Blow up: how half a tonne of cocaine transformed the life of an island

In 2001, a smugglers’ yacht washed up in the Azores and disgorged its contents. The island of São Miguel was quickly flooded with high-grade cocaine – and nearly 20 years on, it is still feeling the effects.

A round midday on 6 June 2001, locals from Pilar da Bretanha, a parish on the northwestern tip of the Atlantic island São Miguel, saw a white yacht, about 40 feet long, drifting aimlessly near the area’s sheer cliffs. None of the villagers had ever seen a boat of this size floating so close to that part of the coast, where the sea was shallow, the tides strong and the rocks razor-sharp. They supposed it was an amateur sailor who had got lost.

In fact, the man sailing the boat was a skilled seaman. Two Italian passports, a Spanish passport and a Spanish national ID card were later found in his possession, all of which showed the same 44-year-old with weathered skin and dark curly hair. But each of the four documents listed a different name. In the previous three months, he had crossed the Atlantic twice, sailing more than 3,000 miles from the Canary Islands, just west of Morocco, to north-east Venezuela, and then back again, to São Miguel, 1,000 miles west of Portugal.

Although he was under orders to take the yacht to mainland Spain, his return crossing had been rough. Big lumps of Atlantic swell had pummelled the boat, damaging the rudder and leaving him floundering. Realising he wouldn’t make it to Spain without stopping, he set a course for São Miguel, the largest of the cluster of nine volcanic islands that make up the Azores, a bucolic archipelago first colonised by Portugal in the 15th century.

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