BY Diego Arias
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[entry: Jeffrey Larrea’s personal notes]
“You said they said what?”
“Los hombres, the men, they said that it was very quick and that it came from outside the fields.”
“In the day?”
“No, in the night, very late. At like, como es, at like eight.”
“Okay, okay. Let’s record this and send it over on a secure server. I don’t want to spend too much time on this silly shit.”
“Okay. Tres, dos…grabando Mr. Larrea.”
[e-mailed transcript from larreajf@lithotrekhldgs.com
Date: 10/15/2032, Time: 10:36 EST
“Good morning gentlemen, I regret to inform you that we have had a series of odd happenings here in Potosí. The Ministry of Hydrocarbons has visited our office to review the matter, but I believe it’s best to stay ahead of any media or government and start an internal investigation. The office reports that the team down here has yet to report any of this to U.S. authorities. Local law enforcement has identified three bodies found by the lithium deposits. Rather gruesome stuff, and no explanation for what caused, apologies, who is causing these unnatural deaths. I will be following up this evening during our phone call with the board. Feel free to reach out if you have questions before we speak, but please know that I know as much as you do when it comes to whatever is happening down here.”]
Mateo hurried us over to the salt fields, driving past workers and men in green hard hats and dark blue jumpsuits, zigzagging so quickly on the cracked white sand that I spilled some of my coffee on a binder I held in my lap.
When we arrived at mina altaflores, law enforcement crowded around a couple of body bags.
“You said it was three.”
“That’s what I was told. I’ll ask to see what is happening.”
We walked up to one of the men draping a white sheet over a body. He looked up at us as we approached him and greeted Mateo. He was a large man with big hands and a full black beard.
“Did you find more bodies?”
“We found more body parts, but we’re not sure how many of we’re working with. We are trying to piece everything together. Some sort of animal must have attacked these poor men.”
“An animal?” I asked.
“Yes, an animal. I can’t see a man doing something like this. These people have been torn limb from limb. Torsos cut open with the precision of a surgical knife. I’d say it’s best you close this off, let a team come down here and take a look at the location. Your men are at risk here, you’re all at risk here. We have to call animal control and capture whatever wild bear is out here terrorizing these people,” the officer said.
“A bear? This high up in Bolivia?” I asked.
“There’s only one type of bear in this area Mr. Larrea. It’s an herbivore, but, yes, sometimes it can engage in carnivorous behavior. It’s certainly never as aggressive as what you have up north. The locals call it jukumari, or short-faced. I’ve never known it to act in this sort of violent manner.”
“If the bear isn’t violent, then there’s no need to close operations. There’s no need for extreme decisions. We can investigate while still working the mines.”
“Well, what if it isn’t a bear?” asked Mateo.
“You mean, like a big cat or something?” I asked.
“A big cat? Out here, impossible. Those animals don’t live this high up, it’s too dry and arid out here,” the officer said and looked over at me. “You’re going to shut down operations sir. Am I correct?”
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El Mensaje
Informes que importan 1922-2035 (103 años de historia)
[translated by Joshua Newton, Lithotrek Holdings Press Officer]
Doubts and criticisms of Lithotrek businessmen in Potosí arise, miners’ families seek explanations
Local
Posted on 11/10/2035 at 5:23 p.m.
The Bolivian government has not yet made public the official state report that details the unexplained deaths of eleven employees found in the mines of the American company Lithotrek. Twelve days after finding the bodies, there are various contradictory explanations provided by the executive director of South American operations, Jeffrey Larrea. The miners’ families have requested an external investigation into whether the corporation, currently seeking additional licenses for exclusive rights to its direct extraction lithium (DEL) technology in Bolivia, has misled government officials on a series of witness accounts and testimonies.
Marcos Arce, lead researcher of the Center for National Forensic Studies (CEFN in Spanish) highlighted that witnesses have reported gruesome scenes of body parts and salt fields covered in what appeared to be human blood. Arce has testified before parliament that American security officers for Lithotrek have denied access to national and local investigators on several occasions. During one visit by federal law enforcement, an American guard kept police officers waiting for over two hours with no information given as to why they were made to wait until US businessmen arrived on scene.
Families are seeking immediate explanations on why the report has yet to be released and if Lithotrek has been given special treatment in what appears to be a criminal investigation into a mass murder of its company workers. Mariela Quispe, mother of one of the victims, has lobbied President Nelson Echeverria to force the company to close its operations and allow full access to government authorities. “They cannot hide behind their money. They cannot deny me the right to see my son. My only child was brutally murdered by something inside of those salt mines. Mr. President, are you listening to us?”
Lithotrek executives have been mired in controversies since the attacks began in late-October. Local communities have argued that the company has sought to keep the lithium mines open despite the massacres of workers and threats to the local community. Larrea has been particularly criticized for his handling of the crisis. Potosí officials have claimed that Larrea has called for excessive meetings on the issue but has resolved nothing, and that he has arrogantly downplayed the seriousness of the situation. The company remains silent on whether or not he will be replaced in the coming weeks, but pressure is building in La Paz to obtain immediate answers to what locals are calling a result of US businessmen putting private interests over the safety of Bolivian citizens.
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December 5, 2035
From: Darren Chametzky (La Paz), Political Officer
To: Aurelio Greenblatt (HST 3322), Diplomatic Security Officer
Subject: Evacuation of Potosí Lithium Mines, Unexplained
Classification: Secret
Aurelio,
Hey there, hope all is well back at Main State. I am e-mailing you on the high side to discuss the issue back at the Potosí mines. We had a meeting about this last week. I promised I’d send you an update on what happened there and post evacuation notes on any Americans that still haven’t left the country.
