This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page a smugglers’ yacht washed up in the Azores and disgorged its contents The island of São Miguel was quickly flooded with high-grade cocaine – and nearly 20 years on a parish on the northwestern tip of the Atlantic island São Miguel drifting aimlessly near the area’s sheer cliffs None of the villagers had ever seen a boat of this size floating so close to that part of the coast the tides strong and the rocks razor-sharp They supposed it was an amateur sailor who had got lost Read moreAlthough he was under orders to take the yacht to mainland Spain Big lumps of Atlantic swell had pummelled the boat damaging the rudder and leaving him floundering Realising he wouldn’t make it to Spain without stopping the largest of the cluster of nine volcanic islands that make up the Azores a bucolic archipelago first colonised by Portugal in the 15th century they would find tens of millions of pounds worth of uncut cocaine which he was ferrying from Venezuela for a gang based in Spain’s Balearic Islands He had to get rid of his freight temporarily and so he began scouring the coast for a place to hide the drugs São Miguel’s coastline is pocked with grottos and secluded coves The sailor navigated the yacht to a cave near Pilar da Bretanha and began offloading the cocaine which was bound with plastic and rubber in hundreds of packages the size of building bricks According to the police investigation that followed he secured the contraband with fishing nets and chains submerging it beneath the water with an anchor But as he set sail for the nearest harbour a small fishing town called Rabo de Peixe about 15 miles to the south-east skeins of fog drifted over São Miguel’s cliffs waves pounded the island’s rocky inlets and the netting holding the cocaine unravelled most of the people on São Miguel have subsisted on farming most of whom are separated by only one or two acquaintances Although the island has the mix of intimacy and claustrophobia that marks many small communities the predictability of life here creates a sense of security that is reinforced by the vast Atlantic Ocean which barricades Azoreans within a subtropical paradise “The paradox of the Azores is that you are always wanting to leave when you’re here and always wanting return when you’re not,” Tiago Melo Bento The arrival in the summer of 2001 of more than half a metric tonne of extraordinarily pure cocaine turned São Miguel upside down I visited the island to speak to people who were affected by the influx of the cocaine or were involved in trying to track down the smuggler The stories they told of how the drugs changed the island were by turns bizarre No one expected in early June 2001 that they would still be talking about the effects of the cocaine nearly two decades later a man from Pilar da Bretanha climbed down a steep path to the small cove where he often fished flapping in the surf like a beached jellyfish was a large mound covered in black plastic the fisherman found scores of the small packages Leaking from some of them was a substance he thought looked very much like flour local officers had registered some 270 packages of uncut cocaine It was only the first of many such discoveries more than a week after the first batch was found a man stumbled across 158kg (worth roughly £16m today) in another cove near Pilar da Bretanha a school teacher named Francisco Negalha alerted the police after finding 15kg on a beach on the other side of the island “I was scared and hesitant even to approach them,” Negalha told me “I thought someone may have been watching me and might kill me if they saw me touch them.” In the space of a fortnight there were 11 registered seizures totalling just under 500kg of cocaine Not everyone who found packages reported it to authorities A number of islanders became small-time dealers and began transporting cocaine across the island in milk churns One such report suggested that two fishermen had seen the man on the yacht dumping some of his cocaine No one knows how much of the drug they retrieved but the stories of these two fishermen have become legendary among the drug-users in São Miguel I heard that one of these men was selling so much of the stuff from his car that his seats were white with powder The same man had apparently paid a friend 300g of cocaine just to charge his phone Other Azoreans “were selling beer glasses full of pure cocaine” an entrepreneur and musician from the south of the island contained about 150g and cost €20 (£17) – many hundreds of times cheaper than what it would cost in London today read: “Police fear the mass dealing of cocaine” The coast near Pilar da Bretanha on the island of São Miguel locals had seen little cocaine on the island It was more common to find heroin or hashish “Cocaine was a drug of the elite,” Jose Lopes one of the leading inspectors from Portugal’s judicial police “It was expensive.” There was really only one previous case of trafficking that people remembered with any clarity an Italian named Marco Morotti was caught in the port of Ponta Delgada transporting large quantities of cocaine dissolved in petrol containers But Morotti’s product had been seized