Champoton, Mexico-- On the other side of the Yucatan, away from the popular vacation spots, a marine biologist discovers oil on a rocky beach.
"It's practically gone," Julio Sanchez says of the patches of tar, which cling to rocks in small, asphalt-like blotches.
Sanchez, on the staff of the University of Campeche, observes that the oil is "very resistant. It's unbelievable."
Astonishingly, the oil appears to be from 31 years ago, remnants of the last great oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
On June 3, 1979, a giant column of gas shot up a pipe, a blowout preventer failed, and the Ixtoc One oil rig erupted.
Crews hired by Mexico's national oil company, Pemex, scrambled to plug the gusher. Nothing worked.
Finally, a relief well tamed the blowout, ten months later.
On the Texas coast, fishing communities immediately sent out an SOS.
The TV reporters of the day sounded eerily familiar, voicing over aerials of large fingers of oil aiming for the coast and bemoaning the failure of boom.
Eventually, 170 miles of Texas coast got stained with oil, driven there by currents.
"There was plenty of oil to share in all the gulf," Sanchez said.
In the Yucatan, a few weeks after the spill, a north wind drove a black tide of oil onto the Mexican shoreline.
"We spent five weeks checking out rocky shores, sandy beaches," said Wes Tunnell, a researcher at Texas A&M.
In the year following Ixtoc, Tunnell drove the entire coastline, from Corpus to Mexico's Carribean coast.
"Champoton stood out in my notes," Tunnell said. "This is the most oil that I found in the entire trip."
Test will have to confirm the source, but Tunnell is convinced the oil at Champoton comes from Ixtoc One.
Back in 1979, the Mexican fisherman got no warning about the dramatic turn his life was about to take.
"All of the sudden, when they were fishing the strings that they used were greasy, full of oil," said Bernabe Pastrana, a life-long fisherman from Campeche.
Bernabe, 35 at the time of the spill, explains one day a group of fishermen arrived at an area of mangrove trees lining the coast and "the oil was knee-high on the shore."
One species of oyster, decimated by the spill, has never recovered.
A United Nations report found that fish and octopus catches in the year following the Ixtoc disaster dropped by as much as 70 percent in the hardest hit places. Whole generations were lost.
"They tried to get some octopus," Bernabe said. "The octopus is on the bottom. It was still there, but once they pulled it up, it would get contaminated" by the oil on the surface.
"So, they said, 'no more fishing.'"
Unlike the current disaster, there was no compensation fund for the Mexican fisherman in 1979.
"Every man for himself," observed Louis Felipe Delgado, a fisherman in Champoton, who was 20 years old at the time of the spill.
Fishermen got a little money, "barely enough for a week, then nothing," Delgado said.
They lost their equipment as it was fouled with oil in the early days of the spill and faced an immediate crisis providing for their families.
"Fishermen have their diet based mainly on seafood," Sanchez said.
100 miles farther of the coast, there are other apparent signs of the Ixtoc spill, in the tiny village of Isla Arena.
The village, with a population of a few hundred, was virtually isolated in 1979.
With no roads leading to the island at the time, Sanchez says there were practically without communication.
"Nobody warned them and they probably had to hollar very loud to get some attention."
Not much is recorded about what happened there 31 years ago, but several miles from the island, the mangrove trees tell a story.
Researcher Wes Tunnell, learning a road had been built to finally connect the island with the mainland, decided to investigate the one area of the coastline he had never surveyed.
"Typically, you would see all of branches of the red mangroves reaching out into the water and you wouldn't see any gaps in the area. And I kept seeing some small openings."
In one of those openings, Tunnell, Sanchez and a fishing guide found a mat of mystery oil, a small table-sized area of asphalt-hard hydrocarbons.
Tunnell says the idea that oil could have lasted, even in small quantities for 31 years, would have seemed unbelievable, had not he been tracking oil in another area of the coast during that time period.
As for this mysterious, new find, Tunnel believes it's no newer than ten years. "I think it's pretty old and it could be as far back as 30 years."
In a heavily-wooded mangrove forest, oil from Ixtoc and a few other spills since, would have been impossible to completely recover. Nature was left to take its course.
At worst, the oil remnants have a low-level environmental impact and those who have studied the Gulf since the Ixtoc spill have marvelled at its recovery.
"Nature is so powerful," Sanchez said. "It tries to overcome all these damages that we do to it."
