by Tim Cahill
Things started to go bad for Antonio Suárez in the spring of 1979. In California, Charles Clark, a Marine Fisheries Service agent, came across a shipment of freezer packages labeled “chunked Tabasco River turtle.” Clark examined the meat. It was not light-colored, like freshwater turtle. It was dark, beef-red, fibrous: more like sea turtle. Clark notified Charles Fuss, the special agent in charge of law enforcement for the National Marine Fisheries Service in Saint Petersburg, Florida. Fuss had been getting similar reports about sea-turtle meat for sale in Florida. But as a result of the federal action taken the previous July, all six species of sea turtle found in the Western Hemisphere had been declared endangered or threatened. Fuss geared up an investigation.
There were twelve agents on Fuss’s investigative team, and it was a rare case of near total cooperation between government agencies: There were people from the Fish and Wildlife Service, from the U.S. Customs Service, from the National Marine Fisheries Service, and from the Wildlife and Marine Resources section of the Justice Department.
The interagency team talked with turtle experts. It was perfectly legal to import Tabasco River turtle (that has since changed), but, according to José Toro, a special attorney for the Justice Department, the investigators were looking at nearly 190,000 pounds of it. And there were not enough Tabasco River turtles in all of Mexico to account for that much meat.
One element of the investigative team, working with customs declarations, followed a paper trail to a seafood exporter in Mexico. The man had no knowledge of the shipments pouring into Miami International Airport. Investigators determined that export papers had been stolen from the company’s office, that signatures had been forged in what appeared to be a criminal conspiracy of some proportion.
Meanwhile, Sylvia Braddon, a research chemist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, was working to identify the meat in those packages of “Tabasco River turtle.” The technique she used is called isoelectric focusing. It involves passing a strong charge of electricity through a small sample of meat for several hours. Eventually the protein “focuses,” forming a microscopic pattern of blue lines, distinct for each species.
In order to identify the species involved, Braddon would have to test the lines developed from the suspect meat against those from the meat of every other freshwater and saltwater turtle in the world. Luckily the investigators had a pretty good idea of what kind of meat they were dealing with: 190,000 pounds seemed to implicate the most prolific turtle butcherer in the world, Antonio Suárez.
Peter Pritchard provided one of the samples of Ridley meat used by Braddon. The thin blue lines from Pritchard’s sample matched exactly those from the meat in the suspect tins.
So it was Ridley meat. The fact that only one man in the world would have that much Olive Ridley meat to sell doesn’t cut much ice legally. There was still a blizzard of paper and a forest of middlemen between Antonio Suárez and all that illegal meat.
It was a very difficult case, but José Toro had a plan.
I knew nothing about the investigation of Antonio Suárez in the late summer of 1979. The story had pretty much died down as far as I knew; so I was surprised to get a strange and urgent call about Suárez a year and half after the publication of the story.
The man on the phone sounded like a guy who knew his Raymond Chandler and who subscribed to Soldier of Fortune magazine; the kind of guy who might weigh three hundred pounds, smoke cigars, and talk out of the side of his mouth. He was calling from Los Angeles, or so he said, and he claimed to represent a group of wealthy southern California conservationists with the money to “provide extraordinary solutions to extraordinary problems.”
“The slaughterhouse,” he said, “it’s located on a pretty remote stretch of beach, isn’t it? You give us the layout, we could be in and out of there in twenty minutes. We’d be in Mexico in ten, twelve hours, tops.”
“You’re not … are you suggesting some sort of, uh, paramilitary operation?”
“I’m suggesting that we talk to these bastards in the only language they understand.”
“Well, you know, I’m not really sure that, uh”—this lunatic was talking about bombing Mexico!—“we’d be able to, uh, do much good, uh, that way!”
There was a pause while the man seemed to consider his options. “All right,” he said finally, “you tell me. How do we stop this guy Suárez?”
