Adventures with Cartels in Mexico

(AKA, how experience makes you stronger…)

Ruins at Chetumal in the South of the country.

This is a long one, so grab a large glass of something cold.

In 1994, prior to the ‘Blue Suit’ experience in Hong Kong, I heard that my employer; who at that time was a well known diving company on the Great Barrier Reef was considering setting up a sister company in Cancun, Mexico. I knew that the reef just off that part of Mexico was supposed to be absolutely beautiful and in size, second only to the one just off North East Australia and so, I really wanted to see it.

One hot and sweaty wet season afternoon in North Queensland, there was little diving work around and in order to earn some money, I found myself chipping barnacles off the bottom of an aluminium catamaran that was up on blocks next to the marina. It was hard on the back and I just knew that crouching down under the hull with the jet hose for a couple of hours was going to really hurt in the morning. Luckily, my employer turned up with a couple of cold beers and I took a break.

Halfway through the first beer, I took the opportunity to mention to him that I’d been studying Spanish at night school, hoping that it would cajole him into considering me for a position in the fantasy Mexican business. At that time, I think that I’d only had two Spanish lessons at the local night school, but thanks to the teacher, who had a good sense of humour and started the lesson with all the rude words, I was enjoying them and by that stage, I at least knew how to order beers and book a hotel room. My employer took the bait and said that he was considering another trip out to speak to the potential partners and that he’d take me with him.

I’d never been to the Caribbean before and although I was totally sold on the diving in Australia, the water off Quintana Roo was astoundingly clear, warm and full of big pelagic fish. I came to love the people and no one laughed at my efforts to communicate in Spanish. Probably because they had heard the garbled mess that the many tourists made of it. In truth, there were many different ‘types’ of Spanish spoken in Cancun – Argentinian, European, Panamanian and Costa Rican to mention just a few. Although the Spanish deny it, the Mexicans actually spoke the original form of the language with all the ‘real’ Spanish lisping away in emulation of King Philip of Spain, so I reckoned that even if I couldn’t speak it properly, I’d be in pretty good company.

We interviewed a couple of local dive instructors while we were there just to see what they were like and were very pleasantly surprised that with just a little tweaking (like not putting a conch shell out for tips* at the end of the day, for one thing), they’d be just right if and when the time came to hire them.

*if that sounds a bit rough, we planned to pay them a proper wage, along the lines of Australian wages with a commission structure, so that they didn’t need to solicit tips, just to survive.

There was of course, a Mexican joint venture partner somewhere in the mix and I met their representative while I was there. He was a smooth, cultured gentleman, obviously descended from the old Spanish ruling class, with a very nice young family. I assumed that he was ‘the money‘ as there was clearly someone big behind the expansion of the overall operations, but just who that was, was never confirmed. The JV company was obviously successful as they were getting big name foreign businesses to invest in the operations and they were bringing in an Atlantis submarine, a replica Spanish Galleon party boat and now, they had a big name diving company.

The decision was made to pull the trigger on the set up and start the business in Cancun and so on a personal level, that meant packing up things at home and preparing Mrs. Jerry and #1 son, who at that time was just a year old. We were both excited as for me, being the General Manager of the company was a pretty big leap in responsibility and a welcome bump in salary too. The last thing for me to do before leaving was to have a conversation with the closest thing the Ozzie company had to a Chief Financial Officer.

The ‘CFO’ was a mysterious character, who lived in a very remote coastal town on the Cape York Peninsular and he never travelled outside his comfort zone. Somerset Maugham’s description of Monaco being a ‘sunny place for shady people was perfectly applicable to Queensland back then and reportedly, the CFO had been a very creative accountant for a number of the white shoe brigade. Of course I didn’t get to meet him, but we did have a conference call. I was asked if I thought that a version of the Australian business could be successful in Mexico and at that time of course, I knew nothing about due diligence back then, but when there was silence to my statement that IF they were happy with the corporate set up and our partners, then given the ocean and reef quality, the operation would sell itself, I realised that they probably hadn’t done any research into that area. This basic omission would prove to be critical later on.

We moved out of our rental accommodation near the beach and sold our prized 4WD.

Her name was Scarlett – for obvious reasons…

She was an old car, but she had carried us around Australia, without letting us down once.

