It’s as if all the sounds in the premises cease; there are no hospitable gestures offering a vacant seat in the almost full bar, only uninterested gazes, some scrutinizing and others hostile. We empty our glasses and leave. The rumours about how two periodistas were in town asking questions had stolen the march on us. The story about what happens immediately afterwards reaches us later.
Right after we leave the bar, an elderly gentleman gets to his feet. He has greying hair and a prominent jaw. He settles his bill, leaves the bar and departs in a car. It is “Tucho” – Antonio Vidal Suárez, the patriarch who, according to the authorities and environmentalists, has built up one of the world’s most profitable illegal fishing operations. The pensioner has left responsibility for a good portion of the operations in the hands of his sons Manuel Antonio and Angel, but always has the final word when the family meets to make important decisions. And he is now under suspicion of being the owner of the Thunder, the Kunlun and several of the other ships that have come to be known as “The Bandit 6”.
It is starting to get dark. We are on our way from Ribeira. Above the gently sloping mountain pass between Galicia and Castilla y León, there are light snow flurries in the air. Then a peep can be heard from the mobile phone. It is an email from Captain Peter Hammarstedt on the Bob Barker.
“Dear Kjetil & Eskil. Please find attached a composite of photographs of the FV Thunder crew. Perhaps they can aid you in the search for the owner?”
There are four photographs. Four men who can be seen scowling on the Thunder. A rough and blurry photograph of a giant dressed in coveralls. Another cautiously slouches his way forward from the bridge and looks toward the photographer in the same way one looks into a dark and unfamiliar room for the first time. The chap wearing the full-face sunglasses and with Latin American features must be the captain. The clearest photograph shows a partially bald man in his early 60s. He wears eyeglasses with steel frames. A determined and unwavering, almost obstinate gaze can be seen behind his glasses.
We turn the car around and drive back to Ribeira. To show people the photographs.
22
GOD’S FINGERPRINT
RIBEIRA, FEBRUARY 2015
He is thirsty, tipsy and the stories are probably exaggerated.
In Ribeira, a retired fisherman is willing to speak about the illegal toothfish expeditions in which he had personally participated. He tells us about 16-hour shifts on old, rusty hulks, crew members who are washed overboard, illness and injuries that are never treated by a physician, fleeing from coast guard ships and flag changes at sea to conceal the ship’s identity. For a five-month-long expedition he was paid around 60,000 euros.
When we show him the recent Sea Shepherd photographs of the officers on the Thunder, he recognizes several of them, among them the fishing captain Juan Manuel Patiño Lampon. But he doesn’t know who his employer is.
The women of Ribeira are also silent. The spouse of one of the Thunder officers refuses to open her door; on the phone she says that she does not have permission to speak. Another confirms that her husband is on the Thunder, that there are problems on board and that it is the last time he will travel with the ship. She tells us that she doesn’t know what problems he is referring to, but that her husband calls home every Saturday.
The home of Lampon the fishing captain is a presentable villa, situated on a site secluded from the coast road and a few kilometres away from the fish market in the centre of Ribeira. According to the Spanish register of companies, up until 2010 he ran the company Ivopesca together with another ship owner from the region. The company sold fish products and owned the vessel the Banzare, which fished toothfish from Uruguay. The environmental organization Oceana accused the company’s primary owner José Nogueira García of extensive poaching of fish and for being a member of la mafia gallega. But it was not just the environmentalists who were following the activities of Lampon’s partner. In 2008 Nogueira García was arrested for smuggling more than two tons of cocaine from Uruguay to Spain. The cocaine, at a market value of EUR 70 million, was hidden in containers of frozen fish. The case proved what the police commissioners in Madrid had long suspected: the fish and shellfish industry was being used both as a distribution channel for narcotics and to launder the profits.
Nogueira Garcia was sentenced to nine years in prison and lost all his holdings. Lampon was never a part of the case.
“He’s at sea,” the fishing captain’s wife says when we call her in Ribeira.
“Is he on the Thunder?”
“I don’t know the name of the vessel. I don’t know how long he has been at sea nor when he is coming back,” she says.
Then she hangs up.
We drive once again out of Ribeira, over the silently flowing Ría de Arousa, one of the river mouths teeming with shellfish in Galicia, full of bateas, square floating piers of eucalyptus wood that have made the fish farmers Spain’s largest producers of mussels, scallops and oysters. According to the legend, the five river mouths in the Spanish province are God’s fingerprint. On the seventh day God had to rest and then he put his hand down upon Galicia. But if it is true that God blessed Galicia with abundant shellfish harvests, he must have simultaneously have forgotten the numerous and often devoutly pious deep sea fishermen in the province. They have little in the way of fishing quotas. That is why the fishermen from Galicia have for decades sought out increasingly dangerous