I wish I could say I pegged him immediately, but it was only after he hung up that it occurred to me that the guy was neither a militant environmentalist nor a flaming nutcase. He sounded more like a very clever professional investigator. “Okay,” he kept saying, “if that won’t work, how do we get Suárez?”
If indeed the man was an investigator of some sort, then he was pumping me for any nasty information I might have on Suárez. The most prolific turtle butcher in the world must have been a very worried man.
Events slid around the bend and went careening downhill for Suárez in November 1979. Suárez had been meeting with Pritchard—the two men would spend eight hours at a crack, arguing their way through a long lunch—and Pritchard invited him to the United States to speak at the First World Conference for World Sea Turtle Conservation. According to Pritchard, Suárez had initially thought that those who opposed him were obstructionists, sentimentalists who didn’t like killing, vegetarians, hippies. “But,” Pritchard told me, “he was impressed by scientists, by reasonable men with facts at their fingertips.” Pritchard saw the conference as a process of give-and-take, a learning experience for Suárez, who he felt was coming around to a more rational approach.
The Justice Departments José Toro, unknown to Pritchard, attended the conference for entirely different reasons.
“Mr. Suárez,” Pritchard told me, “was very nervous. He was speaking in the largest room of the United States State Department to five hundred of the most knowledgeable sea-turtle experts in the world.”
Worse, members of the World Wildlife Fund had put copies of the Outside article on every seat. Two unidentified men, described to me as “large and probably Mexican,” went from seat to seat, confiscating the reprints. No matter: the WWF people handed out more reprints as the delegates entered the room. They had also arranged showings of the ABC Sportsman segment.
Suárez spoke before an unresponsive and surly crowd. As he stepped off the podium, he was surrounded by federal agents and handed a subpoena. Apparently he panicked. Suárez fled. He flew back to Mexico, leaving his clothes and luggage in his hotel room.
“I knew,” José Toro told me, “that there was a great quantity of Olive Ridley meat involved, and that seemed to point to Mr. Suárez. We had no legal proof, however, and the subpoena only involved his records. I went into the investigation with an open mind, but when Mr. Suárez fled, we began concentrating on him.”
Toro and other agents took up the paper trail once again. Names on letterheads submitted to United States Customs led to a group of Cuban businessmen in Miami, and inquiries there led to another group of Cubans in Mexico City. There, Toro, who was born in Puerto Rico and of course speaks fluent Spanish, began looking for the man any investigator wants to find: the fellow with a gripe.
On Toro’s list of people he wanted to talk to was a man named Martin Zacarias. It looked to Toro as if Zacarias had once been involved in the conspiracy but had been somehow muscled out of the business. There were three separate meetings in Mexico City, and because Zacarias was no longer involved in the business, Toro felt justified in granting him immunity in exchange for information. On the third meeting, Zacarias produced a sample customs document, written in pencil. It contained the precise wording used in the customs declarations for the illegal meat.
Zacarias said that the sample document had been drawn up during a meeting in Mexico City sometime in December 1977. At that meeting he and other individuals present had conspired to fraudulently mislabel Olive Ridley meat and export it to the United States. One of the individuals present was named Antonio Suárez.
> Taking this information to the grand jury in Miami, Toro was able to obtain an indictment against Suárez, PIOSA, and five other individuals and corporations. Suárez hired the best lawyers he could find and returned to the United States only after plea negotiations had been completely worked out. On October 28, 1981, Suárez pleaded guilty to all charges and paid a total of fifty thousand dollars in fines.
Antonio Suárez eventually quit the turtle-slaughtering business. “No,” Toro told me, “that was not part of the plea negotiations. I think that we denied him the United States market, and perhaps the business is no longer profitable.” Toro, who shares a Latin background with Suárez, thinks there may be something else involved. “Antonio Suárez,” Toro said, “is a very proud man, very concerned with dignity. He is very Latin in that respect. I think it was devastating to his ego to stand before that judge, to be declared guilty, to acknowledge that he engaged in criminal acts. I think for him the worst humiliation came at the arraignment, when they took him downstairs for fingerprinting and mug shots.