Here she was fording a river in Kakadu National Park

I think that selling ‘Scarlett’ bothered me more than packing up and moving overseas when we were trying to make Australia our home.

Scarlett in the amazing Pinnacles Desert – with her hard top on

But away we went and flying via LAX and Mexico city, we arrived in Cancun a few days later. We had lived very close to the beach in Australia and it was amazingly beautiful, but I was just not prepared for how white the sand was or how just how blue the Caribbean was. It was literally breathtaking and the first drive from the airport to the hotel zone was made in awed silence.

This is the amazing beach near our dive shop. Not too shabby at all…

Part of the deal with being there was the company would pay our rent, but of course, in the beginning, we moved into a hotel room overlooking the beach. Our son ate a lot of sand as we ate seafood and drank cold Corona’s – with lime of course, not the lemon that bars in Oz tried to pass off as being the way the Mexicans drank it. Incidentally, the Mexicans didn’t push the lime into the bottle, they used it to clean the neck of the bottle before swigging from it, placing the used lime on the table afterwards.

It took a while to get used to the (lack of) speed that the Mexicans moved at, but in time, we built a dive shop, purchased the equipment and a compressor and acquired a Swedish made dive boat and found inventive methods to bring everything into the country in order to defy the Mexican authorities the chance to elicit bribes at every turn.

The shop, with all the ‘imported’ surf gear

Mrs. Jerry was excited to play a part in the enterprise and we had determined that she’d be the marketing manager and for sure, she’d be a hit with the major hotel chains with her long blonde hair and blue eyes. As it turned out, they were a sexist bunch and sending a woman over to see them was considered to be a bit of an insult, so I ended up doing most of the customer visits myself. Their loss.

I was struck how much the marketing folks in the hotels all looked like extras out of a Billy Joel music video/Miami vice episode with all their Armani clothing and buffed physiques. They seemed to be impossibly glamorous for hotel staff but I soon learned that the beautiful people were working in the time share side of the business and they didn’t really have much to do with the hotel itself but all of the major big name hotels there seemed to have a big time share operation. I’d always viewed timeshares a bit of a trap for the unwary, but then of course, I couldn’t see myself holidaying in the same place more than once either.

One morning I walked into one high level time share exec’s office and the first thing that hit me was that he was clearly (super) confident with his appearance as he had numerous framed pictures of himself in his Speedo’s on the wall. I’m going to call him Mac. Admittedly, he was a good looking bloke with a great physique but, even if I looked like him, I wouldn’t have had the same thing on my office wall. After giving me a tour of his personal photo gallery, Mac apologised that he was busy and asked me to walk with him through the time share back of house. I did and was amazed at how strikingly attractive his staff were. They looked like they had all been selected from a Miami Vice casting catalogue!

The time share operation had a major role in bringing masses of people into the hotel by offering them ‘2 for 1’ deals on all the attractions in town, as part of trying to persuade them to buy into their 25 year long time share contracts, so the good looking staff were clearly bait. I realised that the ‘walk through’ was his way of showing off his empire but also to make sure that I knew he was ‘the man‘ around town. I was all for bringing more people onto our boat and was keen to see the potential number of bums on seats but I knew that if I filled our small boat with 2 for 1 customers, we’d never make enough money. I explained that and he quickly said, ‘we’ll just buy you a bigger boat’ Mac obviously noticed my confusion and said that as we were the same company, it’d be simple to get it done. Huh?

I was clearly a bit slow on the uptake but the next moment, a small well dressed Mexican man walked in the office dragging two large suitcases on wheels. I was introduced and I asked him if he’d just arrived in town? He looked amused, nodded his head and as he walked into the side room, he said that he was always in and out. As my host offered us both a large line of Cocaine, he explained that he was in and out of Colombia twice every week. I then saw that he was unpacking US dollars from his cases and I felt a strange prickling in the back of my neck, but also my nose started throbbing. Later I realised that this was probably because the used dollar notes had so much cocaine on them, that the vapours were getting into the air in the office. Things felt like they were going to get a little serious, so I politely declined the line and made my excuses, by agreeing to go out clubbing with Mac at some stage (wasn’t going to happen) and I said that I’d return next week to discuss the boat suggestion.

