Nicaragua is one of the last places where commercial lobster diving is allowed despite tragic results.
PUERTO CABEZAS, Nicaragua — Milton Periera sits in a wooden wheelchair fitted with hand pedals, watching the lobster boats appear on the gray horizon.
They are bringing the first lobster harvest in since last year’s Category 5 Hurricane Felix plowed through this impoverished port town on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast.
Periera used to plunge as deep as 140 feet, up to 15 times, for lobster, all of which ended up on the plates of Americans. During season, he earned up to $200 a day snatching lobster from the seabed, making a small fortune in one of the poorest parts of the world.
After one particularly deep dive, he felt a squeezing in his chest. Decompression sickness overtook him, and his legs went numb.
”Maybe I’ll walk again, but who knows when that will be,” says the 26-year-old paraplegic.
As many as 5,000 Nicaraguan men — most of them indigenous Miskitos — risk their lives each year in Nicaragua’s commercial lobster industry, taking on the increasingly perilous task of plucking ”red gold” from the Caribbean. Amid widespread overexploitation, divers are heading farther out into the high seas, and diving deeper to bring in the harvest.
According to the local divers’ union, there are as many as 800 debilitated or paralyzed divers living in Nicaragua, and the death toll of those who suffered health complications related to decompression sickness has reached 200 since 1990. Though the Nicaraguan government plans to phase out lobster diving within three years, it’s one of the last places on Earth where commercial lobster diving is allowed despite such tragic results.
`ENDEMIC DISEASE’
Chuck Carr, a marine biologist from the Gainesville-based Wildlife Conservation Society, who specializes in Central America, said decompression sickness is an ”endemic disease” on the Mosquito coast.
”It’s abuse of natural resources, of human beings. It’s a scandal,” said Carr. “Nicaragua is notorious for this syndrome of diving without regard for dive tables, to the extent that people get bends on a mass basis. Nobody has ever seen anything like it.”
As Nicaragua’s economically devastated North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN) tries to recover from the disastrous effects of Felix, more divers are expected to head out to sea this year to earn desperately needed cash.
”The only income that comes into this town is through the buzos [divers],” said Dr. Francisco Selvas, who treats divers with the bends at the Nuevo Amanacer hospital in Puerto Cabezas, home to Nicaragua’s only decompression chamber.
The Nicaraguan Fishing Institute’s solution is to lure lobster divers into the fishing industry. The Nicaraguan Congress just approved $17 million in World Bank financing that includes funds for small fishermen recovering from the hurricane, says the institute’s director, Steadman Fagoth. When it swept through last September, Felix wreaked havoc on Nicaragua’s fish export industry, which dropped 11 percent to $90 million last year, according to the Central Bank.
”It is more profitable and they can be more independent,” Fagoth said of the divers, adding that the country’s maritime territory — expanded last year in a territorial dispute settlement suit with Honduras — houses 6,000 metric tons and 57 species of exportable fish, a largely untapped resource.
ASKING FOR TROUBLE
But lobster industry insiders like lobster exporter Fabio Robelo say cutting off the main source of income would be asking for trouble. On several occasions throughout the Caribbean, violent riots have broken out in the wake of the hurricane.
On Corn Islands, the pair of Caribbean islands where Robelo is manager for Central American Fisheries, lobster divers took over the airport and tried burning down the mayor’s office in June protests against diminishing earnings as lobster companies cut pay due to skyrocketing gas prices.
”How can you tell so many people not to lobster dive without offering them something else?” asked Robelo.
The notoriously isolated Puerto Cabezas, a town of 40,000 that is a bumpy two-day drive from Managua, saw a population explosion after the 1980s contra war came to an end. Miskito Indians returning from exile or retiring their arms became the region’s first lobster divers as scuba technology became available in Central America, Carr said. Because diving is three times more effective than traps, the coasts’ shallow lobster grounds were depleted within a few years. Divers headed into the deep blue.
Today, lobster companies are going 30 miles out to sea and diving more than 100 feet. Hondurans who have killed off lobster in their area of the Caribbean by overfishing it head now to Nicaragua. Few follow dive tables. In Puerto Cabezas, where nearly half the population lived in extreme poverty before Felix hit, there are few other employment opportunities.
Carr, who specializes in Central America’s Caribbean, says the lobster boat owners follow no safety standards.
”Another nasty part of this story is that the captain will turn their back when that kid agrees to dive for the fourth time before diving without decompressing,” he said. “It’s just outrageous.”
The Caribbean drug culture adds to the chaotic equation. Divers come back to shore and spend their cash on booze and cocaine.
”Families don’t get the rewards,” Carr said.
Robelo, who oversees one of the Caribbean’s biggest lobster operations, says the lobster supply is being bled by a $14 million annual black market for fish and lobster in Nicaragua. Not only is the April-to-June lobster ban largely ignored by small divers, but so is a prohibition on hunting immature lobster before they spawn.
Before Felix swept through, the government had canceled lobster permits due to scarcities caused by overexploitation.
The hurricane made the shortage worse.
”Felix destroyed the reef and seabed. Nature needs time to regenerate itself,” said Brooklyn Rivera, Nicaragua’s only indigenous legislator representing the RAAN.
VETS WITHOUT MEDALS
At the dock entrance in Puerto Cabezas, old leather-faced divers with walking canes and wheelchairs loiter among crowds of women and children, looking like war vets without all the medals.
Like many of the growing number of divers who suffer the bends — an illness with a range of symptoms caused by a pressure decrease involved with a rapid ascent from a dive — Periera didn’t get immediate treatment when decompression sickness set in.
The lobster companies are reluctant to take on costs of evacuating ill divers. If at high sea, the trip back can take two weeks, Selva said.
”They’re not going to take a loss to help a diver,” he said.
