To the island of Sao Miguelthe largest and most populated of the Azores archipelago, is known as the ‘Green Island’ for its lush meadows. In 2001, however, the most appropriate thing was to refer to it as the white island. In one of those pirouettes of destiny that usually inspire Netflix scriptwriters (and in this case that’s how it was) began to arrive on the coasts of São Miguel, more specifically on those of the freguesia of Fish Taildozens and dozens of uncut bales of cocaine of extraordinary purity.
The Atlantic brought them by surprise and without anyone in Rabo de Peixe being able to explain very well why or where they came from. What there is little doubt about more than 20 years later is that that episode changed history of the island.
Not only because Rabo de Peixe was forever associated with surrealist images (it is counted that on the island there were families who they breaded mackerel with cocaine instead of flour), but for the mark it has left on a population of humble fishermen in which until then white powder was a luxury available to an elitist minority.
Twenty-four years later, his story is back in the news thanks to streaming. Netflix has just released a new documentary about that episode, ‘White Tide: The surreal story of Rabo de Peixe’a launch that coincides with the premiere of the second season of a series inspired by the same event, the successful ‘Rabo de Peixe’.
A drifting sailboat
The Azores are a paradise on earth, but even the greatest of paradises can turn into hell. Antonino Quinzi saw this for himself at the beginning of June 2001, while steering a yacht of 12 meters across the Atlantic towards Spain.
Although he was an experienced sailor and had recently completed the Canary Islands-Venezuela route, near the Azores he was surprised by a strong storm that damaged his ship’s rudder and threatened to set him adrift. Faced with such a panorama, Quinzi decided to postpone his original plan, which was to sail back from Venezuela to Spain, and seek refuge in some discreet cove of São Miguel.
The word ‘discreet’ is not a minor nuance.
To the residents of the parish of Pilar da Bretanha who saw how his yacht appeared on the horizon and sought shelter among the cliffs, Quinzi it seemed to them one more amateur sailor. One of the many sailboat owners who set out to sail the ocean without enough boards and end up finding themselves in trouble. In this case they were wrong. Quinzi was a hard-working Sicilian navigator and if he seemed to be stumbling along the coast of São Miguel it was because he was actually looking for a secluded place in which to hide the cargo he was transporting.
On board his yacht, in addition to food and everything necessary for his long voyage, he hid hundreds and hundreds of kilos of cocaine from Venezuela. How many? Officially there is talk of half tonalthough there are those who remember that the ship could carry up to 3,000 kg and it would be strange for the Sicilian to embark on its ocean voyage without taking advantage of that cargo capacity. The fact is that Quinzi needed to reach a port where he could repair his yacht, but for obvious reasons he could not do so with the holds full of bales.
To get out of trouble he decided to get rid of drugs.
Some versions they count who used a boat to take part of the load to a cave, but had to abort the mission when he was surprised by some fishermen. Whether or not it is true, the fact is that to get rid of a large part of his cargo, Quinzi chose to another more radical solution.
A wave of bundles
Which? After ensuring that the bales would not be damaged by water, he placed them in fishing nets and then lowered them off the coast with the help of heavy chains and an anchor. Once he finished the task, he set sail towards the port of Rabo de Peixea humble and discreet fishing town located just over 20 kilometers from where he had hidden the shipment. The plan seemed perfect, if it weren’t for the fact that the same waves that had forced Quinzi to seek shelter ended up destroying the net that hid the coca bales.
The result: dozens and dozens of packages began to emerge and the waves dragged them towards the coast. Guardian account how the first official notice was recorded on June 7, 2001, just one day after Quinzi’s yacht was seen lurking around the cliffs. While walking through a cove, a local came across a large black plastic sheet that hid what looked like dozens of packed bricks. He notified the police, who soon found that there were 270 bales that weighed nearly 300 kilos.
Over the next few days, the authorities received similar notices from people who found bundles while walking along the coast. It is said that in just two weeks the agents seized more than 400 kg of drugs, which is not a bad balance if you take into account that the police estimated that the total shipment It was around 500 kg.
But… And the rest? And above all, was the yacht actually transporting more drugs, as one of the Portuguese journalists who covered the event suspects? “The ship could carry up to 3,000 kg and no one would cross the Atlantic with only a small part of what it can carry,” argues Nuno Mendes, a reporter who traveled from Lisbon to cover the news.
There was more or less drug, almost a hundred kilos or many more, what seems evident is that most of that unseized cocaine ended up in the hands of the inhabitants of São Miguel, where they barely live. 140,000 people. The focus is placed above all on the population of Rabo de Peixe, one of the towns more impoverished from Portugal. The stories told about how that narcotic ‘manna’ reached its streets are so bizarre, so out of the ordinary, that even today it is difficult to know if they are fantasy or true facts.
It is counted that the fishermen threw teaspoons of coca to coffee as if it were sugar, that there were houses in which the fish began to be breaded with the white powder and that there were even boys who believed that the bales contained chalk and used it to mark the lines of the goal on a soccer field. Reality? Pure folklore?
Glasses of coca at 20 euros (or less)
Of course, stories also circulate that show that not everyone on the island was so naive. There were those who saw in Quinzi’s lost charge an opportunity to get rich quick. The stories surrounding that drug trafficking boom are less picturesque, but just as delirious: young people walking through São Miguel with shopping bags full of coke, a dealer who sold so much drug from his car that he ended up with the seats blackened…
It is said that there was so much coca (or perhaps so little idea of its real value) that some locals sold beer glasses full of pure coca for 20 euros. Others say that you could buy one of those ‘flakes’ for only five euros. The situation reached such a point that at the end of June the police already recognized their fear “massive traffic” of coca and in July the local channels were already broadcasting messages to warn the islanders of the risks of the narcotic.
The problem was not just the flood of coca. It was ignorance. Drug addiction did not come to the island with Quinzi, but before his yacht appeared on the horizon the problem was mainly represented by heroin and hashish. White powder circulated, but it was a luxury restricted to the elite.
In 2017 The Country I remembered that this new reality was quickly felt in the hospitals. “We had 20 deaths and an untold number of overdoses in the three weeks after disembarkation. But they are unofficial statistics that we improvised with the help of doctors and health personnel,” relates Mendes.
Since then, several media outlets have returned to São Miguel and Rabo de Peixe to find out how the island has experienced the last two decades. The footprint of coca still seems overwhelming. In 2022 Ara assured that a relevant part of the population of Rabo de Peixe had had problems with drugs.
The problem was not only the amount of narcotic, but its characteristics. Subsequent analyzes showed that the purity of the alkaloid exceeded 80%. In fact, it was so powerful that some users switched to heroin to cope with withdrawal symptoms. “It was a nightmare. Some young people who had never touched a cigarette began using cocaine,” remember in Telegraph José Lopes, inspector of the judicial police.
And Quinzi? The Sicilian who started the story ended up arrested. The police managed to track him down, arrested him and took him to the Ponta Delgada prison to await trial. Just a week and a half after his arrest, he managed to escape in an episode that would make for another report, but he was not able to avoid justice for long.
After all, he was on an island, the authorities redoubled controls at the ports and the airport and his photo ended up in the editorial offices of the local newspapers. They found him not long after, hiding in a local fisherman’s house.
Images| Netflix 1 and 2, Wikipedia and Otávio Nogueira (Flickr)
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