by Otto Penzler
I asked Robertson if he had any regrets about the way things happened that night in Macapá. “No. There’s no way any of us can replay the scenario and say, Well, we were responsible, or, We could have done more. Or could’ve done less. I’m sure people must have horrible experiences when somebody dies and the last thing they remember is that they had an argument. But we were having such a good time.”
One well-known character in the yachting world, who didn’t want his name used, says, “Blake was a tough guy. A very tough guy. The kind who wouldn’t have handed over his wallet without a fight. Hearing the circumstances, it wasn’t surprising. Like a lot of Kiwis, he didn’t take a lot of crap. It was part of his skill as a leader, but it was also part of his downfall.”
A week after the murder, when all six suspects have been arrested, Marcelo, the translator, takes me driving through the neighborhoods where they grew up. They are suburbs that have evolved organically, small wooden houses with which the electric/water/civil-service grid is struggling to keep up. The men are mostly in flip-flops and soccer shorts. But the women wear very stylish and sexy clothes. One girl looks particularly elegant, sitting sidesaddle on the back of a bike in a sheer black skirt, black shirt, and black stilettos, heading down a dirt road under the waning equatorial sun.
Another thing you notice is the kites. Big red kites and little black kites and even those cheap plastic bags dispensed at every shop the world over. Telephone wires holding the skeletons of old kites, frozen in their death like inmates zapped while trying to climb the electric fence. Maybe it’s just that the conditions are perfect: It’s always sunny, warm, and windy, and there are always plenty of little kids and plastic bags to go around.
José, one of the two so-called pirates who didn’t have a record, lived in one of the better neighborhoods. His parents’ house is just a few blocks from his, and they’ve agreed to be interviewed because they don’t want people to think José is a hardened criminal.
We sit on the concrete patio in front of their house. There’s a little plastic Christmas tree on a table in the corner, and the family Volkswagen has been pulled up onto the patio, blocking the front door. José’s parents, a teacher and a retired government worker, sit on metal rocking chairs. His wife, Milene, leans against the car, holding their two daughters, Isadora, one, and Isabela, five, who has drawn a rainbow tattoo on her forearm. Across the street, some neighbors are building a brick wall around their house because someone keeps stealing the light fixtures on their porch. José’s mother says she will not discuss anything about the case, because she is afraid of saying the wrong thing, but that she’d like to talk about José as a regular person.
“He treasured the motorbike his father gave him,” his mother says. “And his collection of Conan the Barbarian comic books.” Isabela runs inside and returns with a Conan the Barbarian comic book written in Portuguese. “No one was allowed to touch them,” his mother goes on. “And he had over a hundred magazines.” On the cover of the comic book, Conan is swinging onto the deck of a ship with a sword between his teeth.
José, Ricardo, and Reney were arrested on December 6 after they were given up by Isael, who was the first to be picked up, since he was walking around with two stumps where fingers should have been and was easy to identify. They found Josué and Rubens the following day, hiding out at a house in the jungle. At Ricardo’s mother’s home, in the ceiling, they found a Canon camera, an Omega Seamaster watch, a pistol with a fitting for a silencer, a .38 revolver, a bulletproof vest, and, as the police report indicates, thirty-seven “foreign music” CDs. José was arrested while having sex with his wife, dragged naked out into the street, and beaten in front of the neighbors. They discovered another of the watches at his home, where he’d shoved it inside a little red teddy bear in Isadora’s room.
The first four, as well as three others who were eventually released, were arrested by the local police before being turned over to the federal authorities. While still in local-police custody, these four were beaten in the presence of one of their lawyers (though the police denied this). Later, in a cell, José claims, the officers played a game called telephone, which involved smacking both his ears simultaneously. A man named Jânio, a suspect who was later released, says that they put a bag over his head until he almost passed out, and then took it off. “And when we were in the car, the policeman, he put a bullet in the gun and spun it,” Jânio says, “then pulled the trigger right in front of my face. I could see the bullet, that it wasn’t yet in the chamber, but I was still scared. They were saying, The president of Brazil told us he doesn’t care if you’re alive or dead. He said, “Do whatever you want to them.”
