Quinci. 

This story takes place on a remote island in the middle of the Atlantic, with stunning landscapes shaped by thousands of years of volcanic activity. A peaceful place where locas have thrived on farming and fishing for centuries. The postcard-like landscape is only disrupted by a few fishermen’s villages along the coast, and a few picturesque towns on the horizon. The seas in the south coast are known for their peaceful tides, less rough waters, while the north coast can be pretty rough. This is pivotal to our story.

Around this time of the year, but in the early 2000s, villagers in one of these fishermen's towns in the north, spotted a vessel that wasn’t meant to be there. The coast is shallow, with sharp volcanic rocks on the seabed; the boat seemed to be adrift. They made nothing of it as they thought it was a novice sailor who got lost.

Days later, further down along the coast, brick-sized parcels tightly wrapped in rubber and plastic started washing off on the beach in one of these towns. Locals were confused as to what these parcels could be; they contained a strange powder similar to flour in texture. Around the same time, where the vessel was first spotted, a fisherman climbed down the steep and sharp cliffs and found more of these parcels floating in and around the coves, and plenty more stuck in a fishing net stuck to the rocks. The fisherman noticed the same flour-like substance leaking from the parcels and decided to report this to the police.

Within hours, the police had recovered something close to 300 Kilos of pure, uncut cocaine from these parcels. In a matter of weeks, they had recovered almost half a ton; but this is just a boring fact! What attracted me to the story is how a smuggler disrupted the peace of an island and its population in a matter of days.

As it happens, some saw opportunity from one man’s tragedy, a few locals started dealing on the streets, transporting large quantities of the raw material in paint cans and milk jugs. Today, you can still hear and read all sorts of stories about the craze that the arrival of these drugs generated. Someone had their car seats covered in white powder from all the dealing happening inside the car. Others were selling it in 300ml beer glasses for something like €20. There’s another story about a football club, there was so much white powder that they used it to paint the pitch lines with it, either by mistake or because someone got paranoid and wanted to get rid of their stash. 

Where I come from, drug and smuggling stories are and everyday talking subject, we’ve wrongly learned to normalise crime and violence. I’d never dare to do a photo essay on any of the stories you hear in Mexico, but this one is different. I was drawn to the naivety of the whole situation but, as fascinating as these stories are, the truth is that the effects left in the local communities by the abuse of raw, uncut cocaine are atrocious and still visible to this day. The island never had an addiction problem until then. There was the rare heroine or hash user; cocaine was a drug for the rich and powerful, but in a matter of weeks, whole communities were hooked. It is said that a man consumed over a kilo in just a month, developing a heart condition never seen by doctors in the hospital. There was another case of a man who plugged himself to a water and cocaine drip for weeks in his house. The presence of such potent drugs triggered a pandemic of drug abuse never experienced before.

The culprit responsible for this story was Antonio Quinci, an Italian smuggler who was trafficking about a ton of cocaine from Venezuela to the Balearic Islands. After facing a rough storm in the middle of the Atlantic, he saw no option other than to head to the Azorean archipelago and try to hide the stash in coves and cliffs while he tried to sort a larger boat. He did this by wrapping the parcels in fishnets and throwing them to the bottom of the sea naively thinking he’d be able to retrieve them; he wasn’t aware of the rough tides and the difficulties of the volcanic nature of the northern coast line.

Police reports state that Quinci had a bigger smuggling operation going on, he owned two other boats that together with the one that capsized were heading to different ports in Spain; each carrying about a ton of the same uncut drugs. Reports from the police state that the cocaine found on the island was over 80% pure; the result of this landing was catastrophic.

Azores Archipielago. June 2025.