PUB] Date: Thu, July 3, 1997
Source: The Scotsman, Edinburgh, UK
Contact: In ShangriLa these days, drugs are a major industry
By Michael Pye

From the mountains of Portugal to Nicaragua's Bluefields, crack cocaine 
is destroying paradise

I catch a plane for my own ShangriLa today: a village of 12 houses in 
pine and eucalyptus forests, up against the mountains seperating 
Portugal and Spain, with a white chapel, four days of annual 'festos', 
neon roses everywhere, good red wine and curious saints.

We need the saints. Every quiet, decent place needs saints for as long 
as northern America and northern Europe maintain their prodigious 
appetite for illegal drugs.

In the past 6 months, in the village next to us, gypsies took over an 
empty summer house. Bleach bottles grew like a garden. When the police 
came, they found a crack cocaine kitchen, run by the heavily pregnant 
daughter of a woman called "Big Rosa".

I met Big Rosa once in the nearby market town: a gruff woman, wide but 
not huge, businesslike. We did geton. She, however, was enjoying life. 
She had a drink to celebrate her recent release after 7 years in jail 
for drug trafficking.

We never expected this to happen in a remote rural valley where the main 
businesses are building houses and growing apple stock. Around us there 
is hardly a money economy, let alone a drug culture. We've just rushed 
into being modern, the wrong way.

I am struck by this change because we used to have one other paradise: a 
quiet town called Bluefields, on a black lagoon on the Caribbean coast 
of Nicaragua, a gentle place where you walked out at night for oyster 
soup down by the water and the children went in neat, pressed uniforms 
to school.

Now, experts say, it has become the highest incidence of addiction to 
crack cocaine in the western hemisphere. They say this has happened in 2 
years  which makes us fear for all those other kind, quiet places.

Bluefields is on the Miskito Coast  the territory of Indians, Scots 
buccaneers, abandoned and shipwrecked black slaves and Moravian and 
Catholic missionaries. It is quiet different from the rest of Spanish
speaking Nicaragua. People speak a Creole based on English; and they are 
darker, which sets off an old Latino racism.

Add the physical seperation from politicians  the turns of the Rio 
Escondido, the Hidden River, a substantial set of mountains, miles of 
bad road and a lake away from Managua  and you have the roots of two 
phenomena. One is pride, especially in an old seagoing tradition. The 
other is neglect.

In the time of the old dictator, Somoza, Bluefields was largely ignored. 
True, Somoza's name was all over the coast's one unreliable ambulance, 
but it was not noticeable on the local fibreglass plant he owned  run 
without the most basic safety precautions.

Come the Sandanistas, that graduate seminar in revolution, the coast did 
not fare much better. Ray Hooker, then in charge of the region, liked to 
say that people would never starve. "We have fish and we have 
breadfruit. That is our strength."

But Managua did not help, made rules for the fishermen who could no 
longer buy petrol or spare parts for their boats, insulted the devoutly 
Christian Miskitos by telling them they could "go back to their old 
religions". Then came contra activity that kidnapped Ray Hooker, a more 
democratic revolutionary, a hurricane and the drug trade. Of all of 
these, the only one with the power to break the place is the drugs 
trade.

Cocaine comes from the sea in Bluefields, often dumped by smugglers on 
their way from Columbia to Mexico when law enforcement comes to close. 
It washes up on the shore in quantities sufficient to start a new trade: 
the walkers who pace the coastline looking for packages.

But it also arrives as wages for the fishermen who help out in the 
trade. We have an old friend from the coast, and we'll calll her Helen. 
She has many cousins with small boats who go out for shrimp and lobster 
in some of the richest Caribbean fishing grounds: "I guess they all do 
the drug trade now," she says, resignedly.

The local cops can't do much. they have a single launch with a 
75horsepower motor trying to outrun boats with the power of a thousand 
horses. "They laugh as they pass us, waving," says Kent Hooker, the 
local deputy police comissioner.

Bluefields suffers because it is midway between Columbia and the great 
American drug habit. It also lies only 140 miles from San Andres Island, 
which belongs to Columbia even though it is off Nicaragua, and it is a 
classic drug entrepot.

Ashore, the impact is corrosive. In peaceful upcountry villages, people 
wake up at night if the pigs squeal; it means thieves are about. You get 
armed robberies in Bluefields, where once your worst fear, walking in 
the dark, used to be the potholes in the road.

"Everybody knows everybody," Helen explains. "They wear masks now so 
nobody knows who they are, and they rob you. I don't put my foot out of 
the house when it gets dark. Not for anything."

A rock of crack now costs about the same as a soft drink  tamarind 
'refrescos' in plastic bags slit at one corner, I remember  and half as 
much as beer. In a place with nothing much to do, where improvements are 
often promised and rarely delivered, it starts to seem reasonable to 
throw away $200 on crack.

A culture dies. The Moravian pastor, Palmerston Budier, says: "We are 
having a very major breakdown."

When we northerners complain about what Columbian 'trafficantes' are 
doing to our cities  or to our favourite peaceful retreats  we might 
remember this. It is northern appetites that have ruined the places of 
our dreams  Bluefields, even the rural heart of Portugal. Without those 
appetites, ShangriLa might still be safe.