by the police before it reached the islanders two types of cocaine were circulating on São Miguel: one was the sort of fine white powder familiar from film and TV shows but dissolved the crystals in water and then injected it into their veins “You were floating.” One recovering drug user from Rabo de Peixe told me that he and a family member consumed more than a kilo in a month A police officer told me the story of a man nicknamed Joaninha who had hooked himself up to a drip of cocaine and water and sat in his house getting high for days A product so valuable in the rest of the world was rendered almost worthless through abundance but they didn’t know how to work with it,” Ruben Frias the head of the local fishermen’s association in Rabo de Peixe There were rumours that housewives were frying mackerel in cocaine and that old fishermen were pouring it into their coffees like sugar No one knew how much of the stuff was still out there In the 24 hours after he had arrived on São Miguel the man on the yacht had barely ventured out of his cabin He had pored over maps and made several phone calls to find out how he could fix his boat’s damaged rudder but he didn’t speak Portuguese and couldn’t afford to draw any more attention to himself than was absolutely necessary As he lay in his narrow bunk on the night of 7 June he didn’t know that police officers were already watching him had been chosen as one of the leaders of the investigation he was 34 years old and had worked eight years as a policeman He was very familiar with the local drug trade and had a reputation for his encyclopaedic memory Lopes also claimed he has a “sixth sense” for solving mysteries It hadn’t taken Lopes long to figure out that the smuggler’s yacht was floating in the harbour in Rabo de Peixe He knew that the cocaine had almost certainly arrived by boat and records of the coming and goings of boats kept by the maritime police Lopes and his team were able to track down the yacht within a matter of hours police watched as a Nissan Micra parked up beside the yacht They later found out that the car had been rented at the airport by a man named Vito Rosario Quinci Vito Rosario turned out to be the nephew of the smuggler a Sicilian whose real name was Antonino Quinci Spanish prosecutors would later claim that Vito Rosario was the link between Quinci and the unnamed Spanish organisation running the cocaine operation four months before Quinci arrived in the Azores the leader of the smuggling ring had bought an 11-year-old Sun Kiss 47 yacht for €156,000 in Puerto de Mogán in the Canary Islands and transferred it to Quinci under an alias It was later discovered that Quinci’s yacht was only one part of a larger operation each carrying more than half a tonne of cocaine were destined for different ports in Spain (Vito was later found guilty of involvement in this drug smuggling operation and sentenced to 17 years in jail in Spain the conviction was overturned after an appeal found that the police had used illegal wiretapping to gather evidence He denied knowledge of the drug-smuggling operation.) Photos from Antonino Quinci’s various identification documentsVito met his uncle in the cramped living quarters of the yacht the location where Quinci had attempted to stash the cocaine two days earlier presumably long enough to establish that the cargo was missing Then police followed them as they sailed around to the town of Ponta Delgada Quinci and Vito set up base for the next 12 days They seemed to do little except make occasional trips on a rubber dinghy sometimes to places where police could not track them When sources in port tipped off investigators that the yacht’s rudder would be fixed by 22 June just under two weeks after the yacht was first spotted Lopes and his team found Quinci surrounded by maps and piles of documents including a notebook marking the boat’s journey from Venezuela via Barbados to São Miguel investigators also found a brick of cocaine weighing 960g and a film canister containing another three grams “Quinci was easy to deal with,” Lopes said having lived in the country for a short time before he had become a police officer He and Quinci were able to converse informally “Quinci was talkative for someone who had just been detained on a drug charge,” Lopes said “He seemed worried by the fact that large amounts of cocaine were washing up all over the island.” Quinci even offered to direct officers to the area where he had hidden the cocaine But in an official interrogation on the following day and said the bricks the police seized from the boat were things he had chanced upon at sea as if he were above proceedings,” Catia Bendetti Quinci’s translator during the interrogation “He barely said a word.” Perhaps Quinci was scared He had two young children and a girlfriend who were vulnerable to reprisals and he had just lost tens of millions of pounds worth of someone else’s cocaine Or perhaps he thought he could avoid prosecution was that he had not given up hope of escaping the island Before Quinci’s cocaine had washed up on shore Lopes and his colleagues had São Miguel’s drug trade on lockdown “We knew almost everything that there was to know about the local market,” Lopes