“I shit my pants.”
In the few hours after they were arrested, the pirates came to realize that they’d been involved in an event of completely different proportions from what they’d thought. They left the boat having robbed and murdered a tourist, an anonymous victim, but they soon discovered they’d killed a person who might inspire large-scale consequences. And realizing this was, they all say, pretty bewildering.
“If this had been some regular guy,” one of their lawyers says, “they wouldn’t have even made arrests at this point.”
The Amapá State Prison is on the outskirts of town. It’s not a hulking, high-tech campus, like American prisons are. There are no monolithic sliding gates or remote locks or video cameras. It’s just a few single-story buildings separated from the highway by a series of concrete walls. Between the buildings are a couple of bald fields where prisoners play soccer.
Marcelo, the translator, lives just across the road and says that every year a few inmates are killed by other prisoners or guards, and another half-dozen escape. “It’s okay, I guess,” Marcelo says. “They usually run into the woods and not toward my house.”
A Franciscan friar who runs a mission at the prison agrees to take us to meet the six suspects. We arrive just after lunch. When you’re done with your meal at the Amapá State Prison, you simply throw what remains out through the bars of your cell, so the hall is covered with rice and what appear to be bits of chicken. Beneath that odor is the funk of food rotted into concrete and the stink of fifty men in equatorial heat. Some of the inmates make noises as we walk past—quasi-menacing laughter, unintelligible grumbling, a convincing pig squeal.
All six of the accused are housed in the same cell, which looks to be about six feet across and twelve feet deep. When they hear our approach, they get up from their hammocks, which are slung across the middle of the room, and make some effort to clean up a bit. Ricardo, the shooter, puts on a shirt, and Rubens pushes some clothes into a corner. They all come to the cell door and look at me curiously. The friar says, “You’re the first white reporter they’ve met.” The guard tells us we have an hour to talk, then leads us to a concrete bench outside the cell block and waits at the gate.
In the pictures published all over the world two days after the murder, the pirates looked like a bunch of guys pulled in from a barbecue, wearing soccer shorts and sandals. In person, they look even less intimidating. Only Isael looks like someone you’d be scared of, with a big scar across his belly and a muscular body with a very low center of gravity. The gunshot wounds to the hand and forearm don’t hurt, either. Reney, on the other hand, has delicate features and soft, velvety black eyes. He doesn’t look so different from Ralph Macchio, circa The Karate Kid.
“We are being treated worse than anyone else here,” Ricardo says. “We have been tortured. Show them, José.” José stands up and pulls down his shorts. His ass is covered in big black-and-yellow bruises, which, he says, were administered with an iron bar wrapped in a towel. Isael puts his arm forward and says he hasn’t been allowed to see a doctor in a week. The wound on his forearm, about eight inches long and closed crudely with some black thread, looks unnaturally wet. He unwraps the bandage on his hand and shows where the two fingers closest to his pinkie were shot off at the knuckle.
José, who’s called Grande B
lanco (roughly, “Big Whitey”) and has remarkable jug ears and a prominent jaw, says, “It’s not like the media is saying that we are used to doing this job. This is the first time we killed someone—” and then Ricardo cuts him off. The police say Ricardo was the mastermind, and he seems to control the group. He rarely allows any of the others to speak.
One thing I wanted to ask when I came to see them in prison was, given that they didn’t set out to murder a man, how they felt when they realized they had. This was, after all, possibly the crucial moment in their lives. The group looks to Ricardo for an answer: “We did not know what happened. We never went down below deck to see him. We knew only that his shooting had stopped and so we left the boat.” I don’t point out that this can’t be true, since they stole Blake’s rifle.
I ask them if there is anything they want to ask me. Ricardo says, “What is the main religion in Peter Blake’s country?” I say I think they are mainly Protestant, and ask why he wants to know. “I’m Catholic,” he says, “so I would like to know. It’s important.”
