If Joseph Conrad had witnessed the scene, he might have set The Heart of Darkness in Central America rather than Central Africa. Scores of Miskito Indians, lobster divers -- buzos de langostas -- thronged against the 10-foot-high iron gate at the foot of the pier at Puerto Cabezas, a Nicaraguan fishing town 60 miles south of the Honduras border. Ratty bedrolls slung across their backs, many half-drunk or stoned, the buzos pushed ahead in the late afternoon sunlight, hoisting yard-long metal lobster-hunting spears called barillas over their heads like the weapons of an attacking medieval force. The descendants of indigenous tribes and escaped African slaves, and now attired in soiled T-shirts of global celebrity (Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive is closing in on all-time champ Air Jordan), the Miskitos were looking for a boat. They wanted to sign on with one of the dozen or so lobster-fishing vessels tied up to the rickety quarter-mile-long pier. On the other side of the iron fence, wearing starched white shirts, holding clipboards and canvas bags filled with money, were the sacabuzos (literally, "fetch a diver"), the middlemen of the lobster trade. The sacabuzos scanned their lists and called out names. One by one, the chosen buzos were allowed to pass through the rusted gate by bored soldiers carrying AK-47s. The divers signed a sacabuzo's pad and were given 800 córdobas, about $50, their advance for the upcoming journey. Few buzos bothered to count the money. If they'd been shorted 20 córdobas or 100, it wouldn't make much difference. During their upcoming two weeks at sea, much of it to be spent with antiquated scuba tanks strapped to their backs as they breathed through half-clogged regulators 140 feet below the surface of the hauntingly blue Caribbean, there would be little opportunity to use the cash. Besides, at close quarters on a Nicaraguan lobster-diving boat, there is every chance a buzo's advance will end up in someone else's pocket. Rather than risk it, the divers handed their small grubstake back through the iron gate to their women. Some were wives or girlfriends who needed the money to keep households functioning, however minimally, until the divers' return. But just as many of the women were prostitutes, thin and bony, come to collect for the previous night's services. Lobster fishing is a $50 million industry in Nicaragua and Honduras, by far the most lucrative business (some would say the only business) on the legendarily remote Mosquito Coast. And like any industry, it has its costs. First, as with most resources packaged as products, lobster stocks are finite. The catch has been declining since the mid-1990s as a result of overfishing, which has not only depleted the lobster population but also wrought severe damage upon seagrasses and coral reefs. The shallows, as they are called, have been fished out. Old-timers talk of days when all one had to do was wade a few feet into the water to snare a lobster. Now, three decades after the arrival of the scuba tank, divers on the Mosquito Coast typically descend to 120 feet before seeing lobsters. Every year, with more processing plants and boats in operation to meet growing demand, the divers go deeper to find the remaining lobsters. Choose to ignore it or not, we -- the vast consumer we -- have forged a highly nuanced social contract with these men. In the case of Miskito buzos, the terms of the contract, traced in greasy streaks of drawn butter and garlic, are exercised whenever we spread a happy-face plastic bib across our chest and begin to tear into the oh-so-sweet meat of those tempting lobster tails. Panulirus argus and Panulirus guttatus, the two main species of lobster caught in the waters off Central America, cut a far less imposing figure than the three- and four-pound, big-clawed decapods (Homarus americanus) caught by hearty New England seamen and tossed live into boiling cauldrons to be eaten by Maine tourists. Clawless and smaller, the "spiny," or "rock," Carib-bean lobster rarely finds its way to a table intact. The animal's head is almost always chopped off before it gets to look its prospective eater in the eye, leaving only the tail. The humble Central American lobster is most often sliced and diced, thrown into salads and bowls of bisque. It is also a staple on the menus of corporate "casual dining" emporiums -- Red Lobster and the like -- where the public's craving for boiled and broiled crustacean is sated within a stone's throw of the freeway exit ramp. For the buzos of the Mosquito Coast, who routinely make 15 or 20 dives a day, the cost of the lobster industry is most starkly manifest in what they call the golpe. Until recently, most Miskitos took this to be a form of divine vengeance meted out by the Mermaid, a.k.a. Liwa Mairin, the goddess of the sea. Liwa was said to strike down buzos who took too many lobsters, as commercial divers routinely do. Recently, however, while not renouncing Liwa's mystical and moral powers, divers have come to call the golpe by more scientific names -- decompression sickness (DCS), caisson disease -- or simply the bends. DCS is a modern malady, largely unknown before humans devised methods to breathe underwater via artificial means. Due to increased pressure below the surface of the sea, air in a submerged body becomes compressed. When a diver ascends, the denser air begins to expand, forming bubbles in the bloodstream. If a diver surfaces too quickly, or