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.