“I began to think, 'I'm so young, and now I'm paralyzed. I have three girls to look after. If I die, who's going to take care of these three little girls?'” — Romulo Greham, Lobster Diver
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: Claudine LoMonaco
Lobster diving is the only source of income on the impoverished Mosquito Coast of Honduras. That is, unless you include the bundles of cocaine that occasionally drop out of the sky or wash up on shore. It happened a couple of times during our ten-day stay and complicated our reporting, although I didn't immediately understand what was going on. It turns out the area is a major throughway for drugs from Colombia, and is awash in narcotics. They affect nearly everything on the Mosquito Coast, including diver safety.
On one of the first days into the trip, photographer Tomás Donoso and I were supposed to meet with a group of injured divers from the town of Kuakira. But nobody showed up. It puzzled Charlie Kernaghan, a labor rights organizer who was traveling with us. Last year, he said, dozens of men in wheelchairs and crutches showed up for the meeting.
A couple of days later we learned why things had turned out so differently. Earlier that day, a drug enforcement plane had chased a Colombian speedboat loaded with cocaine onto the shore near Kuakira. The drug runners abandoned the boat and took off into the jungle, and local residents went to work unloading the cocaine. Nobody came to the meeting that day because everyone was busy hiding the drugs. Officials arrived later to find only an empty boat. They rounded up around 50 people, but eventually let them go, freeing them to sell the cocaine back to the drug runners.
A couple of days after that, when we needed a permit to go out on a diver-training mission, the port captain wasn't around to issue it to us. Evidently, another load of cocaine had shown up nearby, and he'd taken off to deal with it. It wasn't clear if he was going as law enforcement, or to see if he could get a piece of the action.
Honduras is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, and recovery money for a bundle of cocaine can easily exceed the average annual income of around $1,000.
Drugs are so prevalent, and so easily attained, that they have replaced money as currency in some very dangerous ways. On the large diving ships, for instance, captains pay divers in cocaine and marijuana for illegal, undersized lobster.
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