said The flow of drugs was usually small and predictable they would make such a dent in the drug supply that local prices would skyrocket But now police faced an unprecedented situation As well as the 500kg of cocaine they had seized in the previous two weeks Lopes thought that at least another 200kg were still unaccounted for the fishing village where Quinci had first moored his boat and locals told me that it was a place where even other islanders can feel like outsiders it became a hub for the sale of the missing cocaine “People from all over the island came here to buy drugs,” Ruben Frias told me narrow streets lined with pastel-coloured houses snake down to the harbour where fishermen hunch over dominos in grotty bars kilos and kilos of cocaine exchanged hands Later analysis showed that the cocaine was more than 80% pure far stronger than anything normally found on the street The drug’s potency made it highly addictive and many people who started using had little idea what they were dealing with told me that Quinci’s drug made it into the hands of the islanders at a time when many people here had little experience with cocaine a medic and coroner at Ponta Delgada’s hospital told me that in the weeks after Quinci’s arrival an unusually high number of people were coming into the hospital reporting heart attack-like symptoms “We revived a lot of people from drug-induced comas,” he said A month after Quinci had arrived on the island the front page of the Açoriano Oriental opened with the headline “Cocaine kills on São Miguel” The article reported a spike in the number of overdoses and the death of a young man Local television networks began broadcasting health warnings to the islanders advising them not to try the cocaine looks like a brutalist castle and looms over the main road heading out of town According to a witness cited in court documents while in jail Quinci was often on the phone talking in Spanish and trying to secure a scooter or rental car In exchange for help in escaping the prison Quinci had offered to draw maps for other inmates that would lead them to the cocaine Quinci entered a courtyard of the jail for his designated recreation time His arms were wrapped in ripped bed sheets to protect them from cuts: the yard was surrounded by a long From one of the white hexagonal guard towers a correctional officer named Antonio Alonso fired a warning shot from his rifle Alonso then aimed his sight directly at the fugitive prisoners had gathered and were cheering Quinci on Alonso could see civilians walking up and down a promenade on the main road “I was afraid that I might hurt someone if I fired a shot,” he would later testify on to a small scooter and into the distance The prison in Ponta Delgada from which Quinci escaped Photograph: Stefan Sollfors//AlamyPolice were immediately alerted of the escape and moved to seal off the island Pictures of Quinci were sent to all ports on São Miguel and the airport in Ponta Delgada the Açoriano Oriental asked readers to report any sightings of Quinci to the authorities Rumours circulated that he was sleeping rough in fields snorting cocaine to stave off his appetite he ended up in the house of a man named Rui Couto who lived in a village 26 miles north-east of Ponta Delgada who is now in his late 40s and has a tattoo on the left side of his shaved head and wore clothes that were too big for his skinny frame But he was forced to leave after being busted for drug possession “They caught me with six joints,” he told me in a thick Massachusetts accent He came back to São Miguel in his early 20s but the barbed wire ripped his ankles,” Couto said and his whole family was in a garden terrace at the back of his house Couto claims Quinci was brought to the house by an acquaintance of his He also told me he gave Quinci refuge out kindness and that there was no deal or plan with the Italian Quinci stayed in a chicken shed at the bottom of a potato field behind Couto’s garden for around two weeks The pair would often eat together and talk late into the night Couto told me that although Quinci was in a sorry state smoking cocaine in cigarette papers without tobacco Couto said that someone Quinci knew came round to give him a fake passport and money A relative of Quinci had supposedly bought him a boat in Madeira another Portuguese island 620 miles to the south-east and was planning to smuggle him off São Miguel as soon as possible they were going to pick him up down there,” Couto told me pointing to a bay some 200 metres from the back of his house Couto said he had been up late with a friend on the night before the police arrived he heard people shouting outside the house Couto opened the door in his underpants and a squadron of armed police burst through the front door they were working off a tip from a police colleague who believed Couto was hiding cocaine at his house Lopes and a colleague decided to check the stone shed at the bottom of Couto’s potato field The inside was covered in hay and smelled strongly of manure There didn’t seem to be anything of interest inside “but something told me I needed to search more” “We didn’t know Quinci was there,” Lopes said Quinci’s cocaine had profoundly