Jose says, “I have a question. What did you think of us before? And how do you think of us now? We aren’t what they say we are, right? We are not pirates, river rats.” I tell him I hadn’t known much about them other than that they’d killed Peter Blake while trying to rob him. “Well, I don’t think it’s right, what they’re saying about us. You know, I’ve never been convicted of any crimes before.” The criminals now find themselves infamous, cast in a role larger than they had before. Ricardo seems to see the appeal of it. Jose, though, is scared shitless that he’s lost his former identity as simple local screwup, a feeling that thirty years in prison will probably relieve him of. Jose says, “I swear, I never could imagine that the story would end this way.”
If things had gone according to script, it would have been the Southern Ocean that killed Peter Blake. The Southern Ocean is roughly eight million square miles spreading out from Antarctica. It was the most dangerous and crucial leg of his five Whitbreads and two Jules Vernes, and Blake liked to call it the loneliest place on earth. He said often, “If you get into trouble down there, well, no use crying to Mum.” And trouble was inevitably what you’d find in the Southern Ocean. It was a wind-and-weather factory of unrivaled proportions, and Blake called the swells there “liquid Himalayas.” “The real danger,” he said, “is the bow digging in and the boat flipping end over end.” He built little hatches on the hull of ENZA New Zealand so he could climb out if this happened, not that there’d be much he could have done, sitting on an upside-down boat in the middle of the loneliest place on earth. Blake’s friends and colleagues paint the relationship between him and the Southern Ocean like the relationship between, say, Rocky and Apollo Creed—the chummy, mortal respect reserved for worthy adversaries. It’s not that Peter Blake did not realize that he was, like everyone else, a pawn of fate; it’s just that when fate showed up on his boat, dressed in a motorcycle helmet and a grimy T-shirt, he failed to recognize it.
I went to Brazil just before Christmas last year to report a story on the death of Peter Blake for Men’s Journal, where I was working at the time. Yd like to say I was drawn to the story because of some overarching theme it brought up for me. But the truth is that a story appeared in The New York Times one morning about a world-famous sailor who’d been killed by pirates on the Amazon. It was a kind of no-brainer Men’s Journal story, plus I had not written a piece in a while and I was afraid I was going to be fired. I am usually afraid I’m going to be fired. So I flew to Macapá, Brazil, a town I had never heard of before, found a translator who spoke maybe fifth-grade English, and drove around Equatorial Brazil in a rented Fiat, almost always in danger of being robbed by drunk people with machetes.
There was, nonetheless, plenty of adventure and discovery in the reporting of this story. The thrill of finding yourself in a town you’ve never heard of before, suddenly integrated into its community of policemen and lawyers and criminals, cannot be overstated. The editor of Men’s Journal largely wanted me to write about the life of Peter Blake. He was, after all, a Men’s Journal kind of guy—intrepid adventurer, naturalist, celebrity. But to me, his life was just another example of bored rich people creating challenges for themselves where none naturally exist (if Blake wanted to circumnavigate the globe, British Airways would have done it more quickly and cheaply, and with more free pretzels). I was more interested in the families of the killers, in the neighborhoods where they lived, in the concrete stadium built over the equator for dancing competitions, and in the masses of children flying kites at dusk. It’s always reassuring to go to some distant outpost and discover just how enormous and varied and confusing the world is.
One night, in my hotel room, I became convinced that bandits with pistols were going to climb through my window, steal my stash of American currency and Clif Bars, and leave me bleeding on the floor. And suddenly just how obscene Peter Blake’s death was seemed very real. Blake had simply been a curious man passing through a town that meant almost nothing to him, not so different from me. It was a humanizing moment. That it took my feeling threatened is, I know, kind of pathetic, but I blame fame; it can take away a person’s person-ness and make him seem more like a brand. The more I drove around Macapá in my rented Fiat learning about the night Blake was murdered, about the people involved, the more I became fascinated with the confluence of lives, with the perfect-storm-like escalation of events, the loss of control, the spontaneous combustion that resulted in a tragedy that no one involved had wanted.
