It was 5:30 in the afternoon last Friday and we were on the patio having a cold beer thinking how good things were going. As the Amazon is very low this time of year the ships serving our port can not always get to our city of Iquitos, Peru a little more than 2000 miles from the mouth of the Amazon. Several days earlier we had made our shipment by barge to the Three Frontiers area where Colombia , Brazil and Peru meet to be transferred to the awaiting ship.
The phone rang and it was the secretary , she had just gotten a phone call from the customs agent that one of our containers had arrived missing the official seal and it was open. Here where tons of cocaine are smuggled every month down river this is about the worst phone call a person can receive. The container has been violated for one reason or another, sabotage, smugglers, pirates , who knows but none are good..
These things don’t wait, as the secretary is the authorized person for us at the port with the customs agent she had to travel by Rapido the next morning at daylight to the border where the ship was waiting. This is a 10 hour bouncing ride down river in an Amazonian version of a Greyhound bus and another bouncing 12 hours back . My wife and I had lived in that area for 8 years and know many people so we called and had people waiting when the secretary and customs agent arrived. They were whisked away to the ship immediately to take responsibility for the open container. Upon arrival they opened the temporary lock installed by the authorities and held their breath. Everything looked in order but it is not that easy. A customs man entered the container on top of our crates of wood and inspected every nook and cranny possible and found nothing. As every container of wood leaving must have poison gas added to eliminate the chance of insect contamination the Agent almost did not get out after an hour in side.
The end result was nothing but a good scare and it appears that we are OK but just in case I have notified customs in Houston of the problem and they will inspect the container again. It appears it was pirates that boarded the convoy going down river and sawed off the lock thinking there was something to steal. When they encountered 3000 pound pallets of wood and there was nothing to steal they were detoured.
The problem with this type of problem is that if in fact contraband is found everyone remotely connected to the shipment immediately goes to jail until the investigation is over. It is no joke here. Another day in the Amazon and today everything is normal again.. The photos below will tell part of the story.
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