The Drug Trade

The Corn Islands are about 70kms off the coast of Nicaragua, in the Caribbean Sea. There are no other islands close by so where they sit is squarely on the route for the drug runners between Colombia and the north. Nicaragua has a hard line stance on drugs and there is an active coast guard patrolling these waters, from both air and sea.

I’m not quite sure how it all works but I guess if one of the boats is worried it is being tracked, they start dumping their cargo overboard, where some of it washes up on the shores of the Corn Islands. In fact, just down the beach from Carlito’s is a well-known spot where the cocaine washes up in little pots. Apparently Vicks Vaporub containers…

Leo, a dutch lady who has been living on Little Corn making and selling jewellery for the past 5 years, is a font of knowledge of island life, people and their stories. A year ago she was volunteering at the local school and when it came to teaching the little kids about the ecology of the beach she asked them to name some of the things they would find on the beach. Number one was shells, number two was coconuts and number three was cocaine.

I guess its no surprise that education is not respected on the island, kids don’t have to go to school and even if they do they’re not really learning anything. There are kids in first grade who are 10 and they cannot count, read or write their own name. The parents don’t care if they go to school or not.

No one wants to work either. Since I’ve been here, one and a half weeks, we’ve been through three guys who rake the beach in the morning. The first guy we thought was great but after four days he just wanted to smoke away his money. The second was a 13 year old kid whose parents asked Carlito to hire him as a favour to keep him off the streets. That lasted two days. We now have another young guy who seems to be good but who knows how long that will last. Before that there was a young guy who would steal all the ladies bikini bottoms that were hanging out to dry. When Carlito caught him he fired him but he came back begging for his job. Carlito rehired him but the knickers went missing again.

For such a small island, it is amazing that people are willing to throw away the opportunity to earn an income for something so trivial but the other side to that is that they’re all playing the cocaine lottery. Waiting for their find on the beach one day which will keep them living comfortably for a year or two.