After my strange marketing experience and several missed calls from Mac, I spent a few days in the office and around the dock. We were by then running two trips to the reef a day and night dives twice a week. I’d even linked in with a sea plane company and we flew customers down to Cozumel once a week. The diving was deeper there and there was more of a chance to see sharks, so the customers loved it.

We started up a dive school, which was soon filled up with spring breakers, who bought up all the Australian surf wear we could put on the shelves. The operation was really pumping and so we got two bronzed Australian dive instructors to fly out to help us. The Ozzie dive gods cut a swathe through the young women and were always in demand as ‘personal guides’ I even didn’t ask too many questions when the company car (a VW bug) was returned late in the morning as it’d been bogged on a beach somewhere. I did raise an eyebrow when we found a g string bikini brief tucked down the back of the seat and I also wondered what she wore on the way home?

On my recce visit, I’d been taken on an amazing cavern dive an hour or so south of Cancun and I was wondering how we’d capitalise on having these fresh water underground river systems on our doorstep. Essentially, the Yucatan peninsular was all limestone, which at some time after the last ice age, had been covered in Jungle. The rains had caused the tannic acid from the decomposing jungle floor to eat through the limestone and over time, the acidic water had carved out huge underground river systems. Where the roof of the tunnels had caved in, from the air, you could see small lakes throughout the jungle. Each small lake had an upstream and down stream tunnel, either side of a cone shaped debris pile and they were just ripe for exploration. The Mayans called them Cenote’s and believed that they were gateways to the underworld. In order to appease the gods, they threw valuables in there and sometimes even people as sacrifices.

Heading towards the cave with the cenote entrance in the background

At various times , the underground rivers had been dry and ancient humans had lived in the cave systems and it was possible to see pottery, footprints and even human remains in places. The very slow movement of the fresh water out to the sea meant that there was no perceptible current and that the water was incredibly clear. You couldn’t take untrained divers into the caves, but divers with an advanced qualification could be guided into the cavern portion of the systems. That meant that although there was rock overhead, you could always see without a torch and reach the air on a single breath in an emergency.

The diving was fantastic and the customers loved it. We found a small roadside restaurant in the (then) small township of Tulum that did great food and we took the divers there for lunch each time we dived. It was so popular that we ended up doing the cavern trips twice a week as well. In order to safely guide people into the caverns, the instructor needed to be a trained cave diver, so I did the course and in time, we sent the bronzed gods down as well. At that time no one else was doing regular tours to the cenote’s so we were really cornering the market. We used to take people for a short tour around the ruins on the lovely beach there before taking them to lunch.

El Castillo (the Castle) at Tulum.

The Castle had special significance for the Mayan’s who used it for navigation, with signal fires lit in the upper windows. There’s also a small entrance to a cenote at the rear that the locals considered to be an entry way to the underworld. It’s actually pretty weird staring down into what is only a small hole but it was a hole where people were thrown as sacrifices to appease the gods.

El Castillo and the small, but lovely beach

In terms of risk, cave diving is potentially way, way riskier than normal scuba diving. For a silly example, imagine skydiving at night with a partial blindfold on but obviously, you train for mitigating the potential risks involved in being hundreds of meters from air and almost every piece of equipment has to be redundant, so you carry a spare. The only piece of kit that isn’t redundant is your fins and of course, you can swim without them, if you had to. The idea with cave diving is never to breathe more than a 1/3 of your gas on your way in to a cave, a 1/3 of your gas is used for the way out and you keep a 1/3 for emergencies. The ‘gas’ is usually air, but sometimes it could be Nitrox and in extreme cases, mixed gases, so we just call it ‘gas’ for brevity.

Cave diving in Mexico is seductive rather than scary (honestly), but to anyone who hasn’t tried it, it’s difficult to describe what would make someone want to swim into the dark bowls of the earth but the water is gin clear, not too cold and relatively shallow, which means you can stay underwater longer. There are tiny blind albino fish, blind freshwater prawns and occasionally human skeletons under there, as well as the most amazing stalagmites and stalagmites. The Mayans were a bloodthirsty lot and as previously mentioned, before the caves flooded, they used to sacrifice people, especially children by throwing them into the Cenotes to pacify their gods and once I saw a conquistador helmet on a skull, so probably some poor Spaniard had fallen into their hands at some stage. There was a lot of pottery down there, which I knew had been bowls of food offerings and although I never saw gold objects, I knew a lot had been pulled out by archeologists over the years, so I kept my eyes open.