goes down too deep or too often, these nitrogen-rich bubbles can block capillaries, cutting off oxygen to the brain and leading to tissue damage, paralysis, or death. In an unregulated, high-volume situation like the Honduran-Nicaraguan lobster industry, DCS can reach epidemic proportions. According to a 1999 World Bank report, "close to 100 percent of divers show symptoms of neurological damage -- presumably due to inadequate decompression." Over the past decade, local sources say, more than 800 of the 2,500 divers in Sandy Bay (a Honduran Miskito town north of Puerto Cabezas) have died or suffered serious injuries. None of this is news to Bob Izdepski, who has spent the better part of a decade watching processions like the one at the Puerto Cabezas pier. "It is like watching a plague...thousands of men lined up to get on boats to be paralyzed or killed," says Izdepski in his signature rolling drawl as he stands by the pier's rusting gate, watching the buzos prepare to board another boat. The Miskito engagement with deepwater doom has become something of an obsession for Izdepski, who admits to "a kind of intricate relationship between the twin poles of life and death." Izdepski spent 30 years as a commercial diver working on oil rigs as much as 500 feet below the surface (one of the most dangerous jobs in the world), while still retaining enough hope in the future to raise a family of eight kids. Indeed, it is this interplay between life and death that has always attracted Bob Izdepski to the Mosquito Coast, because, as he says, "those things are so close together down here." Izdepski, 53, first became aware of what he calls "the La Miskitia disaster" in 1986. "I was hanging around Sabine Pass on the Louisiana-Texas border, working as an oil rig diver," says Izdepski, describing himself at the time as "a semi-redneck soldier of dis-fortune and former acidhead." It was then, he says, "I ran into a man with a cracked leather face and iceberg eyes who told me any white man with half a brain could get rich in the Central American lobster business. He said, `You can buy these Indian divers for five or ten bucks a day, and when they quit or get bent that's no problem, because there's always plenty more where those guys came from.'" Some years later, after founding the self-published Working Diver magazine, which promised "the bottom line in a very deep sea of ideas" and included columns entitled "Izdepski in Depth" and "Izdepski in Deeper," he visited the Mosquito Coast himself, finding conditions "worse, way worse, than I imagined." That was when Izdepski, usually known as Bob Iz, or simply, elementally, as Iz, says, "I had my epiphany. I understood that I was a diver, I made my living as a diver, that diving was my life- -- and what was going on in La Miskitia was the moral Armageddon of the diving world, a slow-motion underwater genocide. I stood on the beach and felt the blinding light of human obligation, as if the crosshairs of destiny had settled on my shoulders." The way Iz describes it, this has become his life mission. "You see, there's no other way for them to make money down here. No agriculture, no industry. These guys aren't going to sign on at the 7-Eleven, drive a truck. Lobster diving is it. What they do is insane. They dive maybe 15, maybe 16 tanks every day for two weeks straight, when the U.S. Navy dive tables tell you two or three tanks a day is the safe limit. They go to absurd depths. Ten years ago you could find all the lobsters you wanted at 40, 50 feet. But they've fished out the shallows, picked the coast clean. Now you've got to go down 120, 130, even deeper to catch lobsters, and the deeper you go, the more chance of getting bent -- especially with that equipment. "In the States, scuba tanks are inspected every year. I've never seen a Miskito tank, some of which are 20 years old, with an inspection sticker. No diver has a depth gauge or a pressure gauge. They don't know how deep they are or how much air they've got left in the tank. "Let me tell you: I've been down there, and I know. When there's 150 feet of water between you and the surface and you suck on that hose and there's nothing there, that is a notable event. You can't hold your breath; that only makes it worse. The air you breathe, once your friend, is now your enemy. A beast is inside you, snaking around your heart and lungs, fitting you for a wheelchair or the graveyard. "Down here they call lobster red gold," Iz says. "How many have been killed, how many societies wiped out, because of gold? And what for? Gold doesn't drive your car, it won't heat your house. So why? Because we want it. You, me, all of us. Lobster is like that. Lobster is special. It isn't a mayonnaise sandwich. When you're eating lobster you're a somebody. It is a fetish, like a Cadillac." This is how it's always been, Iz says. The rich and would-be rich are consumption machines, and the poor are serfs combing the fields of dwindling plenty. It is a horrible cycle that will end in disaster, as sure as the last book in the Bible is Revelations. But if you really want to help, not simply be a windbag do-gooder, you have to focus, concentrate on accomplishing one small thing. When Bob Izdepski brought a hyperbaric chamber to Cauquira, Honduars, the entire village turned out to haul it ashore with ropes. The Chamber of Salvation For Iz this small thing has been setting up decompression chambers on the Mosquito Coast. Developed in its