Stone of Kings

by Gerard Helferich

  On the television in their room, they heard a news flash about the chronic border dispute with British Honduras, as Belize was then known. For centuries, Britain and Spain had quarreled over this scrap of land straddling Mexico and Guatemala on the Caribbean coast. In 1862, it had become a Crown Colony of Great Britain, and when British Honduras was granted self-government in 1964 (full independence would come in 1981), Guatemala was still claiming the territory for itself. Now the feud had reached yet another crisis, and the Guatemalan government was declaring a state of siege and threatening to confiscate any private vehicles found near the border. So the next morning, the prospectors bowed to diplomacy and skulked back to Antigua. Other matters intervened, and Mary Lou Ridinger didn’t return to the promising site they had seen the day before.

  Then all prospecting was put on hold when the civil war, now in its third decade, took a new, even deadlier turn.

  At 9:30 on the morning of January 31, 1980, thirty-four indigenous farmers protesting the kidnapping and murder of peasants in the department of Quiché occupied the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City. Spain was singled out not because it was involved in the atrocities, just the opposite—it was considered sympathetic to the rebels because Spanish missionaries had been among those killed by federal forces.

  The protestors occupied the embassy peacefully and announced a press conference for noon. But before the meeting could be held, police stormed the building, over the objections of the Spanish ambassador. The dissidents, along with Spanish embassy workers and some Guatemalan officials, fled to an inner office. Accounts of what happened next are conflicting, but fire broke out inside the occupied office, either when one of the protestors’ Molotov cocktails exploded or when the army launched the incendiary agent white phosphorous.

  However the fire started, the police blocked the protestors’ escape, and thirty-six persons were burned alive, including two embassy employees and two Guatemalan diplomats. Afterward, the Spanish ambassador excoriated the government for “extraordinary brutality,” and Madrid accused it of violating “the most elementary norms of international law,” the inviolability of a country’s embassy. Spain broke off diplomatic relations, and hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans turned out for the victims’ funeral.

  Later, President Fernando Romeo Lucas García ordered a brutal crackdown in the campo, ushering in the most violent phase of the war and prompting some forty-five thousand Guatemalans to flee to refugee camps over the Mexican border in Chiapas. On March 7, the army’s chosen candidate, former defense minister and brigadier general Ángel Aníbal Guevara, was elected president in patently fraudulent balloting.

  On the 23rd of that month, junior army officers led a coup to prevent the new president from taking office and instead installed General José Efraín Ríos Montt, an evangelical Christian, who proclaimed, “Thank you, my God. You have put me here.” The new president proceeded to dissolve Congress, abrogate the constitution, outlaw political parties, and suspend further elections. He also continued his predecessor’s brutal policy in the countryside, including drafting campesinos into pro-government civil defense forces on pain of death; rebels responded by killing the draftees along with their families. In July, Ríos Montt told an indigenous audience, “If you are with us, we’ll feed you; if not, we’ll kill you.” The strategy was known as Frijoles y Fusiles, “Beans and Rifles,” and the born-again president was as good as his word: Among the atrocities committed by his troops, three of the most notorious were at the villages of Dos Erres in the Petén, where more than two hundred people were murdered; Plan de Sánchez, in Baja Verapaz, where more than two hundred fifty were killed; and Río Negro, also in Baja Verapaz, where more than four hundred were slaughtered. All told, during Ríos’s tenure hundreds of indigenous villages and tens of thousands of campesinos were annihilated.

  Shortly after the new president took office, American ambassador Frederic Chapin had commented, “We consider President Ríos Montt a significant improvement over the previous president, and we hope to be able to work constructively with him.” Increasingly alienated by its ally’s abysmal human rights record, the Carter administration had cut military support and reduced economic aid to a trickle. Then, taking office in 1981, Ronald Reagan increased assistance, including military aid. Even so, the Guatemalan economy continued to stagger under violence and recession; foreign investment and lending dried up, exports dwindled, and tourism was virtually nil.