“You could,” Toro said, “almost feel sorry for him.”
So the butcher of Escobilla was driven from the beach in humiliation and disgrace. The good guys won, the villain was crushed, and the turtles were saved for all eternity.
That’s the way I’d like to end this report. But the turtles are not yet saved, and Antonio Suárez may not have been a total villain.
According to Dr. Peter Pritchard, “It was easy to see Suárez as evil incarnate, and that is how I saw him at first.” After talking with him for a while, Pritchard saw that Suárez truly believed industrialization was the only way to preserve the turtles: If turtles were worth more to local people than eggs are worth to poachers, then poaching would stop on the beach.
What Suárez didn’t believe was that harvesting during the nesting season was harmful to the population as a whole. “He was beginning to come around to our point of view,” said Pritchard. “Hard facts, statistics, scientific research impressed him. That is why I invited him to the sea-turtle conference in Washington.” That is where Suárez was served with the subpoena.
“I knew nothing about that,” Pritchard said. When Suárez fled, Pritchard raced to the airport. He wanted to assure Suárez that he had not betrayed him. “We didn’t talk for some time after that,” Pritchard said. “He did call when he made the decision to quit the business, though. He was very concerned about what the world thought of him. He didn’t want to be known as the man who was killing off an entire species of animal. I remember I once asked him what he thought about the Outside article. I thought he would scream and yell, call it a pack of lies. Instead, he looked very sad. ‘They judged us harshly,’ he said. He was sensitive to that judgment.”
Perhaps the person whose opinion counted most with Suárez was his daughter. “He loves his daughter,” Pritchard said. “He dotes on her. He told me once that if she even told him to quit the business, he would at once, without question. One day he called me. Now I’m sure there are many other reasons for his decision, but he said, ‘Peter, Fernanda asked me to stop killing the turtles.’ ”
Suárez sold his turtle operation to Propemex, a government-owned company that continues to kill the animals at a furious pace. “Suárez,” says Pritchard, “was the strongman, el Chingón, the man in charge. You could reason with him. Now you see bureaucrats who shrug their shoulders and pass you on to other bureaucrats.”
Carlos Nagle, a consultant for the World Wildlife Fund, puts it more bluntly. “If what you really wanted was to save the turtles, then you have to see what happened to Antonio Suárez as a tragedy. He was a typical poacher on his way to becoming a game warden. He is a very intelligent man, and he could see the long-range consequences.”
But Suárez is gone, and the bureaucrats of Propemex are the new butchers on the beach.
The situation, however, is anything but hopeless. Things are not the same in Mexico as they were in 1977. Then, the only conservationists on the beach at Escobilla were Juan José de la Vega and Boris de Swan of the Cosmographic Society. By 1981, during the largest arribazón of the year, more than 150 conservationists hit the beach, like commandos. Aside from Juan José and members of the Cosmographic Society, there were representatives of two other growing environmentalist groups, Amigos del Universo and Bioconservation.
“The marines,” Juan José told me, “made it possible for us to be there. I can’t praise them enough. When the arribazón started, they provided a plane for us. We flew down from Mexico City and got on the beach only a few hours after the first turtles crawled on the beach.” The conservationists spread out, with people taking stations every fifty yards. They stayed two weeks, “Poachers don’t want the eggs after a week or so,” Juan José said. “They hatch in forty to forty-five days, but hatchlings begin to form inside very quickly. No one would eat an egg with a turtle head in it.”
As the conservationists helped the marines patrol the beach, the navy patrolled the water out beyond the breakers. New Fisheries regulations require all fishing to stop for seven days after the start of an arribazón.
More than seventy reporters covered the operation. The public saw what was happening on television and heard about it on radio. Nine of the most influential newspapers in Mexico ran front-page articles on the plight of the turtles. Two documentary films were produced, and both were eventually shown on television. John Ruiz Healy, a popular reporter on Mexico’s 60 Minutes, did a devastating report on poachers and sellers.
