Gold fever, has been sweeping the scungy bars in town, for some time. After a few drinks, you may overhear a group of old codgers talking in hushed tones about mysterious river names, highbankers, dredging, shares, investors and gold prices.
Stories have circulated for years about the numerous stashes of gold that are buried in walls and under the tiled floors of some of Antigua Guatemala’s colonial homes and buildings.
Another popular gold legend is that the United Fruit Company of CIA fame, only exported bananas as a cover to hide the vast amounts of gold, stolen from Guatemala.
It’s not that there isn’t any gold in Guatemala, as just 250 km away at San Miguel Ixtahuacán in the department of San Marcos, the Canadian owned Marlin Mine extracts some 400 thousand ounces of gold each year in a slick operation.
Having gouged a small mountain, it pays almost no royalties, has a dam that only partially contains all the cyanide it uses, employs some 2,000 people in low paying jobs and has no government supervision. It’s like mining heaven.
With revenues of some USD $900 million a year and expected to generate over USD $3 billion dollars during it’s lifetime, it has only paid some USD $113 million dollars to Guatemala so far, owing to it’s sweet royalty payment deal of 1% of revenue that was voluntarily increased to 4% in January 2012, after some bad press, but has since returned to the original deal.
But this story is about the Lucky River Gold Mine (Rio Suerte Gold mine), which is a different sort of gold mining operation.
Run on the smell of an oily rag, beer smuggling, pension payments, retirement checks and occasional amounts snipped from naive investors, it’s best described as a poverty pack operation, that defies all logic.
Lucky River, sounds like a Chinese emporium during the Californian gold rush days, but it’s actually a white man’s operation, run by a couple of old codgers in their 70’s and three or four youngsters in their 60’s.
All have impressive titles like CEO, engineer, geologist, mining consultant, mining engineer, transport director, mine manager and some includes some Guatemalan gophers.
Robert Bookstein, the oldest member of the group and better known around town as Ponzi Bob, is the CEO and messianic owner of Lucky River, who leads this self interested, adventurous and bored team members, by inspiration.
Ponzi Bob founded his Guatemalan corporation Rio Suerte S.A. in 2007, which he claims is “capitalized with USD $1 million dollars worth of shares”, having arrived at this magical number by; “assessing his self-worth, measuring his effort, commitment, cash out-lay, and luck” and dreams of getting listed on the Guatemalan Stock Exchange (Bolsa de Valores Nacional).
In normal mining operations, things like mining leases, licences and permits are considered important, even essential. However, at Lucky River these may or may not exist and any that may possibly exist, are in the name of one of Ponzi Bob’s daughters and another person, who sees himself the real owner and doesn’t always get on with Ponzi Bob.
Regardless, the Lucky River people consider such matters as “trivial nit picking” and any potential investors, who may question what it is exactly they are investing in, are considered to be acting in “bad faith”.
According to Ponzi Bob, anyone who needs to know “why” they should invest in Lucky River, is automatically disqualified as an investor and he refuses to accept any of their, “stinkin money”.
Ponzi Bob is like a missionary, who turns up in Antigua Guatemala from the US every few months to evangelize, inspire and spiritually lead his local gold followers into blindly believing that the earth will cough up it’s bounty of riches, if they just put in a bit of effort.
He believes that “Guatemalan’s have gold in their consciousness” and that the lure of easy gold, will help them “realize they can tickle the gold from the river themselves”. All Ponzi Bob has to do, is show them how.
Like all missionaries, Ponzi Bob believes he is deeply loved by the local people who live around the mine’s field camp and support everything he does, convinced that the lure of gold will bind everyone together in love, as they all share in the bounty of riches the earth will cough up for them.
Any criticism or bad publicity is considered a positive thing and the slick Lucky River Gold Mine (Rio Suerte Gold mine) website, is as misleading in it’s intentions, as it is contradictory in what it says.
The actual Lucky River Gold Mine is located on the Platanos River, between two other rivers, the Motagua and Las Vacas, about 3 hours drive north of Antigua Guatemala.
The Las Vacas river is the main sewage system used to drain all the untreated sewage and industrial waste from Guatemala City’s 5 million inhabitants and is the only tidal river in the world located at 5,000 feet altitude, who’s level rises just after breakfast time each day, when everyone takes a crap before leaving for work, recedes during the day and raises it’s level again in the evening, just after dinnertime.
