| Cocaine galore! Villagers live it up on profits from 'white lobster' | | Print | |
| 10/10/07 | |
 Centuries of troubles have bobbed on the waves off the Mosquito Coast: Christopher Columbus, the Spanish conquest, pirates, slave ships. For the fishing villages scattered across these remote central American shores there was seldom reason to welcome visits from the outside world. But that was before the "white lobster", and before everything changed. Now the villagers rise at first light to scan the horizon in hope of seeing a very different type of intruder.
What they are looking for, and what they have coyly euphemised, are big, bulging bags of Colombian cocaine. A combination of law enforcement, geography and ocean currents has washed tonnes of the drug, and millions of dollars, into what was one of the Caribbean's most desolate and isolated regions. Villages that once eked an existence on shrimp and red-tinged lobster have been transformed. In place of thatched wooden huts there are brick houses, mansions and satellite dishes. "They consider it a blessing from God. You see people all day just walking up and down the beaches keeping a lookout to sea," said Louis Perez, the police chief in Bluefields, the main port on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast. Colombian speedboats hug the coastline so closely that this narco-route to the US is known as the "country road". With 800-horsepower outboard motors, the so-called "go fasts" can usually outrun US and Nicaraguan patrols. But on occasion they are intercepted, not least when US snipers hit their engines. "Then they throw the coke overboard to get rid of the evidence," said a European drug enforcement official based in the region. "Other times it's because they run out of fuel or have an accident." Currents carry the bales towards the shore. A decade ago many of the indigenous Miskito people had not even heard of cocaine. Some 15 people in the village of Karpwala are said to have died after mistaking the contents of a bale for baking powder. That innocence is long gone. Colombian traffickers and Nicaraguan middlemen trawl villages offering finders $4,000 (£1,960) a kilo, said Major Perez - seven times less than the US street value but a fortune to a fisherman. Tasbapauni, a sleepy hamlet a three-hour motorboat ride from Bluefields, is a cocaine version of Whisky Galore!, the 1940s tale of a Hebridean island which salvages a shipwrecked cargo of booze and plays cat-and-mouse with the authorities to keep it. Read the rest at: Guardian
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