Father and son on the beach at Tulum – before Speedo’s were frowned upon…

I took the opportunity to take the family down to Tulum one weekend and we had a Mayan speaking US instructor named Alex as our guide. I’d wanted to hire him for our operation but he was more interested in freelancing his way through the many female spring breakers and doing contract diving work when he needed money. As a speaker of Maya t’aan, he was a really good resource and was able to arrange for a cart to carry us and numerous donkeys for all the gear. It was over an hour into the jungle and it was a real experience watching the birds screeching in the tree tops as they sounded the alarm at our approach. I was mesmerised when I saw a mother Opossum leading her four offspring down a track as they grasped the tail of the one in front in their mouths.

We eventually reached a small jungle village full of chickens, naked children and dogs. The men were out apparently tending the fields or working in Tulum. The villagers watched as #1 son toddled after the chickens and we met the lady who was to babysit him for the next couple of hours. She had a lovely kind way about her and clearly was no stranger to kids as she scooped him up and started to swing him in the hammock strung outside the hut. He didn’t even notice us leaving, weighed down with all the gear we had with us. The system we had decided to dive was part of Dos Ojos, or ‘Two Eyes” which was named for the two entry Cenotes; sited almost next to each other. Over the years, this system has proven to be one of the largest on the peninsular and joins up with many other cave systems, but back then it was little known and if you stuck to the caverns, with the accessible air and natural light it was quite safe.

After gearing up and checking each other over, we stepped carefully over to the edge of the cenote, held our masks and regulators into place and stepped out into the dark. The water level was around three metres below the entrance and when the bubbles had cleared and our eyes got used to the gloom, the water was incredibly clear and we could easily see the up and down stream entrances to the caverns. There was a cone shaped debris pile directly under the entrance where the roof had fallen in and a few small blind cave fish darted around us. An angled shaft of sunlight lit up the space, which was about the size of a squash court. Alex signalled for us to move off in line and so, we did.

As we got closer to the cavern entrance, I could see multiple ‘windows’ of varying size where there had been small cave-ins of the roof at some time in the past. Spindly tree roots snaked down to the water and we could see tiny bats turning their heads to follow us as we swam towards them. There was a permanent line installed in the cavern, that would enable a diver to follow it and find their way out to both air and light but the cavern itself was well lit, even without the multiple light sources we carried. As we dropped under the surface and swam on, I could see stalagmites poking out of the silt and an amazing array of stalactites decorating the ceiling. They weren’t all the same colour and varied from brown, through pink and then to white, depending I suppose on what elements were in the soil on the jungle floor. As we passed dark, smaller tunnels branching off the main arterial waterway, I realised that they were the caves and I knew then that I wanted to get into them and see what they were like.

Due to the shallowness of the dive, we were able to spend almost two hours in the system and eventually we surfaced close to our point of entry. There was a small gravelly beach leading out of the tunnels and I saw Jerry Junior playing with two other children around the same age with a small puppy. He was clearly very happy, a bit grubby and he smelt faintly of wood smoke. I felt very relaxed and happy with what the future might hold for us in Mexico, but also there was a nagging concern in the back of my mind, that we were a long way from home and the health care there wasn’t first world back then.

The pack out of the jungle village gave us some time to contemplate what we’d seen and the potential for badly screwing things up for the people that lived there if we or anyone else was insensitive to the way they lived. I promised myself that we wouldn’t do that, but instead, we’d try to organise our operations so that they benefited the local community as well as the business. That would probably mean hiring donkeys to carry the gear, locals to help the divers gear up and maybe even provide a few local pre dive snacks.

A lot of the food in Cancun was decidedly Tex-Mex, with lots of sour cream which we did not enjoy that much, so we often ate spicy taco’s and had cold local beers at a little stall on our way home. There were a few good local restaurants in the old town that we really did like and whenever we went, we always took Jerry Junior who after eating, curled up on a blanket under the table and went to sleep. It was pretty much unheard of not to take your kids out with you and we really loved the family oriented way of living there.

