6. Narcomar, the Shrimp Fever.

6. Narcomar, the Shrimp Fever.

The meeting with the health promoters in Puerto Nuevo continued with a welcome party, in which those who stayed to sleep as they did 40 years ago, continued dancing until after midnight.

Among the promoters was Antonio, a promoter from Daule, a town full of shrimp farms in front of Cojimíes.

Máxima listened to her father, who in 1974 traveled through Ecuador with a backpack, who arrived in that town, slept in an abandoned house, and then crossed the Chamanga Estuary, in a boat owned by a man who was drunk, he invited him then to his house in Daule, he was the rich man of that town. Antonio turned out to be the son of that man.

- We go to my town, I invite her doctor and I take her for a walk to Cojimíes, now it is different with the paved road, hotels, restaurants, internet, satellite TV, cell phone.

The next day, the doctor accompanied Antonio to a town that cannot be seen from the road. The bus dropped them off on the freshly paved road and from there, they walked through a variety of land, between the pools to raise shrimp.

 Daule was a street with wooden houses, the center of the town was a canteen, more important than the chapel, and in the background the Chamanga estuary, with its peaceful waters, which looked like a huge pool of dark waters due to the mud at the bottom. , with mangroves on both sides.

The entrance to the estuary was a mangrove island called the Emerald Isle and behind them, the waves of the Pacific drew their white crests, which then fell asleep.

In front of Daule was a town with many houses. It was Cojimíes, a cantonal capital, with a long pre-Columbian history on the Ecuadorian Coast, and in the Province of Manabí,

In 1998, the shrimp plague, called the white spot, arrived in the area. It was the end of a time of madness when Ecuador became the world's leading exporter of shrimp.

  Her father told her that it was estimated in those 90s that at least 120,000 people, including children, women, and adults, swept the 1,500 km of beaches in Ecuador, with red nets, called micrometric.

That indiscriminate fishing, to capture 4 types of shrimp larvae, of which only two could live in the pools, at the same time it killed millions of newborn hatchlings, crabs, small fish, that lived on the beaches, which stunk at dawn for the dead animals, on those nights of fishing, twice a month, when the waves enter the beaches, called aguaje. It was a time when families worked day and night, children did not go to school, to help their parents, or teachers used them to catch shrimp for them.

In towns like Cojimíes, which was a town destroyed by the sea years before, the houses were made of cane and zinc, on mangrove columns, because the government and everyone said that it was prone to tsunamis, and even a cement town and streets with sidewalks, in the interior that nobody wanted to occupy.

In the sandy streets of Cojimíes, at the end of the eighties and beginning of the nineties, in the town what was sold the most were VHS for TV players, since the numerous antennas that were abundant, almost did not capture the channels. The most striking thing was the pornographic videos that were the boom, even the children sold it.

In the days of the Shrimp Fever, most of the land around the town was small puddles with channels, in a huge net, where shrimp larvae were raised, until the buyers came. That larval hatcheries were larger than the urban area.

The price of the larvae was absurd, a small glass of larvae cost what a worker earned in a year as wages. and an ovate female shrimp for the laboratories, up to 5000 sucres, when the dollar was worth only 2000 sucres.

The most important man here was the owner of a shrimp packing plant, where two hundred women came to work daily, the striking thing was that the packing plant had a dozen guards with army weapons, its owner came from Bahia by plane, they were the that paid better, but some of the shipments that the packing company sent to Spain had been contaminated with cocaine.

The fishermen would go out at night with their shrimp nets. The day they captured an ovate female they had so much money that the town's brothel worked day and night since most of the money that this fever produced ended up in women and alcohol.

The trip on the boat through the Chamanga Estuary seemed fantastic to him. Cojimíes now differed a lot from what his father told him, who was frequently there, when he was a malaria researcher in the town of Sálima, since it was the place where all the towns of the estuary were supplied.

Back in Daule he stayed to sleep in the house of Antonio's father.

_If doctor, I was a famous murderer here, it all started when I was a child, I'll tell you