Las Vacas flows into the Platanos River, which flows into the Motagua River and all the filth from Gautemala City meanders on down to the Caribbean coast, eventually discharging into the sea near the border with Honduras.
It’s into this soup of human waste that Ponzi Bob’s faithful gold miners submerge themselves up to their necks, each time time he rallies them to visit base camp and extract a few more flakes of alluvial gold.
Returning home, their wives/girlfriends have to treat their loved ones for innumerable bacterial, parasitic and viral diseases, contracted in this “ecologically sound environment”, as Ponzi Bob calls it.
Some of the symptoms or diseases caught include; Abdominal cramps, vomiting, Foul-smelling flatulence, E. coli, salmonella, shigella, distaste for cigarettes, nausea, fever, stenotrophomonas, legionella, meningitis, diarrhoea, jaundice, light-coloured stools, dark urine, lockjaw, blood poisoning, heart attack and kidney failure, to name a few.
Base Camp
The man in charge of Luck River’s base camp is Frank Koster and he lives there permanently, except when he’s away doing stuff.
The fact is that Ponzi Bob doesn’t look after Frank very well, so to make ends meet, he has to hustle and that usually involves smuggling beer from Honduras into Guatemala, to earn a few bucks.
Frank is German and his English and Spanish are heavily accented. He has been to jail more times than most people have had roots (that’s sex in Australian jargon) and such experiences don’t seem to phase him in the least.
As this story goes to press, Frank is currently sitting in jail in Escuintla at the Granja Canadá (Canadian Farm) which is next door to the Infiernito (Little Hell) prison, awaiting help from his buddies to pay his fines etc., all of which has not been forthcoming. You can catch up with Frank here on the Guatemalan Police Blog
It seems that he recently did a beer smuggling run to Honduras and on the way back, got caught with 888 cans of beer, 4 bottles of tequila and 24 bottles of assorted spirits, all valued at Q5 thousand Quetzales or USD $650. To be released he needs to pay the appropriate taxes to the SAT (the Tax Office), the liquor has been confiscated and Ponzi Bob has flatly refused to help him.
Edwin, one of Ponzi Bob’s useless Guatemalan gophers, had Frank’s passport, didin’t arrive in time for Frank’s court hearing and is so pissed off at having lost the beer shipment, that he doesn’t give a shit. Meanwhile, Frank goes back to jail and some of the team decide to visit him in a gesture of solidarity, although getting him out, is of little priority.
The conditions at the Granja Canadá prison where Frank awaits his fate, are probably better in some ways, when compared to the Lucky River base camp, where he normally resides, as it’s basically just a large hen coop with a roof, woven together by chicken wire, bamboo strips and wooden boards, that hangs precariously on a steep slope.
When the team arrive at the base camp, Frank whips them up a home cooked meal on a discarded fifty-five gallon drum that doubles as his stove and heater. After dinner, they usually settle down in their sweat stained t-shirts to spend the evening chain smoking, drinking beer and philosophizing.
Frank had spent most of the day visiting hamlets of Guatemalan peasants in the mountains, and inviting them to come the next day and witness a demonstration of Lucky River’s unique mining techniques. Previous demos have been a bit of a failure.
Punctuating his point of view with exuberant “mutha-fuckas” in his German-accented English, Frank begins; “They need to see gold. Mutha-fucka! They need to hold the damn shit in their hands”.
“They know gold is there. They need to see the High Banker”, says Ponzi Bob, as he gazes into the distance.
“They weren’t really happy when we didn’t come up with something to show them the last time”, remarks Mike.
“Not happy? They were pissed!”, says Frank.
“Last time there wasn’t much to show”, says Duane between puffs on his cigarette.
“The High Banker is the important thing”, insists Ponzi Bob.
With all the bribes and things he’s had to pay for during his stay in jail, it would have been much cheaper to get Frank out immediately. But . . . Ponzi Bob is in charge of this operation so everything is done in a shambolic manner. Efficiency and logic, is for idiots, as he sees it.
Any form of serious investment in Lucky River Mining Company, should be out of the question. On the other hand, if you like hanging out with the sort of genuine oddballs that you only read about in books and want to chip in few bucks, to pay your way during one of their excursions to a typhus infected river bank, it’s probably not a bad deal.
Sources:
Personal knowledge of all people involved
Ponzi Bob and the river of scum
Fellow Travelers Blog (Which I am banned from)
BJ
You obviously take this too seriously. This is like Abbott and Costello as Expats
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