Business wise, we were doing really well, filling up the boat each trip and the JV’s bank account with US dollars. Actually, the surf wear made more profit than anything else and I had taken to shipping the goods from Australia to the US, flying up to Miami and bringing it back in a couple of suitcases to avoid being ripped off by greedy customs officers. I didn’t mind paying import duty, but it was never the same rate, always in cash and not surprisingly, I didn’t get any paperwork. Getting stopped at customs at the airport was a bit of a lottery and in fact, they had a traffic light system. You pressed a button and if was red, they searched your bags, if it was green they waved you through. I had seen a couple of people who looked a lot like the gentleman in the GM’s office with heavy suitcases just walk past the traffic lights and drop off an envelope with customs ladies, so I figured that there were different rates for different people!

I worked out the system on my next trip and brought back an industrial sized roll of condoms, laying them on top of the swim suits and t-shirts. Being a staunchly Catholic country, I figured that condoms weren’t that easy for females to buy for themselves and if I hit the red light, I’d try to work something out to avoid a hefty and random tax. Sure enough, I did hit the red light and the voluptuous customs ladies beckoned me over. They recognised me as a frequent traveller and smiled as they asked me to ‘abre tu maleta’

Their eyes widened as they saw all of the condoms (around 250 of them!) and completely ignored the skimpy bikini’s. I feigned embarrassment and said that I thought that I’d probably bought a few too many… I explained that my wife would probably think I was being greedy if she saw all of them and asked if they would help me out by taking a few off my hands? They immediately scooped all of them out of my case and under the counter and waved me on. Of course, we all knew what had transpired and I made sure to bring a similar amount of condoms every time I was smuggling surfwear!

We were invited to a Christmas party at our business partners house and we arrived at around 7pm with our son looking very smart in his new ‘Hot Tuna’ clothes and we had drinks and nibbles, standing around making small talk. I hadn’t realised that the Mexicans, rather like the Spanish ate much later at night and the couple of pre dinner drinks, coupled with a long day out on the reef and then later in the dive school, had conspired to make me very tired and my head was nodding. I tried to follow the conversation between the other wealthy looking people at the party and as my Spanish was improving, I understood that they were talking about the development of a beach club on the nearby island of Isla Mujeres. I could also tell that we were expected to station a couple of dive instructors there to take people diving off the beach. News to me, I thought but never one to miss out on an opportunity, I engaged in the increasingly animated chat and we ultimately set up to do just that, to run dive trips from the beach club. Next door was a Turtle sanctuary and it was lovely to see the kids running around on the beach with the young Turtles as they were released back into the sea after hatching. How many of them survived, I don’t know, but it was a hit with the visitors.

Showing tourists how to gear up at the beach club. That’s Cancun in the background.

The Australian end of the business was receiving regular financial updates from Mrs Jerry and they seemed to be impressed with the amount of USD we were handing over to the partners accountants, but were becoming confused as to what the interest rate conversion was in our joint peso account. It looked to be a poor rate, very poor indeed. They had told us that as a foreign company, we couldn’t have a USD account ourselves, but that didn’t ring any alarm bells back in Australia, so we carried on, working seven days a week and handing the money over.

One thing we discovered about literally living on a beach and running a diving business was that we always had a lot of visitors. Rarely a month went by without us having house guests or visiting dive instructors who made a guest appearance on the dive boat and made the most of the hectic social life that Cancun offered. We had the odd weekend to ourselves and took our visitors down the lovely Playa Del Carmen and loaded up on beers at the Blue Parrot.

A sandy afternoon on the playa.

One evening after work we loaded up the beetle with all of our cave diving gear and drove down past Tulum to an area riddled with tunnels that we had been exploring. I had heard about a cenote called the ‘car wash’ so named because the local taxi drivers used to pull off the road and wash their cars with the water from it. No environmental protection there.

We entered the water just as the sun was going down and we settled into a steady rhythm of laying out safety line and moving forward with modified frog leg kicks, so as not to kick up silt and destroy the visibility. After about thirty minutes, we followed a side tunnel that became increasingly narrow, to the point that we had to slip our twin tanks off and push them in front of us. A short distance later, the tunnel opened out into a space around the size of four squash courts wide and about 5 metres high. The ceiling was covered in the most delicate white straw like stalactites and the floor in all shades of white, pale pink and yellow stalagmites. There were places where they had both met forming columns and in the middle was a large rock plinth. Above the rock was a large gap in the ceiling decorations and it was obvious that at some time thousands of years before, the ceiling had fallen in making a kind of rock altar. in the clay, on top of the alter, I could clearly see a small pile of charcoal and in the clay, toe prints from the last human to have been in there when it was dry.