People like Juan José see the media in Mexico as major allies. “The public is now aware of the problem,” Juan José told me, “and this is a dramatic change from when you first came to Escobilla.”
Ricardo Mier, of Bioconservation, adds, “It is a paradox, but the ecology movement seems to be growing here, and growing very rapidly, in spite of the current economic crisis. I think this is because we can now clearly see that true value lies in natural resources and not in pesos or dollars.”
As the public becomes more conscious of the slaughter on the beach at Escobilla, more pressure is put on the Department of Fisheries to reinstate the ban on fishing during the breeding season, or, failing that, to lower the quotas allowed Propemex to more reasonable levels.
The current quotas are absurdly high. Here are some numbers; it doesn’t take a marine biologist to analyze them.
• 1973: Juan José de la Vega sees his first arribazón. More than 100,000 turtles lay their eggs on the beach.
• 1981: The total number of turtles arriving on the beach for all arribazónes, July through November, is 50,000.
• 1981: The total number of turtles allowed to be killed, according to quotas set by the Department of Fisheries, is 89,000.
The number of turtles arriving on the beach in 1981 was only a tenth of what it was only a decade ago. And although fifty thousand turtles reached the beach in 1981, almost twice that number were killed before they could lay their eggs. And 1981 was the sparest year for arribazónes in recent memory, which probably means that fewer turtles reached the beach than ever before, throughout the whole of time.
Juan José de la Vega says the memory of 1973, when he saw one hundred thousand turtles lay their eggs on the beach in a single night, is a treasure no one can take from him. He likes to relive it now and again. He stood alone, surrounded by all that … biology, and the moon was full and bright. A gentle breeze was blowing in off the ocean, and the smell of the sea was strong. All around, on all sides, as far as the eye could see on this bright night, there were turtles: turtles coming in out of the ocean, turtles laying their eggs, turtles returning to the mystery of the sea. Juan José had a sensation of a time before man, a sense of the fecundity of the sea and land. There was something deep and full expanding inside of him, something other people feel only inside a church.
There is an image that lives inside my memory as well. It is a vision of that slaughterhouse dump, those acres of death. The breeze I recall was heavy with the stench of rot, warm w
ith the weight of decay.
Propemex is still dumping bodies there, and, according to Dr. Pritchard, still dumping eggs. These eggs are said to be too immature to be buried in the sand; either that or too fouled with the mother’s intestines during the slaughtering process.
So these eggs are dumped where the bodies of mothers are left to rot. But many of the eggs are not fouled; many are not immature. Many of them live, and hatchlings emerge to crawl over the rotting bodies of their slaughtered mothers. They crawl frantically, through the stench of death, toward a sea they will never reach.
In the Wind
Ill Wind at Poison Creek
It was, my friends used to say, a “local color” sort of a house that I lived in up on Poison Creek, just east of Livingston, Montana. The former owners, one could deduce from the various wounds in the walls, used to shoot the place up every once in a while.
The bathroom door didn’t offer much privacy, but it was a triumph of local-color decorating. The hole in the outer portion was relatively small, about the size of a silver dollar, but the shotgun pellets had spread out from impact so that the hole on the inner side of the door was a ragged, splintered abyss of some two feet in diameter. The shot had proceeded across the linoleum floor and spattered up against the tub. There were pocks on the outside curb of the porcelain and a good deal more of them on the inside edge.
It was rumored that the previous owners, a fine local couple, had had something of a marital spat and that she had attempted to make her point with the family bird gun. The husband retreated to the bathroom, prudently locking the door and hunching down in the bathtub, there to ponder the vicissitudes of life on the ranch. He was, it was rumored, uninjured by the blast, though the shot that hit the inner side of the tub must have gone ricocheting about inside in an annoying fashion.