I’d like to tell you that we had great collaboration with DEA chief Gratzinger down here. He secured use of three helicopters into the mines. Without DEA’s help on this, I’m not sure if we would have had the ability to get those people out when we did. I don’t think the Bolivian government has any interest in securing that location, and the number of casualties make it impossible to send anybody back there. When we arrived at the mines, there was nothing left. No one will go near that place. Initial reports are that some sort of creature is eating people alive out there. I spoke with Richard over at the CIA and he tells me that there may be wild dogs or some sort of jaguar that has made its way down into the white fields in Potosí. He says that these creatures migrate south due to the loss of territory in the Amazon.
Also, CLOSE HOLD: I’d like to give you a head’s up on the chief of operations at Lithotrek, Jeffrey Larrea. He oversees the company’s entire project here in Bolivia. This guy has been really affected by this whole thing. He makes ridiculous claims about some foul-smelling giant troll that attacked him and killed his administrative assistant, Mateo. Maybe your guys can talk to him a bit more when he gets back stateside? It looks like the desert fever, the wild dogs, and the loss of blood he experienced has him screaming nonsense, but I don’t think it’s good for our contacts to have a pretty well-known corporate leader making exaggerated claims about what killed all those people back at the mine.
Send me a response on the board members’ travel plans on the low side, but keep this conversation classified.
Thanks,
Darren
“Do you really need to print this e-mail? Think twice before using paper, electronic records save our Earth.”
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[entry: Jeffrey Larrea’s personal notes]
We took two flashlights and a medevac unit down into the basement floor. There were no signs of the creature this far into the ground, and Mateo had observed that it did not like enclosed spaces. When we ran from it back inside mina veranda verde, it began to scream and frantically push the earth around it, causing it to collapse on top of him. The animal is large, larger than a man, in both height and pure muscular mass. It must have been around ten to twelve feet tall. It had a large eye in the middle of its head, and it was covered in fur from head to toe. Its grotesque mouth was in the middle of his torso, with large yellow teeth the size of a person’s arm. It smelled like something out of a New York sewer doused in urine and brimstone.
“This way! This way!” screamed Mateo.
We figured if we waited in the basement then we would be safe from the animal. If help arrived, we would have to wait until an evacuation team reached Potosí to get us the hell out of there.
“What was that?” I asked.
“I didn’t hear anything. There is a cooling system down here. It must have turned on automatically.”
“No, no. Fuck, no. It’s not the fucking cooling system. It’s found a way in here. Mateo, in room 058 there is a weapons storage. We need to get the fuck over there now.”
We ran down a hallway. I realized we were in the opposite wing of the basement and had to find a way to reach the section 5 corridor. I could hear the beast running through the labyrinth, growling, a killer made only to remind us of our soft fragility and worthless acumen, a being that the locals had identified as not native to this region but found north of the country in Colombia and Brazil. When we had reached the first mine several hours earlier, a man had informed us that we were dealing with what he called a mapinguari, a sort of large, hulking animal that lived in the Amazon. “El no es de aqui. It has come down here seeking. It’s been displaced,” the man had said. We brushed the man off as a foolish local, but learned that he had been right, that this thing was not a short-faced bear or jaguar or a serial killer with a penchant for macabre panoramas. It was the mapinguari, and now it hunted us inside the Lithotrek basement, where we had secured the company’s data, its servers, all its intellectual property down in South America. There was no way we could lose that data and I had to, as an obligation to the board, try to upload the last of our digital archives into a cloud. In room 058 I could try to send everything back to San Francisco and keep the company from losing its Potosí extraction survey. We would lose hundreds of millions of dollars and have trouble competing with the Chinese if we did not send back our hard-earned work to headquarters. I believed then, and I still believe today, that the mapinguari was just another obstacle on the road to greatness.
“This is it. This is room 058!” Mateo said.
I opened the room and locked the door behind me. Inside was a large, caged wall with assault rifles and military grade defensive armor. I took two rifles from the cage and handed one over to Mateo, teaching him how to load and fire if the creature were to breach the steel door that kept us momentarily safe from its hunger. Inside of the wall’s concrete, in a central metallic panel, I took a key and walked over to the right-hand corner of the room.
“What’s in that room?”
“Information.”
“What information?”
“Don’t worry about what information. Hold steady with that AAC Honey Badger and shoot that thing if it breaks through.”
I powered up the computer inside of the controlled access space and entered my login credentials. I could hear the animal breaking down the door, the metal destroyed with every burst of energy from the mapinguari’s arms. I heard the door come down, and Mateo fired into the animal, emptying the magazine. I closed the door to the room and watched from a small window as the animal fed on the man’s body, twisting his head and ripping it off with its monstruous paws. Suddenly, the room turned a deep red and sirens went off loudly, screeching in my ears, banshees clawing at the insides of my brain. I heard the sounds of men and boots, gunfire, and the gates of hell. The animal screamed and screamed and screamed.
Diego Alejandro Arias is a Colombian-American writer. Born in Medellin, he grew up in Elizabeth and Linden, New Jersey. He is a former diplomat, lawyer and civil rights activist. His fiction has been published in the U.S., the U.K., and Colombia. He also has forthcoming work in Another Chicago Magazine, Revista Cronopio, Action Spectacle, among others. He served three tours of duty as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer. His personal website is realdiegoarias.com.