modern form in the late nineteenth century, the chamber, most typically a 12-foot-long metal capsule shaped like a septic tank, simulates underwater pressure, allowing the diver inside to be "brought to the surface" gradually. Time is key. The Navy recommends an interval of no more than five minutes between the time a bent diver surfaces and the time he enters the chamber. On the 300-mile-long Mosquito Coast, however, with perhaps three or four decompression facilities open at any one time, it can take a diver 72 hours, sometimes much longer, to get to a chamber, if he makes it there at all. It was a chamber mission that summoned Iz to Puerto Cabezas this bright tropical morning. In 1995, as cofounder and president of SubOceanSafety (SOS), Iz brought the first decompression chamber to this bustling, ramshackle port city. In the five years it was in operation, more than 600 divers were treated, saving many from paralysis and worse. But now the machine, no longer functional, was rusting away in a tumbledown wharfside warehouse. This was an unpleasant discovery, mostly because the chamber wasn't supposed to be in Puerto Cabezas at all but rather on Corn Island, more than 100 miles to the south. How a two-ton chamber could get misplaced was, in Iz's words, "a fucking complicated situation." The basic facts are these: In 2002, with a second chamber ready to be installed at the Puerto Cabezas hospital, Iz decided to move his original machine to Corn Island, long a center of Miskito diving. This made sense, since there was no chamber on the island or in the nearby mainland town of Bluefields. Thousands of divers were going untreated. The problem was how to move the chamber, pay for repairs, and set it up in its new location. Prospective help in this regard came from an unexpected source: Jorge Morgan, the dominant figure in southern Nicaragua's fishing industry. Encountering Iz in a Corn Island bar, Morgan, who is widely known as the Godfather, said it would be "no problem" to move the chamber. The Godfather said he would do this as a gesture of goodwill, owing to the many Miskito divers who had worked for him over the years. This was great news, except for the fact that Iz did not quite believe Jorge Morgan. After all, Morgan -- a member of the dominant Creole minority and widely rumored to trace his roots back to Henry Morgan, the classic Pirate of the Caribbean -- was a longtime confidant of former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. Morgan had never been known as a friend of the Miskito diver. Many buzos had been hurt or killed while working his boats. However, Iz thought the old boss might want to make amends after so many years of exploitation. Perhaps Morgan was a man of honor after all. It was on the strength of Morgan's pledge that Iz went to Corn Island. The idea was to inspect the chamber and see what was needed to make it operational. But Jorge Morgan had not made good on his promise. Encountered by Iz on the Corn Island airport tarmac, the Godfather, a physically imposing man of about 70 with café au lait skin and a pale yellow guayabera shirt, casually revealed that he'd never moved the chamber at all, that it was still in Puerto Cabezas. Not to worry, Morgan told the apoplectic Iz; everything is in place. The chamber would be moved, Morgan said, someday "soon." This was a setback in several ways. First of all, Iz had believed Morgan, something he now allowed had been a grievous mistake. The man had given his word, Iz railed, more hurt than angry. He was a snake, a robber baron, unworthy of trust. Beyond that, Morgan's failure to deliver had placed SubOceanSafety in a bad light, since Iz had spent time pitching the Corn Island mayor and the town council on the benefits of decompression, trying to persuade them to place the machine in the local hospital. This seemed ridiculous now, the chamber not being on the island at all. Asked if perhaps it might have saved some trouble to call ahead, Iz frowned. "Call ahead?" bristled the SubOceanSafety president, his eyes narrowing behind his sunglasses. Even in the backwater context of Nicaragua and Honduras, the Atlantic Coast was a world apart. There were no roads. Phone service was not reliable. Information could not be depended on. People told you whatever they thought you wished to hear. If you wanted to know anything, you had to see it with your own eyes. Besides, it wasn't as if SubOceanSafety were one of those plush outfits whose minions spend their time writing up fancy foundation grants and riding around in $50,000 Toyota Land Cruisers. Iz didn't play that game, couldn't even if he wanted to. Ticked off that he has "never gotten the time of day from big-shot groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club" (despite the past presence on the SubOceanSafety board of respected people such as the well-known hyperbaric physician David Youngblood), Iz finds it next to impossible to operate any way but unaffiliated, under the radar. Yet even the most pared-down assault on injustice requires cash, and that's tough for an unpaid moral activist with eight kids, living in a clapboard house with a flooded front yard in the funky section of Lacombe, a community on the north end of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway from New Orleans. Iz's travel expenses are often dependent on backyard welding jobs (the sign outside his house says, simply, "WELD") and Tom Sawyer-like cajoling of visiting writers to help