changed life on São Miguel But that was just the immediate aftermath of his arrival When I travelled to the island earlier this year the long-term effects of Quinci’s cocaine were evident The users who agreed to speak with me said that Quinci’s arrival on São Miguel had changed the island in surprising ways. Several people told me that a number of locals had become rich thanks to the Italian’s cocaine, then started legitimate businesses, such as coffee shops, many of which still exist today. After he was re-arrested, Quinci was put on trial in Ponta Delgada and given 11 years for drug-trafficking, the use of a false identity and escaping from prison. The decision was appealed and sent to the courts in Lisbon, which reduced the sentence to 10 years. (The other two yachts that were part of the smuggling operation, the Lorena and the Julia, were impounded in July 2001 in Spain by the Spanish police.) the Caribbean-Azores route is now a mainstay of international drug trafficking where cargo is usually transferred to fishing vessels or speedboats for shipment to mainland Portugal or Spain a catamaran sailing under a French flag was impounded near the Azorean island of Faial with 840kg of cocaine on board After the methadone truck left for its next stop I took a drive along the island’s northern coast near where Quinci’s yacht had first been sighted My journey cut through towns of whitewashed buildings with terracotta roofs Farmers squelched through the soggy fields while portly Holstein-Friesian cows grazed as I reached the north-eastern tip of the island I saw the Atlantic stretching out to the horizon like a sheet of rippled slate a white sail boat was rocking back and forth in the afternoon swell Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, and sign up to the long read weekly email here Notices are posted by 10 am Monday through Saturday Adjust Text Size: A+ A- As published in Winnipeg Free Press on Apr 11 Share your memories and/or express your condolences below Unfortunately with the need to moderate tributes for inappropriate content your comments may take up to 48 hours to appear FALL RIVER — They could almost have walked across the wide Atlantic And they could just as easily have walked across five centuries so faithful are they to the way it’s always been granite landscape of New England to the cart paths of São Miguel living on the bread and milk offered at the farmhouses they passed Santo Christo church is covered in bright blue scaffolding and the scaffolding is covered in white fabric that the restoration of the church is beginning Across from the church is Nobrega’s Market and Irene’s Fashions where pure white First Communion suits glow in the windows A police officer’s shoulder radio crackled and those who strained their ears heard the words “Ave Maria” blown down from further up the hill as the Romeiros approached and young faces are as numerous as old faces among the marchers “I’ve been doing it for nine years,” said Katie Do Couto was marching with numerous other members of their family Ryan’s been on the march since he was 7 years old Pinned to the shawls of these marchers were pictures of Manuel Silva and Mirissa Medeiros “They’re my cousins,” marcher Alyson Bouchard said of Ryan and Katie then she pointed to the two memorial cards attached to her shawl Santo Christo is the halfway point of the Romeiros’ walk through time several women ladled soup as fast as they could Rosa Carvalho stirred soup with a huge spoon It’s a good soup for a walk between centuries And Now What? by the Icelandic artist-activist Rúrí, at MIEC made deliberately for the exhibition project with the ashes and remaining burnt trees from the local forests The exhibition underlines the restlessness of Rúrí’s art in particular the climate crisis and the consequent rise in the average sea level the forest fires and the temperature of local ecosystems which reveal inequalities in access to drinking water other natural resources and better living conditions in both human and non-human beings The title’s questioning stresses the need for us to reflect on new ways of living on the planet caring and respecting all living and non-living beings renowned as a pioneer in performance and installation unfolding as she adds new possibilities to her art and installation world As German art historian and curator Christian Schoen says in the preface to the artist’s dedicated monograph: «for Rúrí art is language It allows her to express herself in ways that would be unfeasible through the written or spoken word The artist addresses important notions for all of us; she raises questions about life and coexistence about cosmic coherence; she challenges the relativity of objects and phenomena questioning the system of coordinates with which we structure the environment» [2] uses her art as political or social agency to voice concerns about her surroundings Activist artis a term used to describe artistic practices addressing political or social issues through actions that nurture experiences and challenge power structures The renowned art professor and researcher Boris Groys political and practical issue of today’s discussions on activist art is to be at an ambiguous point Criticism rests mainly on the notions of aestheticisation and spectacle associated with the theses of Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord who argued that the aestheticisation and spectacularization of politics cancels out the practical goals of activism But the author concludes the following: «Contemporary activist art being captive to this contradiction is good because only self-contradictory practices are true only art points to the possibility of revolution as radical change beyond our current desires and expectations.»