The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(33)

Here was yet another way in which the exploration of the valley of T1 meshed with the goals of the newly elected president. Hernández had expressed concern about deforestation, the looting of Honduras’s archaeological treasures, and the acute need for Honduras to lower its crime rate, reduce drug smuggling, and—above all—increase tourism as a way to lift the economy. To combat crime, he called the army into the streets. Some Hondurans were outraged that the military was deployed in a civilian capacity, but the program was popular in neighborhoods plagued by gangs and crime. Operation Forest would do for the rainforest what Hernández’s policy was doing in the streets: Soldiers trained to live self-sufficiently in the rainforest for rotations of duty would become a quasi-permanent deterrent to illegal loggers, archaeological looters, and narcotraffickers, who count on the jungle’s isolation to conduct their business.

As he reviewed our plans for the expedition, however, Oseguera felt obliged to register a serious objection to our logistics. He noted we were bringing only seven doses of snake antivenin: two for coral snake bites and five for crotalid (viper) bites. He did not believe these would be sufficient; at least twenty doses would be the minimum. (A single bite, depending on the size of the snake and the amount of poison it injects, usually requires multiple doses for treatment.) In the military’s experience, poisonous snakes were everywhere and difficult to avoid in the heavy foliage. Especially problematic were the smaller ones that rested in low branches and, when disturbed, fell down on the unwary traveler.

Elkins balked: It had been almost impossible to get those seven doses to begin with, due in part to an antivenin shortage. They had cost thousands of dollars, and there was no way to obtain more on short notice. The discussion ended there, but as I glanced around I noted a number of people looking uneasy, me among them.

That evening the core group of us—Steve Elkins, Dave Yoder, Chris Fisher, and myself—met with James Nealon, US ambassador to Honduras, and his wife, Kristin, in the heavily fortified embassy and residence perched on a hill overlooking the twinkling lights of the city. Nealon was gripped by the story of the lost city and fascinated to hear about what we might find, and he gave us a detailed and insightful briefing on Honduras, which, he noted pointedly, was off the record. The phrase “cognitive dissonance” came up several times. We promised to report back on our discoveries when we emerged from the jungle in two weeks.



The following morning, our convoy left Tegucigalpa in vans, headed toward Catacamas, a four-and-a-half-hour drive. The expedition’s AStar helicopter followed the convoy from above. Honduran soldiers in military vehicles before and behind the convoy provided security, a routine precaution against banditry and kidnapping, especially necessary because we were hauling a bowser of aviation fuel, highly coveted by drug smugglers. The convoy was in constant communication with us and the other soldiers by two-way radios.

It was a long, dusty drive over mountain roads, through a succession of impoverished villages with dilapidated houses, heaps of trash, open sewers, and sad-faced, droopy-eared dogs slinking about. We did pass through one strikingly different and pretty village, the neat houses painted in cheerful colors of turquoise, pink, yellow, and blue, adobe walls draped with purple bougainvillea, and flower boxes in the windows. Those streets were clean and well swept. But as we entered the town, the soldiers warned by radio that under no circumstances were we to stop, as this was a town run by a powerful drug cartel. We were assured that the narcos were engaged in their own business and wouldn’t bother us as long as we didn’t bother them. We drove on.

Eventually we reached the town of Catacamas, the expedition’s base of operations. It, too, was an attractive city of whitewashed houses with red-tiled roofs, population 45,000, nestled against the mountains, overlooking a rich, broad plain dotted with beef cattle and fine-looking horses, watered by the Río Guayape.

Ranching is a proud and venerable tradition in Catacamas, but in recent years it had been eclipsed by the business of drug smuggling. The city had been taken over by narco lords, who came to be known as the Catacamas cartel. The Catacamas cartel was in competition with another cartel in the nearby city of Juticalpa, and the road between the two cities—which we had been driving over—had become a battle zone, plagued with robberies, murders, and carjackings, often committed by criminals posing as Honduran law enforcement. In 2011, it was the scene of one of the worst drug massacres in Honduras, in which a gunman opened fire on a minibus of civilians, killing eight women and children. In 2015, by the time we arrived, the drug smuggling had subsided somewhat, but the town was still dangerous. While there, I learned from a local businessman that the cost of a contract murder in Catacamas was twenty-five dollars. However, we were assured that we were in no danger because of our guard of elite Honduran soldiers.

The Hotel Papa Beto was the finest in town, a whitewashed fortress located in the old city center, with a luxurious swimming pool and an enclosed courtyard with shady, arched portals. The building was surrounded by twenty-foot concrete walls topped by broken glass and concertina wire. As we checked in and got our keys, our escort soldiers with M16s and Israeli Galil automatic weapons stood guard in the lobby. The expedition had taken over the entire hotel, and we spread out our gear poolside in organized piles, ready to be packed and flown into the jungle.

We would spend two nights in the hotel before jumping into the unknown, flying into the valley and establishing a base camp. Snake antivenin shortages aside, Elkins and his team had planned everything to the last detail, a remarkably thorough job, even though we had only a vague idea of the actual conditions we might encounter in the valley of T1 in terms of snakes, insects, diseases, weather, and the difficulty of travel. Only two people on the expedition had actually seen the valley of T1 up close: Juan Carlos and myself. (Tom Weinberg did a brief flyover of T1 in 1998 on a mercy mission with the US military, on their way to deliver supplies to stranded villagers after Hurricane Mitch. Although the storm had derailed their plans, Steve hoped Tom might spot something in the mysterious valley he was convinced held a lost city. So Tom persuaded the pilot to alter his flight plan to get a quick look-see en route, but there was nothing but dense tree cover.) No one had been in there on the ground in perhaps hundreds of years. There was nobody to ask, no guidebooks to consult, no maps beyond the lidar images, and no way of visualizing what we would find in the ruined city. It was both unnerving and exciting to know we would be the first.