The Crocs

The Rio Tarcoles, just north of Jaco, Costa Rica, is home to the largest crocodile population in the Americas.

There’s a bridge over the Tarcoles that one crosses to leave Jaco for the capitol San José (or vice versa) and if you look over this bridge at any time of day you will see at least a dozen long, fat, dun-coloured reptiles spread out on the banks in repose, sunbathing lecherously or else floating, absolutely still, observing the bridge with their snouts and backs just above the water.

Some of the Tarcoles crocs are monstrous, easily 13-feet long and very robust, and they all sit with their mouths split open in that haunting, toothy grin that, no matter how often we’re told it’s a cooling gesture — like a dog’s hanging tongue — is always going to look anticipatory, knowing, leering, debauched and absolutely sinister. When they move to slither back into the water, they’re so languid and self-assured. It instantly makes you feel like prey or some sort of cosmic inferior.

Jaco is filthy and so is the Tarcoles. In fact, the water is so polluted it is widely believed that not a single fish swims in it. Which begs the question that even if these resilient, prehistoric crocodilians don’t mind the pollution, what on Earth do they eat?

Half-humorous local folklore says the crocodiles live on shit. But the truth is much funnier.

After dark, some of Jaco’s many expats — mostly middle-aged American men — will pay a local man waiting on the banks $100 US for a live chicken (a 5,000 per cent mark-up from the price the local paid for the chicken at the market). The expats aren’t just paying for the chicken, they’re also paying for the privilege of throwing the chicken and seeing it snapped out of the air by ever-ready jaws.

Sometimes a rope is tied to the bird, and a bit of sport is had with the crocodiles. It’s good business for both Costa Rican hustlers and the gluttonous reptiles. Sadistic and entrepreneurial sport-feeding keeps the world’s largest gaggle of American crocs thriving in waters that would suffocate a catfish. A police outpost was recently established on the bridge, and one hears countless impossible-to-confirm stories from the pre-outpost days when, it is said, local gangsters added untold quantities of human life to the diet of the crocs.

The Job

My first day in Jaco I was informed of two things over and over. First, that five, maybe six years ago you could come to this place and it was just a sleepy little beach town — one with dudes napping under their sombreros on the side of the road. And second, that there was a double-murder drive-by shooting yesterday executed by Vespa-mounted hoodlums.

I had come to Jaco to write and work for an English–language newspaper as a “Pacific Coast bureau chief” to use my overstuffed editor’s overstuffed phrase. Jaco was a beach town with a permanent population of little more than 5,000, but it was, at that time, shaded everywhere by massive cranes erecting six imposing condo and resort hotel structures.

These cranes gave off the whiff of imminent, intoxicating wealth that blanketed the whole town.

In practical terms, this whiff meant lots of corrupt expat businessmen looking for a take, lots of poor Nicaraguan immigrants looking for construction work and the enticing quiver and thump of cocaine culture tugging at the corners of Jaco society, drawing it into dark pits of violence and criminality.

I added a touch of scorn, targeting the expat feeding frenzy, to my first article for my employer — an article about a fundraising initiative I had barely bothered to research — because I considered it my duty at the time.

It was my first real newspaper gig and I didn’t know better. My editor admonished me gently from behind his overgrown, tobacco-stained moustache for “unnecessary editorializing,” but his eyes were pleased. I was disappointed when I discovered the isolating properties of my scorn; those businessmen were my audience and my customers. I felt like a fool for treating them as targets.

As I flailed about in successive assignments, trying to find my niche amongst these folk, I learned that not all foreigners were businessmen. There were many pre-baby-boomers belonging to the set I dubbed “expats with ex-wives.” Nearly identical in their bald heads, leathery hides, slow shuffles, unforgotten estranged children and heavy daytime drinking habits, you’ll find them in warm climates the world over. My curiosity grew over the town that had existed before my arrival, the one with the roadside sleeper and his picturesque sombrero.

The Costa Rica they read about back home

Happily, I was to discover that town further south.

On the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica, development tended to follow the southward creep of the coast-hugging paved highway, or, perhaps more accurately, the progress of the highway followed the development. Right around where the fresh blacktop gave way to dusty gravel, a reggaeton-blasting, Jesus-decaled bus deposited me in a beach town called Matapalo.

In Matapalo was serenity, a quality always promised by brochures that are printed only after the serenity has been successfully uprooted.

Stretches of pale sand beaches, still blue water and pineapples growing everywhere in the nuclei of little verdant explosions. Capuchin monkeys chattering and whole swaths of this beach all to yourself with no one around.

But chainsaws and even bulldozers were soon roaring. I was here for a story, after all. People were being evicted from their houses with only five days notice. After the notices’ expiry, the houses were demolished.

Even a beloved septuagenarian Don was expelled from his residence of fifty-plus years. Costa Rica still has Dons, one of the many, almost-charming, relics resulting from Spanish colonialism as it is the only Latin American country to never experience a middle-class revolution.

The municipality had invoked a little-used federal law, on the books since 1977, to declare these beachfront homes illegal. The municipality conducted the demolition with a swiftness, a brutality and an embarrassing evasiveness that left little doubt in anyone’s mind as to their motive; the land allegedly had a foreign suitor.

It was time for the locals to leave and the business to come. The Costa Ricans who fled their rightful homes — without a cent of compensation — would maybe be pushed further south by the highway until they hit the Panamanian border, and then there was nowhere left to turn except towards a corrugated-sheet-metal shack on the hidden and despised outskirts of one of the cities.

“I have boats waiting,” my portly, fatherly editor told me when I unexpectedly announced my resignation. “This place isn’t for everyone. It’s not for most people.” I admired him for always having one foot in, one foot out. “If any shit goes down,” he added conspiratorially, “I have five different ways I can leave the country in an hour.”

A last look back, before forgetting

I didn’t leave with my head held high, as I’m tempted to pretend I did. When I left, I was trying to broker a favourable-press-for-advertising-money deal with a local hotelier (a foppish and anaemic-looking Dutchman I had always liked) without my editor’s knowledge. Honestly, I was willing to adapt, but I didn’t have the constitution — the fortitude, even — for it. It’s weird to consider a beach town that’s “not for most people,” but it’s also weird to consider everything about the spread of viral capitalism.

Jaco had a mayor, but to me it didn’t seem like he ran the town. I remember a town hall meeting where the mayor didn’t say a word and sat in a corner, seemingly petrified that someone might accidentally send a query his way. The person taking all the questions about beach security, about the recent water privatization and about the new headline grabbing recycling initiative was a local developer.

The last question at that town hall came from a new-to-town expat, looking fit, determined and ready for the golf course. He asked our property developer which chapter of the Rotary Club he belonged to; the meeting was adjourned right after the question. The two Rotarians proceeded to privately discuss whatever it is Rotarians privately discuss.

I watched them for a while, with a strange mix of disgust and admiration. I may be misremembering, but in my mind’s eye I see their two chests in polo shirts and I see that they’re both embossed with that little Lacoste logo, that little crocodile.

Dylan Ferguson is a former Features editor of the Manitoban and a freelance journalist based out of Winnipeg