The media was on hand in force for the dedication of the lab that stormy Sunday afternoon in the fall of 1977. There were more than 25,000 hatchlings swimming about in 106 tanks. The governor of the state made a speech, and newsmen got plenty of pictures of the lab's benefactor, Antonio Suárez, who smiled modestly.

Several days later I returned to the lab. All the tanks were empty. All the hatchlings were gone. The mature turtles in the large tanks—­the ones whose mat­ing habits were going to be studied—­had been taken to the slaughterhouse, or so said an old man eating his lunch under a tree. He was the only person I could find at the "lab."

The hatchlings in those tanks on dedication day, I discovered later, had been collected on the beach at Escobilla, and they had hatched from eggs laid there naturally. They had been brought from Escobilla to the lab to deceive the media and the Mexican people.

On the last day of my visit to Escobilla I visited the slaughterhouse dump, the most evil place I have ever seen. "The dump," I wrote soon after­ward, "is located on several low hills just southeast of the slaughterhouse. When the turtles have been slaughtered, the 12 pounds of good meat has been stripped from the bone, and leather has been stripped from the head and chest, the remains are dumped onto these hills like garbage and left to dry in the sun before the bones and shells are ground into fertilizer.

"The stench here—the odor of death—was unholy....Vultures retreated reluctantly as I approached. Here and there I saw flippers stripped of their flesh, their five fingers, like yours and mine, jutting out of black putrescent meat.

"There were eggs there too, where no eggs should be. Mixed with the bowels of their slaughtered mothers, they were heaped into a sprawling pile and covered with maggots. I suspect someone will tell me that PIOSA only chooses the finest eggs to go bad in the sand or in those styrofoam boxes, and that these were rejects. But I saw that pile with my own eyes. There were thousands upon thousands of eggs, all rotting in that evil heap.

"I was, quite literally, sick to my stomach."

That was the tone of the article: bitter, angry, hopeless. It was full of words like evil, and those words were always used in proximity to the name Antonio Suárez.

In late 1977 things were going very well indeed for Antonio Suárez. His men were killing as many as 700 turtles a day, the governor of Oaxaca had compli­mented him on his efforts in the field of conservation, and Tecnica Pesquera, the magazine of the Mexican fishing industry, had published a long and laudatory article on the lab. Suárez was selling the turtle leather and making enough money, apparently, to continue the obscene slaughter at Escobilla. Mex­ican law required him to make use of all parts of a turtle. The shells and bones could be used as fertilizer, but the proc­essed meat was a problem. Olive ridley is not considered a tasty turtle, not in Mexico or Central America. The turtle soup and turtle steaks that are prized come from the green turtle. So Suárez was sitting on a few hundred thousand pounds of meat, which, if not precisely worthless, was not making him any money either.

In December of 1977—according to an indictment later handed down by a Miami grand jury—Antonio Suárez and several others met in a luxury apartment in Mexico City, and there they entered into an illegal conspiracy to dispose of all that cumbersome turtle meat.