Ten thousand years ago, after the end of the last ice age, the cave systems had been dry and the ancient Mayans had used them for ceremonies to please and appease their Gods. They stacked up pots full of grain, beer and even honey as sacrifices and as I mentioned earlier, they sometimes sacrificed humans down there. On another dive trip, some weeks later, I had taken the two bronzed gods and driven down to a new system of caves. By that stage both of them had become cave dive qualified and we’d left after work knowing that by the time we came back out of the water, it’d be dark. As its obviously dark underground, it made no difference to us what time of the day we dived. Actually, there was a good moon and plenty of stars in the sky so we had no problem getting undressed and loading up the car.

Sure enough, after emerging together from the still waters of the cenote, the sky was clear and bright. A memory that has never left me was startling a Jaguar, oblivious to us just breaking the surface that was quietly lapping at the water before spotting us and literally doing a ‘Tom and Jerry’ and running in mid air as he turned and scrambled to get back into the jungle. For a couple of minutes we just floated on the surface, staring at the sky, before staggering ashore (cave diving gear is heavy) and getting changed. Diving in caves is quite spiritual and in what was almost a post coital/religious vision glow, we talked through the experience and as the dive gods smoked, I had a beer from the esky.

As it was getting quite late, I didn’t want to dawdle in the little road side cantina’s so we headed north back to Cancun. After about ten minutes driving, we noticed a Federal Police vehicle following us. It turned its lights on and pulling in front of us, forced us 30m down a side road, to the west and away from the direction of our travel. As this wasn’t our first encounter with the Federales, we knew that it was likely to be a shakedown so we made sure that our wallets were lightened and we pulled to a halt.

The Cops were as usual surly, and didn’t brighten seeing that we were gringo’s (actually not literally as we weren’t Norte Americano and we did speak Spanish). They made us get out of the car and lay face down on the verge as they searched the car for ‘drogas’ The dive gods weren’t against having the odd spliff and I was hoping that they didn’t have anything on them. Later I learned that they had, but in their pockets, not in the car that was being searched. In the background, I heard what sounded like a convoy of heavy vehicles passing by, up on the highway. The cops carried on ‘searching’ half heartedly for a couple of minutes more and then as they pulled away , we looked up and saw that they had pulled all the dive gear out of the car. This was unusual as their MO had always been to fine us for some imagined infraction of the road rules have us pay la mordida (the bite) to go on our way. This time, they had obviously been delaying us for some reason.

We didn’t see any other vehicles on our way back to the city and soon dispersed back to our relative apartments. The next day, we discussed things in more details and we decided that it was probably drug related. I happened to have been introduced to the British Consul in a (not very salubrious) bar just outside of town not long before and so I called him and asked if we could meet. It turned out that he wasn’t totally ignorant of the strange convoys and although HM’s Government wasn’t directly involved in Mexico, they were in Belize and they had a direct line to the US Govt through their Embassy in Merida. I was put in touch with them and spoke to a man who I later learned was DEA and very interested in this ‘new’ route for the drug convoys making their way up to the border with the US. We continued to keep our eyes open for this kind of thing going forward and reporting back from time to time. Cancun at that time was like Paris in the 80’s, where the various terrorist groups were not interfered with if they didn’t become involved in violence in that city. Cancun was considered to be neutral ground by the various Cartels who, as I learned, laundered their money through the various bars, clubs, hotels and time share activities. Cancun was hot property and there were four distinct spring break holidays, the US, the Mexican, the Brazilian and the Argentinian. All of which not only brought in a lot of potential users, but couriers too.

The spring breakers of all nationalities would come into our shop and clear the shelves of all the Australian surf gear and in particular, the swim suits. I remember vividly hearing that the shop was very busy and wanting to help, I wandered out of my little office and into a group of young 20 somethings teetering around in high heels and our tiny g string bikini’s and feeling, rather than seeing Mrs Jerry’s eye’s boring into my skull. I turned on my heel went back into my office and closed the blinds. Trouble averted.

