her head in her hands. “If you’ve got to blame somebody, blame me,” she said. “I was the one who took Jairo and showed him the beach, and he fell in love.”

  Mora was born in Gandoca, a tiny Caribbean town near the Panama border. He caught the wildlife bug early, from his grandfather, Jerónimo Matute, an environmentalist who helped found the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge, a sea turtle nesting area. Jairo began releasing hatchlings at age six. Once he became a full-time Widecast employee, he sent much of his salary home every month to his mother, Fernanda, and completed high school through a correspondence program.

  By 2010 Mora had moved to Moín, living in a tiny room over the sanctuary’s kitchen. Some days Mora and the volunteers—college students, mainly, from all over the world—counted poached nests or monitored the sanctuary’s hatchery; some nights they’d go on patrol. Mora was clear about the risks involved, and some chose not to go, but others joined eagerly. It didn’t seem that dangerous, especially in the early days, when the Limón police accompanied the patrols.

  Still, there were tensions from the beginning. During nesting season the hueveros squatted in shacks in the jungle. Most were desperately poor, many wer
e addicts, and all considered Lizano and Mora competition. Lizano had no qualms about reporting poachers to the police.

  A leatherback typically lays 80 fertilized eggs and covers them with about 30 yolkless ones. Poachers consider the yolkless eggs worthless and usually toss them aside. Lizano and Mora often placed those eggs on top of broken glass, causing a poacher to cut himself while digging for the good ones. Lizano even set volunteers to work smashing glass to carry in buckets to the beach. She sometimes found obscene notes scrawled in the sand. She’d write back: Fuck You.

  Lizano got caught in shootouts between police and poachers at the beach four times, once having to duck for cover behind a leatherback. In April 2011 she was driving alone at night on Moín when she came across a tree blocking the road. Two men with machetes jumped out of the forest and ran toward her truck. She floored it in reverse down the dirt road, watching as the men with the machetes chased, their eyes full of hate.

  In the spring of 2012, Calderón suspended the police escorts. Limón had the highest crime rate in Costa Rica, and the police chief was spread too thin trying to protect the city’s human population, never mind the turtles. Mora and Lizano shifted to more conciliatory tactics. They hired ten hueveros and paid each of them a salary of $300 per month, using money from the volunteers’ fees. In return the men would give up poaching and work on conservation. Guti was one of the first to sign on. The hueveros walked the beach with the volunteers, gathering nests and bringing them to the hatchery. It was a steep pay cut—an industrious huevero can make as much as $200 a night—so Lizano pushed the idea that the poachers could eventually work in the more viable long game of ecotourism, guiding tourists to nesting sites. But the money for the project quickly ran out, and Lizano wasn’t surprised when poaching increased soon after.

  Around the same time, a menacing poaching gang showed up on Playa Moín. They seemed far more organized than the typical booze-addled hueveros. The group dropped men along the beach by van, using cell phones to warn each other of approaching police. They were led by a Nicaraguan named Felipe “Renco” Arauz, now 38, who had a long criminal history, including drug trafficking and kidnapping.

  In April 2012 a group of men armed with AK-47’s broke into the hatchery, tied up five volunteers, and beat a cousin of Mora’s with their rifle butts. Then they stole all 1,500 of the eggs that had been collected that season. Mora, out patrolling the beach, returned to find the volunteers tied up. He went ballistic, punching the walls. Then he exacted vengeance, going on a frenzy of egg gathering, accompanied once again by armed police protection. Mora collected 19 nests in three nights, completely replacing the eggs that had been stolen. But a few weeks later Calderón once again suspended escorts, and no arrests were made.

  A month after the hatchery raid, in May 2012, the dangers became too much even for Lizano. She was at a restaurant in downtown Limón when she spotted a man taking Fedé’s photo with his cell phone. She recognized him as a huevero and confronted him angrily: “It’s me you want. Leave the kid out of it.” The man laughed at her. That was the final straw. She moved with Fedé back to San José, returning to Moín alone on weekends.

  Mora remained, however, and when the 2013 season began in March, he returned to his patrols—mostly alone, but occasionally with volunteers. By this point the volunteer program was entirely Mora’s operation. The Americans, who arrived in April, knew there were risks. But according to Rachel, Mora never told her about the raid on the hatchery the year before. She entrusted her safety to him completely. “I had gone out numerous times with Jairo and never really felt in danger,” she told me. “I knew he was there and wouldn’t let anything happen to me.”

  But just a few weeks before his death, Mora told a newspaper reporter that threats were increasing and the police were ignoring Widecast’s pleas for help. He called his mother, Fernanda, every night before he went on patrol, asking for her blessing. When Lizano saw Fernanda at Mora’s funeral, she asked for her forgiveness.

  “Sweetie,” Fernanda replied, “Jairo wanted to be there. It was his thing.”

  Click-click.

  The cop next to me, young and jumpy in the darkness, pulled his M4’s slide back, racking a cartridge. As I crouched down, I saw two green dots floating—the glow-in-the-dark sights of a drawn 9 mm. About 100 yards off, the police had spotted a couple of shadowy figures. Hueveros.