When I met Peter Blake’s killers in jail, they were bewildered at having been part of something so large and violent. When I spoke to the men in the crew, they were likewise bewildered. It was the sort of event for which denial is the only sensible reaction. Since I’ve returned from Brazil, the “pirates” (more like petty thieves) have begun prison sentences many of them may not outlive; Peter Blake’s widow just put up the family yacht for auction, since it’s too big a boat for her to handle on her own and she could use the money; Blake’s business partners are trying to make a go of Blakexpeditions as a Cousteau-ian nonprofit In the movies, killers are calculating and the murders they commit are shot through with meaning and psycho-philosophical dilemma. In Macapá, though, as in most places, lives take violent, abrupt turns for almost no reason at all.
A WOMAN’S WORK
PETER LANDESMAN
Slaughter, and then worse, came to Butare, a sleepy, sun-bleached Rwandan town, in the spring of 1994. Hutu death squads armed with machetes and nail-studded clubs had deployed throughout the countryside, killing, looting, and burning. Roadblocks had been set up to cull fleeing Tutsis. By the third week of April, as the Rwanda genocide was reaching its peak intensity, tens of thousands of corpses were rotting in the streets of Kigali, the country’s capital. Butare, a stronghold of Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus that had resisted the government’s orders for genocide, was the next target. Its residents could hear gunfire from the hills in the west; at night they watched the firelight of torched nearby villages. Armed Hutus soon gathered on the edges of town, but Butare’s panicked citizens defended its borders.
Enraged by Butare’s revolt, Rwanda’s interim government dispatched Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the national minister of family and women’s affairs, from Kigali on a mission. Before becoming one of the most powerful women in Rwanda’s government, Pauline—as everyone, enemy and ally alike, called her—had grown up on a small farming commune just outside Butare. She was a local success story, known to some as Butare’s favorite daughter. Her return would have a persuasive resonance there.
Soon after Pauline’s arrival in town, cars mounted with loudspeakers crisscrossed Butare’s back roads, announcing that the Red Cross had arrived at a nearby stadium to provide food and guarantee sanctuary. By April 25, thousands of desperate Tutsis had gathered at the stadium.
It was a trap. Instead of receiving food and shelter, the refugees were surrounded by men wearing bandoleers and headdresses ma
de of spiky banana leaves. These men were Interahamwe, thuggish Hutu marauders whose name means “those who attack together.” According to an eyewitness I spoke with this summer in Butare, supervising from the sidelines was Pauline, then 48, a portly woman of medium height in a colorful African wrap and spectacles.
Before becoming Rwanda’s chief official for women’s affairs, Pauline was a social worker, roaming the countryside, offering lectures on female empowerment and instruction on child care and AIDS prevention. Her days as minister were similarly devoted to improving the lives of women and children. But at the stadium, a 30-year-old farmer named Foster Mivumbi told me, Pauline assumed a different responsibility. Mivumbi, who has confessed to taking part in the slaughter, told me that Pauline goaded the Interahamwe, commanding, “Before you kill the women, you need to rape them.”
Tutsi women were then selected from the stadium crowd and dragged away to a forested area to be raped, Mivumbi recalled. Back at the stadium, he told me, Pauline waved her arms and then observed in silence as Interahamwe rained machine-gun fire and hand grenades down upon the remaining refugees. The Hutus finished off survivors with machetes. It took about an hour, ending at noon. Pauline stayed on, Mivumbi told me, until a bulldozer began piling bodies for burial in a nearby pit. (When questioned about this incident, Pauline’s lawyers denied that she took part in atrocities in Butare.)
Shortly afterward, according to another witness, Pauline arrived at a compound where a group of Interahamwe was guarding 70 Tutsi women and girls. One Interahamwe, a young man named Emmanuel Nsabimana, told me through a translator that Pauline ordered him and others to burn the women. Nsabimana recalled that one Interahamwe complained that they lacked sufficient gasoline. “Pauline said, ‘Don’t worry, I have jerry cans of gasoline in my car,’” Nsabimana recalled. “She said, ‘Go take that gasoline and kill them.’ I went to the car and took the jerry cans. Then Pauline said, ‘Why don’t you rape them before you kill them?’ But we had been killing all day, and we were tired. We just put the gasoline in bottles and scattered it among the women, then started burning.”