The ‘spring breakers’ were just young people who wanted to have a good time in a relatively cheap location and many of them found themselves unwittingly or unwillingly moving relatively small amounts of drugs, but the real intent was to clean the money in big real estate deals and of course, the long term movement of money through the massive time share business. At that time, I knew very little of how the criminals operated but after speaking to the other foreign businesses associated with our joint venture partner, I learned that they had all experienced the very bad ‘exchange rates’ landing in the joint accounts, the delays in payment of bills associated with the 2 for 1 customers and after a while, put 2 + 2 together and came up with the realisation that we were all unwittingly part of the money laundering end of a drug cartel.

On the next call back with the Australian part of our business, I mentioned all of this to our owners and they went silent. I asked if during the due diligence phase of their investment (me having done a bit of pre internet media research), they noted anything untoward about our partner. The lack of a coherent answer convinced me that they hadn’t given it any thought at all. Ahh, that probably wasn’t good then.

The Ozzie owners stayed quiet for a couple of weeks and then sent their own accountant out, who verified everything that we had said with regards to the finances. He enjoyed the diving and of course, the night life and the day before he was due to leave, our local video cameraman came into the office at the end of the day to do his financial reconciliation. I had been told (by one of the other staff) that he’d been taking cash for dive videos instead of booking them though the shop and so I needed to speak to him about him and give him a chance to refute the allegation.

I put it to him, but it was quickly obvious that he was a guilty as sin. I fired him on the spot and he took a swing at me. At that time, I was a lot more punchy than now, as age has most definitely wearied me, but I am sorry to say that I gave him a couple of knocks before sending him on his way. I was told later that I should have gone to the Police and had him arrested for assault, but I felt that him losing his job and getting a few bruises was justice enough. It turned out though that by not having him dealt with by the law, I’d given him the opening to come after us for unfair dismissal. That wasn’t the best thing and so both sides lawyered up. Our Australian employers sensed a way out to save face for themselves, escape their unintended involvement with money launderers and effectively abandoned us, cancelling our rent payments, our return flights to Australia and started the rumour mill working against us back home.

A long story cut a little bit shorter, but we won the court case in Mexico, we were theoretically awarded a large cash payout but our Ozzie employers bailed completely, without paying up and leaving all of the other staff jobless and us with nowhere to live. Our lovely British friend Jan, who lived in the same apartment block, put us up in her spare room, fed us and poured us gin. Erica, our wonderful Venezuelan nanny, whose kind husband Salvador worked for American airlines, arranged staff price flights back and cheap freight for all our belongings that we hadn’t sold in a yard sale at our dear cleaner, Conchita’s house.

Getting back to Australia after seeing friends in the US on the way home was an eye opener. People who we’d known for years said that they were surprised we’d come back after ‘what we had done’ It was obvious that their poor business decisions and the subsequent collapse of the business in Mexico had been blamed on my ‘beating up a local staff member’ We had to find a lawyer in Sydney who hadn’t been retained by our employer for just such an eventuality and ultimately won our case there in Australia. We received a payout that after the lawyers has taken their slice, allowed us to put a decent deposit on our first house. The local media, already well paid by our employer for advertising declined to cover the verdict, so our lawyer took out an advert in the state media to rub it in. I think it was a moot point as the word had passed around anyway, as we say.

Cancun over the last few years has become somewhat of a battle ground between the cartels, with shootings, bars burning and tourists being beaten up for not paying inflated bills. The couple of small hotels in Tulum along the beach had multiplied into very chi chi mini resorts with Michelin starred chefs and shamanic cleansing rituals (Mayan alcohol enema anyone?) The foreign owners were ultimately kicked out by wealthy Mexicans (or their proxies) who miraculously discovered that 100 years ago, their descendants had purchased that land from the locals and had ‘paperwork’ to prove it.

If ever there was a good example of ‘you live and learn’ I think that this was it. We’d be taken advantage of by other employers and done the dirty on by other people over the years, but this was really our first experience of something that felt like the worst thing that could have happened to us, eventually came to be something that we learned from and prepared us for our various adventures and challenges to come.

Not us…