HEAVEN TO HELL –
Jan. 22, 2025 – Telmo Mineiro, a fisherman from São Miguel, takes a heavy drag on his cigarette and points to where he found a brick of uncut cocaine on the shore. “We were hunting for sea urchins,” he says, “we saw the pack and went to get it out of curiosity.” Another man told me that there was so much cocaine on the island that summer that teenagers were walking through the streets carrying shopping bags full of the powder.
Whether or not these accounts are entirely accurate, the unembellished truth is just as astonishing: in June 2001, hundreds of packages filled with extraordinarily pure cocaine washed up on São Miguel’s shores. People reported finding packets the size of hardback books bobbing in the shallow surf. Others were strewn on beaches, leaking their powdery contents into the sand.
On the morning of 7 June policemen discovered 271 packets by some rocks on the beach.