  In Antigua, it would be a long time before government atrocities in the campo became general knowledge. But the intensified campaign brought the war home as never before. An army tank appeared in the plaza principal for the first time, silhouetted against the quaint Colonial buildings. And anyone who dared to venture out of town might hear the pop-pop of gunshots along the road, as federal troops and rebels battled in the woods.

  Despite the escalation, Mary Lou Ridinger still felt oddly detached from the civil war, was still riding her “little pink cloud.” But there was no denying the effects that first the earthquake and now the worsening violence were having on the jade business. About this time, she recalled, “It all came crashing down.” The tiny team was working fourteen hours a day, seven days a week—marketing, designing, attending to legal matters, struggling to keep the enterprise solvent. In the eight months they had trudged through the arid hillsides prospecting for jade, Mary Lou had never lost faith, had always felt she was living a life of “high adventure.” But these days, she was fearful of what the future might bring. Unable to market the jade they had, they gave no thought to prospecting for new sources.

  The rising violence did touch Antigua eventually, not with gun battles in the streets but in more insidious ways. Occasionally, a resident who had done something to offend one side or the other would find a corpse on his doorstep, a hint that he should leave town for a while. A gang threatened death to more than a hundred local business owners, including the Ridingers, if they didn’t leave ten thousand U.S. dollars in cash at a specified location. The notes were addressed to “Whom It May Concern,” and after consulting with their neighbors, most recipients ignored them. But one merchant, the Chinese owner of a dry-goods business, fled the country. Then, a couple of weeks later, the bodies of eight of the gang members were discovered on the edge of town, apparently victims of an intramural dispute.

  Another incident, personal and painful, touched the Ridingers deeply: Their driver was kidnapped. Taking the company truck to Guatemala City to pick up Mary Lou at the airport, he was intercepted by armed bandits, who blindfolded him, drove him to a hiding place, and pressed him to reveal the whereabouts of his bosses’ mine. Thanks to the Ridingers’ secrecy, the driver didn’t know the location, and less than a day later, he was released uninjured. But he returned with a message specifically for Mary Lou Ridinger: We will get you, the thugs warned, and you won’t be able to hide even in San Miguel de Allende.

  Apparently, the kidnappers were trying to terrorize the Ridingers into leaving the country and ceding control of their mine. The attack seemed strangely timed, considering that first the earthquake and then the escalating civil war had made their jade virtually unmarketable. But in Guatemala, even more than in other places, perception was more persuasive than reality, and clearly anyone with a jade mine must be a latter-day King Solomon. And to appear wealthy in Guatemala was, Mary Lou Ridinger says, “to paint a target on the side of your car or the front of your house.” Whereas in the States, the well-to-do might buy a Mercedes to flaunt their success, in Guatemala they would drive a battered pickup so as not to attract envidia, “envy”—including that of government officials. Ever since they had discovered jade, Jay Ridinger had been dreading that a man in an army uniform would wrap an arm around his shoulder and tell him, “I’m Colonel So-and-So, and I’m your new business partner.” But it hadn’t happened, presumably because they were fish too small to tempt the seriously corrupt.

  The day after the kidnapping
, the Ridingers hired a security consultant, who advised them to vary their routine—drive different cars; leave the house at different hours; keep their plans to themselves, even in small matters such as whether they would attend a friend’s party. For their own safety, they began spending more time outside the country, in Natchez and San Miguel de Allende. On these trips, the Ridingers would take merchandise, holding more trunk shows, educating people about Guatemalan jade, and hoping to send enough money back to Antigua to meet their payroll.

  Even as the Ridingers were coming under siege, Guatemala was finally inching toward peace. In August 1983, Ríos Montt was deposed by his minister of defense, Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores. (The first sign that yet another takeover had begun was that radio stations would start broadcasting nothing but patriotic tunes. Expatriates in Antigua had a name for the programming, “coup music,” and they took it as their signal to stock up on groceries and stay indoors.) In 1984, elections were held for an assembly to draft a new, more liberal constitution, which took effect in May of the following year. Two years later, Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo would be elected president—the first civilian to hold that post in sixteen years—and would put forth reforms including the introduction of habeas corpus and the establishment of a human rights commission. Though the war hadn’t ended, political and economic progress was being made, and violence was on the wane.

