With everything happening, it's been a struggle to write. I'm not gonna lie. My mind is in chaos. There's a lot going on. My laptop is slowly dying. My Dad is slowly dying. There are days I feel like I am slowly dying. And there are other conflicts and traumas whirling inside my head (war in Ukraine, terrible government policies, health issues, personal problems). It's not a great time to be bipolar and not on meds. I'm managing, but just barely. To relieve some of my stress and despair, I decided to go to a birthday party. Small gathering. Just a few people. Socially distanced... We did all the right things. Hung out for an hour or so. It was fun. And someone told a story. Here is that story:
Turns out, a small plane crashed into the sea in front of the next village; Portete. It wasn't in the news. There were no public announcements about it. The entire incident was kept very quiet. A few villagers had witnessed the plane dive straight into the sea in the wee hours of the morning and could confirm that this actually happened. In an "interesting" coincidence, the power to the village and surrounding area was cut off at 3:00 am that same night and was not restored until 7:00 am. This is a regular occurrence and points to some (perhaps locally based) collaboration between the drug runners and the state-run electric company.
Some weird guys dressed in dark clothing arrived to secure the crash site and make sure no fishermen went out to investigate. A team of SCUBA divers arrived. Within 24 hours, they were all gone again. Rather than salvaged, the plane was dragged out into deeper water. Rumor has it there was around USD $12 million in cash inside the plane. Drug money. So, a lot of people started wondering where the drugs might be. Did it get dropped off before the plane crashed? With our proximity to Colombia (Mompiche is located 400km from the southern border), everyone assumes it's cocaine.
It's not the first time Colombian drug runners have accidentally left Mompiche awash with narcotics. The first time was just over twelve years ago when smugglers threw a ton of 1kg cocaine bricks overboard while the Coast Guard was chasing their boat along our coastline. Mompiche was inundated with coast guard, police, and military personnel for several weeks while they scoured the ocean and the coast for the dumped stash. About a year after that, out of the blue (or, perhaps, out of the "white"), local people built new houses, bought new cars, and had trucks full of appliances delivered.
A couple of days after this mysterious plane crash, two male bodies washed up onto our beach. They were further down the beach, about 2km from the village. A hostel owner saw them and called the police. Instead of police, military personnel showed up to remove the bodies. No one who arrived in Mompiche to deal with these cadavers explained anything to anyone. Everyone vanished without a word. It was all done extremely discreetly. Normally, this type of news would overtake all headlines in Ecuador, including COVID-19 coverage and the reports of former government ministers being arrested for corruption, but there was not a peep of it anywhere, not even a photo on social media.
Some of us had questions: Did they jump out of the plane before it crashed? Why were their bodies found 3km from the plane crash site? Who was on the plane when it went down? Where had it come from? Where was it going? Who did it belong to?
Last weekend, there was a wild party on the beach. There was an enormous bonfire. Lots of people attended. Mostly tourists and a few locals. Cocaine was passed around. It seems "blow" is really easy to get in the village right now. Word travels fast in a village this size, so it didn't take long to learn about this new development. In abundance and relatively cheap, this new cache of cocaine is bound to attract all kinds of trouble. Unfortunately, in our lawless corner of the jungle, these activities will go unpoliced. The local police are more interested in gawping at foreign girls in bikinis than they are in actually working.
We’re three months into 2022. Like the rest of the world, Mompiche has been through some stuff these past couple of years. We've also dodged some bullets—being let off lightly by the pandemic; residents mostly asymptomatic, only a few hospitalized, zero deaths—and we've been kept reasonably safe with our freedoms intact. We walked on the beach, went swimming in the sea, and some of us were able to work. Do we really need to be inundated with "recreational cocaine enthusiasts" right now? No, we don't. It's just another reason to stay home and hope the news of another tragedy isn't just around the corner.