The Bathing Family

Illegal gold mines in the Awacachi Nature Reserve, Esmeraldas Province, Ecuador

Cocaine.

We all know what it does to people.

The violent crime by the hooked, the conniving tendencies of those with a habit, and the normal occasional user that is just looking for a good time and doesn’t want to hurt anyone.

A few lines every once and a while couldn’t be that bad, right?

I mean unless you’re addicted, or doing it to keep from feeling bad, it has to be harmless, right?

I mean ain’t nothing with a little cocaine am I right?

Well, no, no and no.

It doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. Let me tell you a story.

In the early 1500s, a cargo ship on its way to Peru was packed with human beings who thought they would be cursed into a lifetime of forced servitude but found themselves escaping a shipwreck off the coast of what would become the border of Ecuador and Colombia. They swam to shore, established communities in rainforests, beaches and mountains, intermarried with the natives and later provided refuge for others who escaped slavery near and far. To this day you go there and in many towns there are no Hispanic or mixed looking people, just dark black people, who find themselves historically exploited like black people everywhere on earth, but some in addition are literally poisoned every day through the profits of cocaine.  

I was blessed with the opportunity to work there during my time as a geographer in Ecuador for 2 and a half years, my third day there, I got in a small airplane with a team to map in high resolution the last tropical rainforest that connects the Andes mountains to the Pacific, an area filled with pristine waterfalls that glisten as a prism for sunlight, with an anarchist choir of endangered birds each song stranger than the last, all strutting their outlandish feather outfits for a mate to earn that sex that everyone deserves. Then there are the practically extinct insect dependent plants and flowers each of which could be a cure for cancer, their pollinators feeding the reptiles, amphibians and mammals reliant on wildlife corridors, ecological fauna highways from the mountaintops to the mangrove wetlands for which we had been contracted to make aerial photography. The Awacachi reserve is so important that the Ecuadorian government has deemed it illegal to enter without permission and only under strict regulations to protect nature’s fragility, but cocaine funded paramilitaries had smuggled in bulldozers to make illegal gold mines, with lakes filled with neurotoxic mercury to separate the soil from that yellow metal that people like for some reason.

Months later after the monotony of tetrising a puzzle of thousands of aerial photos, I returned to the area to collect GPS points to align our mosaic to the ground. After passing trucks full of diced trees to finally reach a more desolate clearing on a bridge, we waited for the geographical data to collect and couldn’t help but notice a beautiful scene. A naked Afro-Ecuadorian family bathing in a creek, the chiseled father whose machete and fishing nets are normally an extension of himself was contently soaping his obsidian child, while others hop around chasing each other splashing water, the potential beauty queen mother whose figure was not phased in the slightest by years of breast feeding, they smiled and waved, I smiled and waved back, before turning away to respect their privacy but wanting stay to take the moment in. Maybe, they saw me and my co-worker and envied our luxuries, absolutely, I saw them and envied theirs.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that same beautiful family that I waved to, who may have distant west African descended relatives you know, were having their brain cells deadened by the heavy metals dumped in that very creek, and in the clams they eat that will be filtering those heavy metals out of river bottoms for decades to come, made possible because of money from cocaine. Maybe a better reason to not do this drug is its funding of a civil war in Colombia where villagers are massacred, children are kidnapped into sexual slavery, child soldiers kill innocent people for the FARC, and family members of businesses are murdered one by one until extorted rent is paid. Or maybe a better reason is the thousands of unaccompanied minors escaping drug gang violence in Central America, the bodies dumped over borders for not complying with demands of drug cartels, or communities crippled by a brutally oppressive mafia power structure that couldn’t exist without money coming from the north. Or maybe better reasons are the cartel wars a few hours south of San Antonio, journalists tortured and killed for exposing the truth or the intricately intertwined sexual slavery taking place in the neighborhoods of every major city.

There are endless reasons not to do cocaine, to not douse the dopamine of one's brain in the blood of all the innocent people killed along the way, in the screams of starving children locked in closets and forced to please soulless men, or in the gunshots that families pray will end. But for me the biggest reason will always that family that waved and smiled to me, sparkling in the tropical sun, enjoying a lazy Sunday in a creek contaminated by Mercury.

So the next time someone is giddy with misguided evil joy at the expense of others they forced to suffer and they offer you a bump, or a line or sack, please have a heart.