  Tourists still hadn’t returned to Guatemala, and financially, 1984 was the Ridingers’ worst year yet. But even through these dark times, they resumed the hunt for new sources of jade. They hired a young cousin, Andy Duncan, a graduate student in geology, to prospect during school vacations. For two summers, Duncan pored over Foshag’s publications, Ed Shook’s notebooks, and the Ridingers’ own field notes. Though he conducted a grid-like search over the Motagua Valley, he found no new deposits of jade.

  By Duncan’s third summer, 1987, his search had led him westward, about thirty miles outside Guatemala City. And there, thirteen years after the Ridingers’ initial discovery, about forty feet from the Motagua, on the flat alluvial plain running along the river, he came upon a second source—a ton of jade boulders in a handsome blue-gray shade similar to that favored by the ancient Olmecs. The Ridingers announced the find in the English-language Guatemala City publication This Week, but in keeping with their protocol, didn’t reveal the location.

  Along with the blue jade, Duncan found a striking black stone flecked with gold-colored metal, different from anything the Ridingers had ever seen and different from anything they had ever heard reported in Asia, the Americas, or Europe. When they mentioned the stone to their daughter Angela, she recalled that in his account of his travels to the Orient, Marco Polo mentioned seeing jade with flecks of gold. Their factory foreman, who handled more stone than anyone else in the company, insisted the rock was jade. The carvers had experimented with the piece, he said, and it worked like jade, with the same toughness and density. And so the Ridingers shipped a sample to the Gemological Institute of America for an x-ray diffraction study, which confirmed that the stone was jade. The metal flecks were three-quarters pyrite, or “fool’s gold”; the rest consisted of half a dozen other minerals, including gold, silver, and platinum. The Ridingers christened the discovery “Galactic Gold Jade” and began to carve some into jewelry. But they wondered, why had none of this conspicuous jade ever been discovered in an ancient Maya city?

  Not long after, Jay Ridinger received a phone call from the United States. “I’ve heard of you,” the man said, “and I have some secrets of jade I’d like to share.” He would divulge nothing more over the telephone, and since he was too old to travel, he invited Ridinger to come to his house in suburban Maryland. Ridinger’s curiosity was sufficiently piqued that he flew to Washington.

  The man had traveled to Guatemala many times, he explained, and in his basement he had dozens of ancient black jade celts he’d collected. He also had a rock saw, and when he showed Ridinger a cross-section he’d made of one of the celts, gold flecks were plainly visible. Apparently the stones’ outer surfaces had also been flecked, but over centuries the softer metal had oxidized and abraded, leaving only the more durable jade. Of course, no museum would sacrifice its artifacts to such an experiment, but the Ridingers were certain that some of the black celts on display in Guatemala City and elsewhere were also carved from Galactic Gold. Again, Mary Lou Ridinger submitted no article to an academic journal reporting the find.

  A couple of months later, National Geographic published a cover story on jade. Though the lion’s share was devoted to Asian stone, New World jade was included, along with Mary Lou Ridinger (“an archaeologist who mines Guatemalan jade”) and Ron Bishop, by now a curator at the Smithsonian, who was testing Mesoamerican museum pieces to see which were jade and which were greenstone. After the article, Mary Lou noticed a shift in attitude, even on the part of academics. The warming had actually begun after she’d furnished geological samples to the Mesoamerican Jade Project in the 1970s. But now that their business had been brushed with the imprimatur of National Geographic—who’d acknowledged Mary Lou as an archaeologist, no less—even skeptics had to concede that the Ridingers were selling bona fide jade and that the stone was a legitimate part of Guatemala’s heritage.

  In late August 1987, Mary Lou Ridinger attended a week-long international conference in Denver, where some thirty geologists and archaeologists met to share the most recent findings about Mesoamerican jade and to consider avenues for further research. She brought along a dozen samples of their newly discovered blue-gray jade, which the Ridingers were calling “Olmec Blue,” and passed them out to some of the attendees.

