8 July 2012
Hermes, 62, was born and has mainly lived in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the largest city in Bolivia (1.5M pop), in the eastern lowlands of the country. He is a biologist, business man, light aircraft pilot, widely published wildlife photographer and is on many conservation NGO boards. He tells a good story. The two below are among several that he told me and Josefina after dinner in the JR Hotel in Camiri, Bolivia, last weekend. We spent the weekend with him tramping through the bush and skirting little lakes photographing birds for his next book.
In about 1991 Hermes was flying his Piper Cherokee over a region of the south east of Bolivia with a couple of biologists from a local university who were looking for a suitable site to make a camp that their students could visit for field work. The region is grassland with groves of forest dotted about wherever favoured by the availability of ground water. They were flying at an altitude low enough to see, almost simultaneously, a small herd of deer and marks in the grass of an aircraft having landed. Pampas deer are a threatened species, for reasons similar to the extirpation of the American Bison, and also because they are foolishly curious. The biologists excitedly urged Hermes to land. While they were off looking for the deer, Hermes strolled over to the forest. Already he had a foreboding because of the few reasons to land a plane in such a remote spot, beside a forest, one is because it’s a cocaine production facility. In the good old days of the 70s, coke kitchen operators would fade away quietly if discovered, but now more commonly they respond according to the principle of “dead men tell no tales”. The murders of Noel Kempff and his companions in 1986 (see below) came to Hermes’ mind.
Ambivalently, because of this consideration and an intuition that the forest was deserted, he stepped into the shade of the trees. And listened. He could hear the whine of insects, the whisper of breezes through foliage and the thumping of his heart. An opening in the groundcover suggested a trail so overcome by curiosity yet breathless with apprehension, he entered the wood. A well-used path led deeper into the gloom, past rusty barrels and where no ground fuel remained, as though it had been collected. He stopped and listened again, hearing nothing but forest sounds, so he continued on, carefully placing his steps. Presently he glimpsed the form of a low building through the trees and approached it silently. It appeared to be a kitchen and dining hall. He assessed other buildings, one with cots and another empty but for scraps of cardboard boxes. He found a large lead-acid battery, new-looking, and got a healthy spark from it when he shorted the terminals with a piece of metal. He also found a newspaper dated a couple of months earlier. Clearly the place was uninhabited and had been for some time.
Out in the sunshine once more, he described to his companions what he’d found. Reassured that there was no danger, they light-heartedly followed him back in to the forest to see for themselves, and left carrying the battery.
Back in Santa Cruz, thinking that he should take some action, Hermes consulted colleagues. They all spoke against it. You never know who is involved in what, they said. The military, the police, politicians … these are corrupt institutions and you could be walking into big trouble. The one incorruptible authority in Bolivia was the DEA, the US Drug Enforcement Administration, which had coca eradication and drug interdiction programs active in the country. Hermes met the US Ambassador socially, explained the concern for the safety of students on field trips, given what he’d seen, and asked for advice. The ambassador introduced him to the DEA country director, a friendly and competent looking guy who listened to Hermes’ story intently. He invited Hermes to accompany him to visit the site and several other flakey landing strips that Hermes had seen in his travels. So they took the flight in a hotrod helicopter that would have left Hermes’s plane as though stalled. The DEA turned out to have a detailed knowledge of coke facilities and transfer routes in Bolivia and were glad to add Hermes’ intel to their catalogue. They said that they didn’t have budget to take down a tenth of the sites they knew about, and that the best advice they could give in his situation, if Hermes’ academic friends wanted to establish a camp there, was to post a sign along the lines of “Research Facility of the University of San Moreno”.
Noel Kempff Mercado
Bolivian biologist and environmentalist, born 1924 in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Murdered by cocaine traffickers on September 5, 1986 in Huanchaca National Park in the Serrania de Caparuch, Bolivia
In 1908, Peter Fawcett first explored the area that is now the Noel Kempff Mercado National Park. Almost 70 years passed before explorers looked at it again, when in the 1970s geologists visited the area to survey the Precambrian Shield rock formations there. This expedition attracted the attention of Noel Kempff Mercado, an esteemed conservation biologist of the time. Kempff, recognizing the global significance of the area, proposed a campaign to preserve it.
In 1986 he drove with his assistant, a Spanish biologist and a guide to a camp below the escarpment of the Huanchaca Plateau. They wanted to explore the plateau but a ground approach would be too difficult, especially for the 78 year old Kempff. Hearing about terrain on the plateau suitable for landing, they arranged for a aircraft to reconnoiter the area piloted by someone familiar with the region. The Spaniard proposed that Kempff stay in camp, considering the excursion too strenuous for him, but Kempff refused to be left behind. The four, pilot, Kempff, Spaniard and guide, flew up over the plateau. Inside the perimeter of the escarpment, the terrain was dish-shaped, mostly savannah with sizable copses of forest here and there. They passed over an area in which they saw in the grass near a grove a well-worn landing strip so they decided to put down, a hundred meters or so from the edge of the forest. The guide and the Spaniard sauntered off to stretch their legs and entered the forest. Presently Kempff and the pilot saw them returning, followed by two armed men. As they approached the aircraft, the aggressive attitudes of these men clearly indicated trouble. They were Brazilians. Kempff explained that his party were scientists informally visiting the plateau, had no intention of disturbing whatever was going on here, would leave and would not return. At that moment, the guide reached abruptly to scratch an insect bite in his armpit, and one of the Brazilians shot him dead. As Kempff went to his aid, the other Brazilian shot him. The Spaniard and the pilot took advantage of the confusion to run off down the aircraft track, in a hail of bullets. One struck the Spaniard in the leg but he ran on. In better physical condition, he left the pilot behind and darted off into the forest. Hearing more gunshots, he assumed that the Brazilians had captured and killed the pilot.
He went further into the forest and found a shallow depression with an accumulation nearby of large dry leaves. Lying down in the trough, he covered himself with the leaves. Soon he heard footfalls and cracking twigs as the Brazilians entered the forest looking for him. They criss-crossed the forest for two hours, until dusk, and left. Later the Spaniard took advantage of the darkness to leave the forest, skirt the landing area, and hide himself among some rocks on a low hill opposite the forest, overlooking the aircraft. In the morning he could see the bodies of Kempff and the guide, but no sign of the pilot.
That afternoon he saw an aircraft approaching and remained hidden, unsure whether it was friendly or associated with the Brazilians. As it circled the landing site he could see that it had Bolivian military markings, and also that the pilot intended to land, so he limped down the hill and stood in the track near the Kempff party’s plane. The military aircraft touched down and rolled toward him, coming to a stop. The Spaniard was able to communicate a sense of danger to the pilot, that he should not shut off his engines and instead get airborne again immediately. No doubt the sight of the bodies was convincing. They took him aboard and departed. He understood that the assistant, left in camp, had become alarmed at Kempff’s failure to return and had summoned help.
Several days passed before the authorities organized a return visit, to recover the bodies and investigate. They found the aircraft burned, the bodies of Kempff and the guide in a high state of decomposition, and no sign of the pilot. In the deserted forest, hidden from aerial and satellite observation, they found a cocaine production facility, many barrels of precursor materials and workers’ living quarters.