paint the top of a neighbor's double-wide trailer to pick up a much-needed $250 the day before setting off on a critical mission. What is really needed in this particular ad hoc line of do-gooding is faith. And faith is something that Bob Izdepski, a grand, cockeyed kind of un-Ugly American, has in abundance. So it was in an upbeat frame of mind that Iz arrived in Puerto Cabezas, several days after the Corn Island incident, to inspect the chamber Morgan was supposed to have moved. It turned out that a tropical storm had blown off the roof of the building, so the chamber, exposed to the elements, had acquired an unsightly coat of rust. But things could have been worse, Iz proclaimed after checking out the pressure gauges. With a little sanding and paint the chamber would be as good as new. This was no surprise, Iz said, since a decompression chamber was a simple device really. Useful for treating a variety of maladies, from burns to carbon monoxide poisoning, the chamber's basic function was to ensure life over death. Objects with such a singular purpose, like similarly unconflicted human beings, tend to be tough, difficult to discourage. Now Iz was standing atop that unvanquished chamber, using it as a pulpit to rally the SubOceanSafety troops, which consisted of half a dozen Puerto Cabezas divers, two of whose lives had been saved within those very same steel walls, and the super-cool dude Juan Alejandro Samuel, a Miskito who holds down the Nicaraguan desk of SubOceanSafety, a movable sort of bureaucracy located wherever Samuel happens to be at the moment. "We are on a mission from God," Iz declared, quoting a John Belushi line from The Blues Brothers, a favorite inspirational touchstone. "We will not be deterred. It is the pitfalls in a man's life which give him the impetus to move forward, to test his character," Iz preached with manic, Whitmanesque optimism. "Brilliance is required, and brilliance will be supplied," he thundered. "When you are trying to do something good, things always work out. You don't have to be a saint. You can be a fool. It is a thin line between a hero and a clown. We are small, but moving under the cover of our own ineptitude, we will succeed!" The Diver's Tale Británico Colborth Salajar, a roundish Miskito man in his mid-40s, remembers when he first went diving. "I was just a young boy, maybe 10. We were free divers, just held our breath. All the boys went for turtles. This is our national dish, the turtle. When I got older, I learned how to really catch a turtle, how get him around the back, pull his head up, drive your knife into his neck. But we were just boys then, and a turtle weighs a hundred kilos. We'd get on his back, hold on, and it would be like flying. "There were so many lobsters then, they were everywhere," Británico recalls of the days before scuba tanks came to the coast and the export industry started up in earnest. "You could walk in from the beach and pick them out of the surf. At night their antennas cut through the water in the moonlight. We caught lobsters the way they do now, with a barilla. It has two sides, one with a hook, the other pointed. You use the hook to get the lobster from his hole in the reef, turn him over with your hand, and stab him through the chest with the pointed side so he stops struggling. "I did this for 17 years altogether. I worked for Jorge Morgan, others too, until 1992, when I died." It was the golpe, Británico says. "I was in a coma when I came out of the water. Everyone thought I was dead. But I could see and hear. I heard my mother crying, ordering my coffin to the house. Then I felt myself hovering above my own body. Someone was with me. I thought it must be the Liwa, the Mermaid. But I saw that it was Jesus and I said, 'Father, I will serve you.' Then I returned to my body and I woke up." From that point on, Británico has been an itinerant preacher, traveling the countryside telling other divers of his revelation. "I went around Corn Island, to Bluefields, to say it was not the Mermaid who would protect them. Jesus was the Savior. To know him they would have to be born again, like me." Eventually, however, Británico's diving injuries made it impossible for him to travel. He went back to Corn Island and started his church. "It is right out there," he says, pointing to the sheer pink curtains fluttering over the window frame of his shantytown home. The first thing he did when he built his church was take one of his old dive tanks and suspend it from a tree branch. This became the church bell, a typical practice throughout the coast. Británico preached his own mystic gospel in his cinderblock church for several years until his sickness rendered him immobile. "For three years now I have been in this bed," he says, removing the blanket wrapped around his waist to reveal that his left leg has been amputated above the knee. Paralyzed limbs are easily injured, with even small cuts sometimes leading to virulent infections and gangrene, so surgeries like Británico's are not uncommon on the coast. "This buzoman sickness is eating me, every day another bite," he says. "But I am not unhappy," Británico continues, unfurling a dreamy, unexpected smile, as someone up the hill starts hitting his old tank with a hammer, the clang resounding through the preacher's house. "Because every moment I am so much closer to heaven." Not all the buzomen, however, are so uncomplaining. As Iz points out, the Miskitos have always been hunters