  I was on patrol. Following Mora’s killing, the sea turtle volunteer program had been suspended, but two of Mora’s young protégés, Roger Sanchez and his girlfriend, Marjorie Balfodano, still walked the beach every night with police at their side. Sanchez, 18, and Balfodano, 20, were both diminutive students, standing in bare feet with headlamps on. They weren’t much to intimidate a poacher, but Sanchez was fearless. Before we set out he told me with earnest bravado that he planned to patrol Moín for the rest of his life. When we saw the hueveros, we’d been walking for three hours alongside an escort of five officers from Limón’s Fuerza Pública, kitted out with bulletproof vests, sidearms, and M4 carbines. Perhaps it was just a publicity stunt by Calderón, but it was a comforting one. We had encountered a dozen plundered nests, each one a shallow pit littered with broken shells. The hueveros, it had seemed, were just steps ahead of us.

  Then the cop on my right noticed two figures and pulled his gun. Three of the police told us to wait and confronted the two men. After several minutes we approached. The cops shone their flashlights on the poachers and made them turn out their pockets. One wore a knit cap, and the other had long reddish dreadlocks—Guti. They were both slurry with drink, and the cops seemed to be making a show of frisking them. The men had no contraband, so the cops let them stumble off along the beach.

  After a while the radio crackled. Another police truck had found two nesting leatherbacks. We rushed to the spot. In the darkness, a hump the size of an overturned kiddie pool slowly shifted in the sand. The baula’s great watery eyes looked sidelong toward the sea as it excavated a nest in the beach with back flippers as dexterous as socked hands. With each labored effort it delicately lifted a tiny scoop of sand and cupped it to the edge of the hole. Sanchez held a plastic bag in anticipation, ready for her to drop her clutch.

  Then Guti’s drunken companion stumbled up to us, knelt beside Sanchez, and offered a boozy disquisition on sea turtle biology. The cops ignored him, and the spooked animal heaved forward, dragging her bulk away without laying any eggs. A few more heaves and the foaming waves broke over the turtle’s ridged carapace.

  The night wasn’t a complete loss, though. A short distance away, the second leatherback had laid its nest. Soon a second patrol truck pulled up and handed Sanchez a bag of 60 eggs. We hitched a ride back to the sanctuary and a wooden shed packed with Styrofoam coolers. Sanchez opened one, sifted beach sand into the bottom, then began placing the eggs inside. I noticed that a pen had been stuck into one of the coolers. Next to it a set of stylized initials was scratched into the Styrofoam: JMS. Altogether there were perhaps 1,000 eggs in the coolers. Almost all of them had been gathered by Mora.

  A couple of days later I went to see Erick Calderón at the police headquarters in Limón. With his small build and boyish face, he seemed an unlikely enforcer, and he’d clearly been affected by the pressure the killing had brought on his department. Since the murder, Calderón said, the police had patrolled Moín every night. “I want to make the beach a safer place, control poaching of eggs, and educate the population so the demand isn’t there,” he said. But it was unclear how long he could sustain the effort. He said that only a dedicated ecological police force would make a lasting impact. They’d need a permanent outpost on Moín, a dozen officers supplied with 4×4s and night-vision goggles.

  Then Calderón insisted that Mora’s murder was an anomaly and that Costa Rica was “not a violent society”—an assertion belied by the fact that the previous afternoon a shootout between rival gangs had happened just a few blocks from the station. He seemed ashamed that the murder had happened on his watch, th
at Lizano had screamed at him. “I know Jairo was a good guy,” he told me.

  That afternoon I met up with Lizano’s father, Bernie. His means of processing his sorrow had been to turn himself into a pro bono private investigator. A former tuna fisherman, Bernie was 65, with a full head of white hair and a pronounced limp from an old boating accident. As we drove around Limón, he seemed to know everyone’s racket, from the drug kingpins behind razor-wire-topped fences to a guy on a corner selling drinks from a cooler. “He keeps the turtle eggs in his truck,” Bernie whispered conspiratorially. At one house he stopped to chat with a shirtless, heavily tattooed man. The guy offered his condolences, then said, “Let me know if you need any maintenance work done.” As Bernie pulled away he chuckled: “Maintenance. That guy’s a hit man.”

  We drove to a squat concrete building with dark-tinted windows on the edge of town—the office of the OIJ. After Bernie and I passed through a metal detector, one of the case’s detectives, tall and athletic, with a 9 mm holstered in his jeans, agreed to speak with me anonymously. He said that OIJ investigators in Limón were the busiest in the country due to drug-related crime. I asked whether he thought the killers were traffickers, and he shook his head wearily. “If they were narcos, it would have been a disaster,” he said. “Every one of them would have been killed.”

  Like Calderón, he promised that Mora would not be a mere statistic. He insisted that they were closing in on serious leads. Walking out, Bernie told me he had spoken in private with the detective, to whom he’d been feeding every scrap of information he’d gotten. “He told me, ‘We are very close to getting them, but we don’t want them to know because they’ll get away.’”

  Bernie’s PI trail led back to Moín, where he had tracked down a potential witness—a man who lived near the beach. The man had been the first to find Mora early on the morning of May 31. He walked Bernie to the spot where he’d found the body. As he described it, there were signs of a struggle from the footprints around the car. It looked to him like Mora had escaped his captors and dashed down the beach. Another set of tracks seemed to show a body being dragged back to the vehicle.