Nicaragua’s Coastal Epidemic

SANDY BAY TARA, Nicaragua —  On Christmas Eve, Marvin Baat treated himself to a special present.

Ignoring his mother’s anguished pleas, the 25-year-old fisherman’s helper and only breadwinner for a family of six had a supply of crack and nearly pure cocaine delivered to his home.

He was high for days. Then, in the first week of January, he went into convulsions and died--apparently of an overdose.

It’s a story all too common in Los Angeles and other large cities. But what makes Baat’s tale different is that he lived on Nicaragua’s remote east coast, in a community of thatched-roof huts with no electricity, road or airstrip, three hours by motorboat from the nearest town.

He was the first victim of a fatal crack overdose in 1997 in this Miskito Indian community of 7,000. Five other young men died from crack last year, community elders say, and 20 more are on the verge of death from drug use. As many as half their young men are habitual drug users, they estimate.

The Miskitos, who held out against everyone from the Spaniards in the 16th century to the leftist Sandinista government in the 1980s, are being conquered by crack cocaine. “Unless we get help, the Miskitos of Sandy Bay will cease to exist,” predicted Eduardo Rales, a member of the community’s council of elders.

The crack is made in home laboratories from neatly packaged kilos of cocaine that wash up on the coast, which is on a major route for the Colombian drug traffickers who supply an estimated 70% of the cocaine in the U.S.

Traffickers toss the cocaine overboard to get rid of the evidence when drug enforcement police are pursuing them.

In the more than four years since those packages of 90% to 95% pure cocaine started appearing, some community members have learned to turn it into crack. For just over $1 a rock, youngsters can escape their humdrum, impoverished existence. Those who fish for lobster dive longer and deeper, just to make money to buy more cocaine.

The crack epidemic has spread throughout the tightly knit ethnic communities of the Miskito Coast, devastating Indians and blacks alike.

Further, police and community leaders believe that international drug traffickers are not always just throwing away evidence when they spread cocaine along the shore. Traffickers are intentionally encouraging drug dependence among the coastal ethnic communities in a bid to ensure their collaboration against law enforcement, authorities say.

“To use a military term, they are bombarding the coast with drugs,” said Eduardo Cuadra, deputy director of the Nicaraguan National Police. “They have developed drug addiction in the communities. Secondly, they have taken advantage of the desperate economic situation in these communities to develop [local drug dealers] and create conditions for introducing drugs into the rest of the country.”

Nicaraguan police estimate that nearly 1 1/2 tons of cocaine entered the country through the Caribbean shore that Nicaraguans call their Atlantic Coast in the first eight months of 1996. That’s small potatoes for the international traffickers--just 16% of the cocaine that passes along the shore here, Cuadra said. The rest is headed to the United States.

Smuggling Route

History, economics and geography converged to make this coastline a favored route for international drug traffickers. Just 140 miles from San Andres Island--Colombia’s notorious smugglers’ den--the coast offers hundreds of keys for waiting out storms or hiding from police.

Since the end of Nicaragua’s civil war in 1990, the military budget has been slashed, leaving the shoreline practically unguarded, in contrast to the heavily patrolled international waters nearby.

Drug traffickers also capitalize on the region’s long history of poverty and resentment toward Managua, the capital. “We are a colony of Nicaragua,” complained the Rev. Faran Dometz, the superintendent of Nicaragua’s Protestant Moravian Church.

The Atlantic Coast is the poorest region in one of Latin America’s poorest countries. The primary industries are fishing and timber, important export sectors that nevertheless return little to the local economy.

Although the majority of Nicaragua’s 4.4 million people have melded into an Indian and European mestizo society, the half a million costenos, as those who live on the coast call themselves, have kept the traditions of four distinct Indian cultures, plus those of African slaves and Chinese immigrants.

Creole English and Indian languages predominate here, not Spanish. The Moravian Church, not Roman Catholicism, is the largest religion. The area is so isolated that the first-ever broadcast from a Managua television station was not seen on the Atlantic Coast until last month.

The coast is divided into two nominally autonomous regions--the North and South Atlantic. But in reality, the autonomous governments have no budget or power.

“We are second-class citizens in this country,” Dometz said. “We produce lobster here, but we can’t eat it.”

That poverty is to blame for both drug use and drug dealing here, church and government authorities agree.

“It’s very hard to control because there is no work to do,” said Dean Samuel, 27, who used crack until four months ago. “Guys consume drugs so as not to feel so bad.”

Unemployment runs as high as 90% in the region, and police say that means plenty of despondent customers for 114 known crack houses just in Bluefields, the Atlantic Coast’s largest city with a population of about 50,000.

Crack Houses

Crack first appeared in Bluefields in 1992, police say, about a year before it spread to the fishing communities. They believe it was brought directly from San Andres to Bluefields through well-established smuggling channels.

Emma Brown once operated one of the best known of those crack houses in Bluefields’ Beholding neighborhood. Brown’s nicely painted two-story house is easy to spot among the unpainted shacks on her alley.