and warriors. Often thought of as ornery xenophobes by the would-be cosmopolitans of the Pacific Coast, the Miskitos hated Somoza. Ditto the Sandinistas. When the revolutionaries arrived from Managua with notions of a centrally planned utopia, many Miskitos signed up with the Ronald Reagan-backed contra forces. If their enemy's enemy was not quite their friend, at least he was handing out plenty of M-16s. Even today, tell a local you are American and he will snicker and say, with no small irony, "Ollie North, mi campeón." | | On Central America's Mosquito Coast, young men plunge into the abyss with defective equipment to capture dwindling stores of lobster. A tale of U.S. appetites, human misery, and one stubborn American's crusade to bring salvation. Miskitos cherish their reputation for macho stubbornness, and buzos often carry bravado to the extreme. Some young divers consider coming up from 150 feet with a punctured, bleeding eardrum a rite of passage. For every bent buzo, crippled on the beach, there is another guy banging on his chest as if invincible, claiming he went through 22 tanks just that day. "When I was young, I had no fear," says John Wayne Taylor. He stands slumped over a dented metal walker in front of his small wooden house on one of the back alleyways of Puerto Cabezas. He is 27 years old. Throughout the town, in tough, hardscrabble bars like the Midnight and the Atlantic, there were buzos calling themselves Elvis Presley, George Bush, Bing Crosby, Plastic Man, Michael Jordan, M.C. Hammer, and, in one rumored case, Adolf Hitler. People change their names all the time, says John Wayne Taylor. Sometimes it depends on which comic books you've read and which pirated videotape you've seen most recently. Life on the boats was difficult, John Wayne says, with a mixture of loathing and nostalgia. An 80-foot-long boat usually carries at least 75 people. This includes perhaps 30 divers and a like number of cayuqueros who paddle the canoes that leave the mother ship to hunt the lobsters. Divers and cayuqueros sleep in large communal hammocks. During storms everyone throws up on each other. But there are rewards. A smart, skilled buzo can make a decent living, at least for a while. Pay is variable, depending on the catch. A box of lobster tails weighing 100 pounds usually sells for $10 to $12 a pound wholesale. The sacabuzo, captain, and fish processors take their cut off the top. The buzo gets what's left over, maybe $2 a pound. Working 10 hours a day in the water, the seal of his Lloyd Bridges Sea Hunt mask leaking, breathing stale air from outmoded tanks, a buzo can clear $300 for his 12-day shift. Once back on land, the diver spends most of his money in stores often run by the same people who own the boats. After a week or so, it's time to find another boat. Still, John Wayne says he was not unhappy as a diver. For years he was a top hand, a stud, el gran buzo. No one got more bottom time out of a tank. True, horrible things happened. Sometimes divers would get bent in the first few days of the journey and be left to suffer on deck rather than taken ashore for treatment. There was a case of a hurt buzo who suddenly disappeared one night. Everyone assumed he had been thrown overboard by the captain so he wouldn't distract the others with his groans. These were all sad things, John Wayne says, but he accepted them as "the buzo life." Then, in late 2000, John Wayne got sick. Afflicted by a gas embolism, there is little chance he will ever walk again. As a rule, the lobster industry offers no insurance, often making divers sign contracts freeing their employer from liability in case of accident. However, as befitting his top buzo status, John Wayne was deemed entitled to two years of compensation at 2,400 córdobas -- about $150 -- a month. The next payment would be his last, which made him feel "desperate." John Wayne would eventually suffer even greater humiliation, said several men standing around the small compound in front of his house. The problem was, he was married to one of the most beautiful women in a town of often startlingly beautiful women. John Wayne's wife, fetchingly outfitted in a frilly turquoise top and tight gray miniskirt, was selling batteries and soft drinks behind the counter of a small makeshift store set up in their front yard. This income would sustain the family for a while. But sooner or later, people said, John Wayne's wife would leave him. Eyes flashing, still very handsome, John Wayne watched his wife's every move. When two younger men approached and began laughing with her, John Wayne gripped his walker tightly and maneuvered himself between them, shooting hard looks their way. The men departed. But, as one of John Wayne's friends noted, they'd be back. Pointing the Finger Zero in the book -- that about covered it, Iz declared in a seaside Puerto Cabezas café, listening to a tune of the same name. A sort of Miskito reggae, the song tells the story of a diver who catches lobsters that will be eaten "on the plates of gringos." Now paralyzed, the diver has become el medio hombre -- half a man. He crawls back to the sacabuzo to see what he has to show for all those days under the sea. The foreman opens his ledger and runs a manicured fingernail across the debits and credits. Sorry, he says to the buzo, there's nothing. Nothing but zero in the book. This was how it was on the coast. The divers had been cast in the roles of sharecroppers, oceangoing, black-lunged