Originally published in Outside's November 1982 issue

Very few human beings, I believe, could tour that dump near the slaughterhouse on the beach called Escobilla and remain unmoved. There, rotting reptilian bodies were piled one atop the other, as far as the eye could see. Near the entrance to these acres of death there was a pile of eggs—an entire generation, or so it seemed—­rotting away under a blazing tropical sun.

I saw that dump in October of 1977. I had gone to Mexico expecting to write a pleasant little report on what promised to be an awesome natural phenomenon. On the beach called Escobilla, in the state of Oaxaca, on the Pacific coast not far from the Guatemalan border, some 100,000 turtles were said to come up out of the sea and lay their eggs in the sand. The olive ridley, an 80-pound animal about the size of a manhole cover, had come up onto the beach at Escobilla on nights of the full moon, 100,000 strong, for as long as anyone could remember. These massive arribazónes—­arrivals—happened approximately once a month from mid­summer through late fall.

I had been invited to see the arribazón by a man named Juan José de la Vega, the director of a Mexican environmentalist group called the Cosmographic Society. Also invited by De la Vega and on hand for the expected arribazón was a film crew from ABC's American Sportsman. As it happened, the crew was lucky to get good footage of a single turtle laying her eggs in the sand: There was no arribazón in October of 1977. Politics and greed had gotten in the way, and the dump at Escobilla was the result.

The article I wrote, "The Shame of Escobilla," was published in the February 1978 issue of Outside. The pleasant little story I had envisioned became a horror of death and despair. Antonio Suárez, the man in charge of the slaughter, felt Outside had judged him "harshly."

Despite the fact that the situation seemed to me to be hopeless—­no laws were being broken, after all—­there wasa mad scramble of activity. I was invited to international conferences, asked to file affidavits, to submit copies of the Outside article to environmental groups in sup­port of lawsuits initiated by them.

In the four years since the publica­tion of that hopeless story, my fileon the turtles of Escobilla has expanded enough to fill an entire drawer, and the story no longer seems quite so hopeless. It is a continuing tale, one of criminal conspir­acies, of investigations and counter-­investigations, of well-intentioned people working at cross-purposes, of evil—­and hints of redemption.

All I ever wanted to do was watch those turtles swim up out of the sea and lay their eggs on the beach. What I actually saw on the beach called Escobilla in October of 1977 lives in my mind like a wound.