While the youngest of her seven children watched cartoons on a 36-inch television, Brown alternately twisted the gold rings on each of her fingers and pulled the half-dozen pendants around her neck as she explained why she sold crack.

“I thought I couldn’t support my children on what my husband earned,” she said.

But after serving 15 months of a three-year sentence for drug dealing, she said she has changed her mind.

“I’ll have to learn to get along,” she said.

The draw of crack is even more compelling in the fishing communities such as Sandy Bay Tara, or Big Sandy Bay, because the poverty is so much worse.

Most fishermen live in unpainted wood-plank houses about the size of a one-car garage, built on stilts as protection from flooding during the nine months each year of nearly constant rain. Clothes are hung from nails, and cooking is done over an open fire.

In contrast, the companion of one alleged drug dealer showed off the gas stove, refrigerator and upholstered living room set in her freshly painted cottage. The generator-powered, 36-inch television plays only videos, she explained, because no television signal reaches the area.

Many Are Furious

Such drug-based wealth infuriates many in the community.

“They are making crack and selling it to the poor,” said Rales, the elder. “The young men are dying. We ask them to please leave these bad things that are poisoning our young men or we will have them put in prison.”

But drug dealers ignore the council of elders. When the police hit the shore, they flee into the jungle. And when the authorities leave, they take revenge.

While Joseph Milton was in the regional capital of Puerto Cabezas last week filing a complaint that accused neighbor Jose Chow of dealing drugs, Chow fired on the home of Milton’s son with an automatic rifle, witnesses say. By the time police arrived, Chow was gone.

The gunfire terrified the entire community, including Baat’s grief-stricken mother, Tina.

“They have been threatening me because after my son died I told the police who had sold him drugs,” she said through an interpreter as her mother wailed beside her on the floor of their shack.

“Then there was the gunfire yesterday,” she said, beginning to cry. “It was like a war. We are all afraid. I want justice. This cannot go unpunished.”

Increased Tensions

Police ineffectiveness against drugs has increased tensions in the region.

“There is no attention at all to the situation, which is the overall treatment we get from Managua,” Dometz said. “When they think about people from this area, they think of people destroying themselves with drugs. But nothing will be done until [the drug problem] knocks on the door in Managua.”

Police respond that they are severely limited by lack of both resources and, often, community cooperation.

In the North Atlantic Autonomous Region, 308 police officers--including 22 narcotics specialists--utilize four four-wheel-drive vehicles to protect a large area mostly inaccessible by road.

“We do not have an outboard motor or a boat,” said Deputy Commissioner Carlos Espinoza, the region’s top-ranking police officer. “We cannot patrol the ocean.”

In the South Atlantic region, narcotics chief Capt. Jose Tenorio recently set out with a $56 expense budget for 10 officers on a three-day mission in the fishing communities. They were trying to find two-thirds of a ton of cocaine believed tossed overboard by a Colombian speedboat in early December when it was being pursued by U.S. drug agents in nearby international waters.

It took police a month to raise the money needed for gasoline to get to the remote areas where tides would have washed the drugs. Tenorio was not optimistic that they would find much of the cocaine.

“It has already been sold,” he predicted.

Similarly, when police arrived in Sandy Bay Tara to investigate Milton’s complaint against Chow, community elders handed over 2 kilos--nearly 4 1/2 pounds--of cocaine to them. But deputy narcotics chief Lt. Celestino Aguirre believes that the drugs were only a small part of what fishermen actually found.

“Normally, there are 10 to 20 kilos in a plastic bag,” he explained. “There were six fishermen, so they kept 3 kilos each and gave us 2. They think they are paying a fine.”

The most disturbing evidence of lack of broad-based community support occurred last year when police operating out of Bluefields detained the ultramodern commercial fishing ship Neptune and found 1 1/2 tons of cocaine aboard.

Captain and registered owner Melvin Thine and his crew stated in court documents that they found the drugs floating in the ocean and were on their way to turn them over to authorities when they were arrested.

The jury found them innocent. But police still insist that they were trafficking drugs.

“They got off,” said Deputy Commissioner Ramon Avellan, the top-ranking officer in the South Atlantic Autonomous Region. “It has been practically an invitation to others to get involved in this kind of business. If they were not punished, who will be?”

Individual Solution

Faced with the inability of government, church or community institutions to overcome the drug problem, one Bluefields mother sought her own solution.

Isabel Estrada founded the Future Progress Group nearly five years ago when her husband’s drug use made her life impossible.

“It was a terrible situation--all those sleepless nights,” recalled Estrada, 43, a Garifuna Indian.

Worried that her three children and their friends would become involved in drugs because of the bad examples they saw, she decided to keep them busy with sports and sewing.

Now, 185 youths participate in the program run by volunteers in six Bluefields neighborhoods.

Her husband has stopped using drugs and coaches the girls’ softball team.

However, such success stories are virtually nonexistent in fishing communities like Sandy Bay Tara.

“In our community, the mothers and fathers are all weeping because of drugs,” Rales said. “We are trying to find a way to end this before our sons all die.”

Darling was recently on assignment in Sandy Bay Tara.