coal miners, except they had no John L. Lewis, no Big Bill Haywood, no meaningful union of any kind, said Iz, author of his own buzo blues, entitled "Paralysis and Gold." Sung to the tune of Gordon Lightfoot's "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," with the opening line "Let's raise a glass to the men who won't last, on the reefs of the Costa Miskitia," the song was recorded on cassette by Iz's wife, Susan, whose clear voice can be heard in several church choirs in Louisiana's St. Tammany Parish. Iz, who describes himself as "pretty much an Old Testament kind of guy when it comes to affixing culpability," was of the opinion that if an evil like the situation on the Mosquito Coast could exist, someone or something must be to blame. There were plenty of villains to choose from. There were the greedy sacabuzos, the cruel boat captains, the rapacious owners of fish processing plants. There were millionaire lobster magnates like Jorge Morgan and his Honduran counterparts on the island of Roatán, the McNabb family, and Albert Jackson, who used his fishing fortune to build a TV-themed sport-dive facility, Fantasy Island (complete with a local dwarf in the Herve Villechaize role). In the late 1990s, when Nicholas Guarino, a former Wall Street analyst, sought to open a rival processing plant on Roatán, Jackson supposedly sent him a coffin as a welcome gift. And then there was Central America's institutionalized corruption. "There is a sense of lawlessness along the Mosquito Coast, especially in the lobster business," says Paul Raymond, a special agent for the enforcement section of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in charge of monitoring illegal seafood imports into the United States. "If you look hard enough you'll find major abuses in almost all the big seafood import companies. Not that anyone is really looking. Policing by the locals is almost nonexistent." What is happening on the coast is a shame, Raymond says. His office has jurisdiction to arrest people attempting to import "short," or undersized, lobsters into the United States. But there is nothing NOAA can do about the divers. "There's no law against diving for lobsters, not in Nicaragua, not in Honduras, not in the United States. The fact is, lobster diving is a human rights issue...and human rights are slippery things, beyond our jurisdiction." Red Lobster menu Yes, there is a lot to hate on the Mosquito Coast, Iz acknowledges. To narrow it down, he's focused much of his ample ire on the stateside corporations that import Central America's spiny lobsters. Singled out for special scrutiny is the 1,300-outlet Red Lobster chain, a subsidiary of Darden Restaurants Inc. of Orlando, Florida, the largest "casual dining" company in the world (it also operates the midpriced Olive Garden, Bahama Breeze, and Smokey Bones chains). Red Lobster agents first appeared on the coast in the early 1990s, signing deals with a number of the larger boat owners. Berkeley geographer Bernard Nietschmann, the Miskitos' foremost international advocate, decried the involvement of large American seafood companies, calling the overfishing of Caribbean spiny lobster "an ecological disaster in the making." Red Lobster spokesmen have repeatedly denied complicity in the buzo disaster. Mike Bernstein, media director for Darden, says that while it is true that Red Lobster imports a sizable percentage of the lobsters caught along the Nicaraguan and Honduran coasts, "we do not purchase diver-caught product. We are concerned about the safety of the divers. That's why we only enter into contracts with providers who exclusively trap lobsters." This is exactly the sort of talk that drives Iz around the bend. He brandishes a letter from Jim DeSimone, Darden's president of communications, asserting that Red Lobster buys only "trap-caught or shallow-dive, hand-caught lobsters." "What do they mean 'shallow-dive, hand-caught lobster?' How do they know how deep these guys are? The divers don't have gauges; they don't even know themselves." Iz is in full j'accuse mode now. "These pirates are trying to absolve themselves, saying they're only trapping, which is civilized, instead of dealing with these primitive fools who keep diving. The cold, hard fact is that most Miskitos can't trap. A fisherman needs at least 50 traps to even begin to make a living catching lobsters. Each trap costs between $25 and $30." Who had that kind of money on the Mosquito Coast? Iz wanted to know. Not the divers, not the small boat captains or the sacabuzos. In his view, Darden's "trap-only" policy assured that the big fisheries, Jorge Morgan and his ilk, would continue to rule the roost, since they alone had the necessary capital. It might be different if there were some kind of alternative economy on the coast, another way to make money. Right now, however, the only viable options for unskilled Miskito workers are activities such as signing on with the lumber companies deforesting the interior, or joining the gold miners using cyanide leaching in the mountains. On top of that, Iz contended, the "trap-only" claim was based on a fallacy. There was no way a big importer could claim, with a straight face, to buy only trap-caught lobster. Everyone knew that once you caught a lobster, cut off its head and shoved its tail into a 70-pound freezer bag, it was impossible to tell whether it came from a trap or not. Determined to prove this, Iz embarked on a typically scattershot