Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Half the shit floats away with the current…

You can’t make this shit up.

At first glance, Bluefields in Nicaragua looks like any other rum-soaked, Rastafarian-packed, hammock-infested Caribbean paradise. But Bluefields has a secret.

People here don’t have to work. Every week, sometimes every day, 35kg sacks of cocaine drift in from the sea. The economy of this entire town of 50,000 tranquil souls is addicted to cocaine.

Bluefields is a creation of the gods of geography. Located halfway between the cocaine labs of Colombia and the 300 million noses of the United States, Bluefields is ground zero for cocaine transportation. Nicaraguan waters are near Colombian territorial limits, making the area extremely popular with cocaine smugglers using very small, very fast fishing boats.

The US military calls them “go fast boats”, which is a bureaucratic way of describing these mini-water-rockets. Typically these 12m boats have 800 horsepower of outboard motors bolted to the stern. A Porsche 911 Turbo, by comparison, has 485 horsepower.

While they are very fast, they are also very visible to the array of radars set up by roaming US spy planes, Coastguard cutters and helicopters which regularly monitor the speeding cocaine traffickers.

With night vision equipment, I have seen a lit cigarette from two miles,” a US Navy pilot said. “Or the back light from their GPS screen? It looks like a billboard.”

When the Americans get close, the traffickers toss the cocaine overboard, both to eliminate evidence and lighten their load in an escape attempt.

“They throw most of it off,” says a Lt Commander in the US Coastguard. “I have been on four interdictions and we have confiscated about 6000 pounds [2720kg] of cocaine, and I’d say equal that much was dumped into the ocean.”

Those bales of cocaine float, and the currents bring them west right into the chain of islands, beaches and cays which make up the huge lagoons that surround Bluefields on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast.

“There are no jobs here, unemployment is 85 per cent,” says Moises Arana, who was mayor of Bluefields from 2001 to 2005.

“It is sad to say, but the drugs have made contributions. Look at the beautiful houses, those mansions come from drugs. We had a women come into the local electronics store with a milk bucket stuffed full of cash. She was this little Miskito [native] woman and she had $80,000.”

Hujo Sugo, a historian of Bluefields, says the floating coke has created a new local hobby.

“People here now go beachcombing for miles, they walk until the find packets. Even the lobster fisherman now go out with the pretence of fishing but really they are looking for la langosta blanca - the white lobster.”

Given the remote setting and lack of infrastructure, there are few roads, few cars and the biggest shop in Bluefields sells nothing more sophisticated than a washing machine or TV set.

So what do the locals do with all this cocaine? They sell it to travelling buyers who cruise the coast, disguised as used clothes vendors.

“We know there are small shop owners who do this,” says Yorlene Orozco, the local judge. “We are talking about people without a profession, no home, no job. One day later they have a new car, go to the casino and are building a home that costs I don’t know how many thousands of dollars.”

Law enforcement in Bluefields is practically invisible “I just had a Swiss tourist tell me that when she went to the supermarket they tried to sell her cocaine,” says Orozco.

The police and Navy have few resources and less trust from the local public. Bluefields is effectively an anarchist nation - no Government, no organised institutions and the rules are made by community groups.

Given the massive amount of cocaine in town, violence is surprisingly rare. Gunfights are nearly unheard of and most of the town seems to lounge around or play baseball all day and then erupt into a frenzy of energy by late afternoon, fuelled by Flor de Cana, a Nicaraguan rum, fresh fish, an endless supply of native oysters, and “the white lobster”.

Read the whole New Zealand Herald article here.