[3] In And Now What? Rurí displays this desire and possibility for change photographs of waterfalls that have disappeared due to dam construction in Kárahnjúkar as well as others affected by hydroelectric development Water is a commonplace feature in Rúrí’s work one of the most powerful ways of representing this element that flows across the globe The serialisation of the photographs underlines the water issue; firstly by the way the dams are borders between us and the surrounding elements considering the devastating way in which humanity has extracted the planet’s natural resources and the scarcity of water in many areas of the Earth due to climate change an ongoing installation composed of five screens with map fragments They allow us to study the possible future of coastlines based on calculations of the water mass released during the complete melting of the Antarctic ice sheet by collecting data in public international databases This is another warning about the climate crisis and the rise in the average sea level There runs a similarity with the installation Water Balance IV where the artist places one hundred and twenty translucent glass jars This emphasises the importance of the liquid element as the most precious commodity of life It has instruments and allusive decoration where we hear the ticking of several clocks in the room The work was activated by a performance at the opening where the artist took several pages from a world atlas turning each one into pieces in an electronic paper shredder She then placed them in a transparent cellophane bag with a label containing the same caption as the original book page the looping video ITEMS (1978-2006) underlines the idea of sequence showing words on the screen under a skyline we proceed in a narrow corridor surrounded by transparent cellophane bags with the remains of burnt forest ashes where there is this description: Steps in the Forest (2022) – Step Twenty – Santo Tirso 2023 Footsteps that lead us to Forest (2022-23) a kind of carpet in the corridor of the old monastery pine cones and parts of burnt trees from nearby forests Santa Cristina do Couto and São Miguel do Couto These are the remnants of beings that once had life evoking the blight of the frequent fires in our country and in other parts of the world There are also quotes by the artist on her experience in the forests inscribed on the walls of adjoining rooms belonging to the permanent exhibition of Museu Municipal Abade Pedrosa (MMAP) a possible change and a desire for a better world in face of the climate crisis we recall the sci-fi precursor We (1920) by the author Evgueni Zamiatine Before the first flight experience of the Integral She intends to sabotage the mission and instigate a revolution believing that the last revolution had already been carried out and that everyone is happy Reflecting later: «- Children are the only daring philosophers And the daring philosophers are all children And we can’t help but pose the question that children ask: «And then what?»[4] And Now What? by Rúrí is at MIEC until June 25 [1] Schoen, C. (2011). Preface. Em H. Cantz, Rúrí monograph (p. 6). Ostfieldern. From: https://ruri.is/the-artist/  [3] Groys, B. (June, 2014). E-flux Journal. From On Art Activism: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/56/60343/on-art-activism/ [4] Zamiatine, E. (2017). We. Lisbon: Antígona. (p. 208). 1990) currently working as a researcher at i2ADS – Instituto de Investigação em Arte with a fellowship granted by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (2022.12105.BD) to atende the PhD in Fine Arts at Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto Already holding a MA in Art Studies – Museological and Curatorial Studies from the same institution With a BA in Cinema from ESTC-IPL and in Heritage Management by ESE-IPP Also collaborated as a researcher at CHIC Project – Cooperative Holistic view on Internet Content supporting the incorporation of artist films into the portuguese National Cinema Plan and the creation of content for the Online Catalog of Films and Videos by Portuguese Artists from FBAUP Currently developing her research project: Cinematic Art: Installation and Moving Images in Portugal (1990-2010) following the work she started with Exhibiting Cinema – Between the Gallery and the Museum: Exhibitions by Portuguese Filmmakers (2001-2020) with the aim to contribute to the study of installations with moving images in Portugal envisioning the transfer and specific incorporation of structural elements of cinema in the visual arts Subscribe to the Newsletter (EN Version)! 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