but eminently determined investigation. On Corn Island we visited a packing plant owned by Central American Fisheries (CAF), a large exporter that handles both trapped and diver-caught product. Either unmindful or uncaring that many of his stateside buyers were on record as not buying buzo-caught lobsters, Fabio A. Robelo, the laconic general manager, readily admitted that there was "no way anyone would be able to tell which lobster was which" once the processing started. "It is all mixed together," he said. A subsequent tour of CAF's massive freezer turned up several lobster boxes bearing the logo of the Sysco Corporation. This was a find, Iz pronounced, since Sysco, with reported gross sales of $27.5 billion in 2003, is one of the largest food purveyors in the world. In an implicit acknowledgment of the controversy over Mosquito Coast lobster, the company's website makes a point of saying that its "Sysco classic warmwater lobster tails" are "trapped in the clear Caribbean waters of Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Bahamas." Iz saw opportunity here. After all, Sysco is a publicly traded corporation. If the accuracy of the word trapped should come into question, it could cause a ruckus among the stockholders, especially if some loudmouth international labor-rights organization were to take up the buzos' cause. Indeed, asked what he would do if he learned that Red Lobster was unwittingly buying dive-caught lobster, Darden spokesman Mike Bernstein said, "Well...we'd be very disappointed." The noose was tightening, Iz maintained later, as we drove over to a shipping yard on Roatán. A dive boat, the Captain Josué, was at the dock, buzo canoes stacked up on its deck. Beside the boat were giant refrigerator containers marked HYBUR, a subsidiary of the Hyde Shipping Corporation, owned by another of the old-time island families. (Jerry Hyde is currently the Roatán mayor.) A few days later, Iz's sleuthing took us to Miami, where we drove past another stack of HYBUR containers outside Hyde's stateside offices. Pretending to be a lumber buyer inquiring about the price of moving Honduran hardwood, Iz asked what else the company shipped. "A lot of lobster," the Hyde shipping manager replied. "Yeah? Who buys it?" "You know, Red Lobster for the most part," was the answer. If this didn't exactly put a smoking gun in the company's hand, Iz said, it was pretty darn close. Still, if you really wanted to point a finger at who was destroying La Miskitia, you had to take the long view. Even if Iz says he feels nauseous when he hears Red Lobster's ad slogan, "Share the Love," there were larger forces to blame here. It was us, Iz knew. "Big, piggy us." It went back to the notion of lobster as rich people's food, something extraordinary, a fetish like gold, Iz said. "When they come up with a concept like Red Lobster -- which sells lobster tails for mass consumption, on the cheap -- that fulfills the ideal about everyone getting to feel special. This is good. It is democracy. Part of the American dream. Except if you're going to make every man a king, you've got to have a heck of a lot of lobster. It is a supply and demand problem. Because with every $9.95 lobster fest there are fewer lobsters, and some Miskito diver has to go down another foot to find the next one, and the next one until there are none left. No lobsters, no Indians. But what do we care, as long we've got the bib around our neck and melted butter on the side?" Enter the Do-Gooders Many people on the Mosquito Coast assume Iz must be running a scam, that he has a secret plan to get rich. Why else would anyone come to a mucky malarial zone to save the lives of a bunch of often surly Indians for no pay? Even Juan Samuel, loyal to a fault, sometimes wonders. "Bob," he says with total affection, "he's like a little...crazy...you know." Iz pays no attention to such talk. Those who question his motives "do not understand the nature of true obsession, with all its attendant blind spots," he says. The important thing is to continue moving the ball down the field. We traveled to Cauquira, a verdant Miskito fishing village across a mangrove-lined lagoon from the funky burg of Puerto Lempira, on the Honduran side of the Río Coco. Eight years ago, Iz and his oldest son, Jesse, then 14, brought a decompression chamber down here. As part of the Izdepski home-schooling project, all the boys get their turn in La Miskitia. Bob says it gives them "something to shoot for, to understand that there's a world out there bigger than themselves." The Cauquira chamber had been one of SOS's greatest successes, treating more than 700 divers. However, to Iz's great chagrin, things had gone awry. The chamber building, marked "Clínica de Buzos," was padlocked. The doctor hired by FUDENA, a private Honduran aid agency entrusted by Iz to run the facility, had disappeared. The chamber's green oxygen tanks were empty. This meant that a boat captain seeking help for one of his bent divers would be forced to bring his own oxygen. Chances of this happening were "exactly nil," Iz said. Now the buzos -- the ones who would get any help at all -- would have to be taken to Roatán, a two-day journey away. The delay was "like a death sentence," Iz said, banging on the dive tank that served as the bell for Cauquira's Pentecostal church. Within minutes, the buzos began to appear. From out of their mahogany huts, from the boat docks along the lagoon, they came up the dusty road, a