  One of the crucial questions for the conference went back to Ron Bishop’s work for the Mesoamerican Jade Project, several years before. He’d suggested that the museum artifacts and geological samples formed six distinct clusters based on the trace elements they contained, although it wasn’t certain how many geological sources they represented. Since then, he and his colleagues Edward V. Sayre and Joan Mishara had analyzed more than a hundred artifacts from Costa Rican museums. Only half a dozen were found to resemble geological samples from the Motagua, reinforcing their conclusion that other, undiscovered jade sources must exist.

  Many experts had long suspected that jade deposits would be found in Mexico and Costa Rica, since both areas were rich in jade artifacts and had known deposits of serpentinite. But William Foshag had searched the Mexican state of Puebla without success, and in subsequent years, no jade had been documented either in that country or in Costa Rica. Now another conference attendee, geologist George Harlow, from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, declared those efforts futile: “Based on geologic interpretation,” he stated, “the prospect of Mexican and Costa Rican sources is extremely poor,” since there were none of the tectonic plate boundaries required for the stone’s creation. In fact, he concluded that the region around Guatemala’s Motagua Valley was the only place in Mesoamerica meeting the geological prerequisites for the formation of jade.

  As for the trace mineral research, which had suggested a variety of sources for the jade, Harlow believed that Bishop’s clusters were artificial, the result of studying too few samples and failing to consider the stone’s heterogeneous nature. Instead of focusing on trace elements, Harlow did his analysis with a microscope and electron microprobe, concentrating on more general characteristics such as color, texture, and mineral content. And with this forest-instead-of-trees approach, he found that most of the jade artifacts were actually similar to geologic samples taken from the Motagua.

  Harlow’s analysis was thorough and, to some, persuasive. Attendees from Mexico and Costa Rica were crestfallen to hear the world’s leading expert on the geology of jade say that deposits would never be found in their countries. But the Ridingers were excited that undiscovered sources might lay tantalizingly close to the two sites they were already working in the Motagua. With the war wind
ing down and the campo becoming safer, and with tourists finally returning to Guatemala, it was time to resume their prospecting.

  SEVEN

  Jade Guatemalteco

  It was a hazy afternoon toward the end of the rainy season. The Bell Jet Ranger helicopter hovered over the scrubby ridge. Sitting in the copilot’s seat, Mary Lou Ridinger took her eyes away from the window and peered again at her map. Then she trained her binoculars on a stone outcrop several hundred feet below. Finally, she turned to Jay, sitting in the back seat beside his daughter Robin, and shouted over the thwack-thwack of the blades, “That’s the place!”

  The Ridingers’ prospecting was more sophisticated than it used to be. They were now expert with geological maps and could trace the fault lines and serpentinite deposits where jade was liable to lurk. Like the ancient Mesoamericans, they knew that the ground over serpentinite was generally barren, because when the stone broke down it released few nutrients and even some chemicals that were poisonous to plants.

  The Ridingers were also more astute at recognizing jade when they found it. Because the stone wraps itself in its nondescript rind when exposed to the elements, appearances counted for little in this type of prospecting. The hunt was necessarily more tactile and aural, more intuitive. Over thousands of hours in the field, the Ridingers had mastered the language of the hammer bounce, had learned to parse its recoil and ping.

  Mary Lou was the ex-flying student, but it was Jay Ridinger who’d suggested they hire a helicopter, despite the extraordinary expense. On the map, the area they were searching wasn’t far from the site of their first jade discovery back in 1974. But it was much higher in the sierra, up a sheer cliff with a waterfall, several days’ walk from any road. The Ridingers knew because they had already hiked it. They had found some jade there, including a little of the coveted imperial green, but on foot they’d been able to carry out only a few small samples. So they’d come back today in search of more. This morning they had spent reconnoitering another location, then had flown west to yet another place where they’d heard reports of jade. It was that second area they were flying over now.