disquieting procession of medio hombres, about 20 of them, some leaning on handmade canes and broomsticks, others pushing themselves along the bumpy path in jury-rigged wheelchairs without tires. They gathered inside the church, which had no walls. It was simply an open shed, a roof over 20 rows of benches arrayed before a plain, Masonite-covered pulpit. One by one, the divers told Iz their name, their injury, and the year it happened, these facts serving as the totality of their identity. Rones Welyans, hurt in 1991, could not walk. Neither could Harry Flores Mitchell, crippled in 1996. Fredal Albanez Kittom lost the feeling in his hands in 1994. In 1995, Atto Simon Kilton's ears were damaged; he had become deaf. With Juan Samuel translating, the buzomen more or less confirmed the story of the chamber shutdown: The doctor, Waldina Matamoros, was gone, the divers left to fend for themselves. Several injured men had gone back to their villages, presumably to die or be cared for by the sukias (shamanic doctors) and the brujos, sorcerers known to place a poultice of toilet paper and gasoline on a buzo's back and set it aflame, in hopes of jump-starting a frozen nervous system. Iz listened with gathering anger. He'd personally communicated with José Ramos Martínez of FUDENA to make sure things were run correctly. The man seemed honorable. He had given his word. Teeth gritted, Iz was trying to get Martínez's phone number in Tegucigalpa, the capital, when, like an apparition of Middle American certitude plunked down amid third world despair, half a dozen white people in brand-name camping gear and nifty hiking boots appeared in front of the church. They turned out to be representatives of a Rotary Club in northern Idaho. Do-gooders themselves, they had journeyed to the Mosquito Coast looking for worthy causes upon which to bestow a series of "micro-grants" -- highly targeted aid packages that often prove more beneficial than the mega-loans big donors funnel through sticky-fingered government bureaucracies. As chance would have it, the Rotarians were accompanied by Julio César Villalta, who ingratiatingly described himself as a very good friend and colleague of José Ramos Martínez. A FUDENA man himself, Villalta had brought the Rotary Club people to Cauquira to demonstrate how efficiently his group was managing the chamber. "Oh, is that so?" Iz remarked, inviting the Idahoans to meet the crippled divers as he explained the "extremely regrettable" circumstances that had led to the chamber's untimely shutdown. FUDENA had dropped the ball, Iz said. Properly shocked, the Rotarians, quickly seconded by the suddenly abashed Villalta, said they would report the problems to Martínez as soon as they returned to Tegucigalpa. "I'm sure we'll get some action on that," one of the Rotary grant people said. "Yeah," Iz said, "I'm sure we will now." Just to make sure nothing slipped through the cracks, Iz insisted that Villalta give Martínez a ring. Villalta called up on his satellite phone. There was a good deal of shouting in the ensuing conversation, during which FUDENA promised to get the chamber working again. "How about if I just do it myself right now and send you the bill?" Iz shouted into the phone. "Good, I knew you'd see it my way." He spent the rest of the day restoring the chamber to working order and attempting to arrange the delivery of new supplies of oxygen. Later on, riding across the lagoon back to Puerto Lempira, Iz was serene. Sure it had been a long day, but a successful one. The synchronicity of the Rotarians' arrival he considered a sign. The forces of Good were at work, however mysteriously. The chamber would soon be back online. Some people who might otherwise be crippled would continue to walk. Some who might have died would live a while longer, if only until their next dive. Bumping across the mangrove-brown water, Iz said his mission in La Miskitia might well end soon. He'd heard rumors of a sizable cache of oil and/or natural gas in the continental shelf off the coast. That would bring energy company executives to Managua and Tegucigalpa to hash out profit-sharing agreements. Lobster diving was fine, but oil and gas were the Grail. There was little doubt what would happen next. It was only a matter of time before the platforms were built, which would truly be the end of the buzo life. About that, Bob Izdepski had mixed feelings. If the plans came to fruition, the Miskitos would get a share of the wealth. Maybe not their fair share, but something. Lawyers and indigenous-rights people would see to that. Natural gas was exactly the sort of issue that brought out the NGO types, not some poor crippled Indians in dive masks. Once that happened, Iz figured, there wouldn't be any room for someone like him. Not that he'd be out of business. There were plenty of buzo nightmares around the globe. Lobster divers off the coast of Bahía in Brazil had similar problems. He'd been interested in the place ever since he saw Orson Welles's movie It's All True, which was shot down there. So maybe that would be his next stop. You never knew what was going to happen in this world, Iz said, standing at the bow of our bouncing skiff, arms crossed, like an ever-vigilant George Washington. That's why, when you had the chance, you should try to do something good. It might not be much when compared with the salvation of the universe, but it might make a difference. Every man should try to make a difference, Iz said. |
