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Cocaine galore! Villagers live it up on profits from ‘white lobster’

Centuries of troubles have bobbed on the waves off the Mosquito Coast: Christopher Columbus, the Spanish conquest, pirates, slave ships. For the fishing villages scattered across these remote central American shores there was seldom reason to welcome visits from the outside world.

But that was before the “white lobster”, and before everything changed. Now the villagers rise at first light to scan the horizon in hope of seeing a very different type of intruder.

What they are looking for, and what they have coyly euphemised, are big, bulging bags of Colombian cocaine. A combination of law enforcement, geography and ocean currents has washed tonnes of the drug, and millions of dollars, into what was one of the Caribbean’s most desolate and isolated regions. Villages that once eked an existence on shrimp and red-tinged lobster have been transformed. In place of thatched wooden huts there are brick houses, mansions and satellite dishes.

“They consider it a blessing from God. You see people all day just walking up and down the beaches keeping a lookout to sea,” said Louis Perez, the police chief in Bluefields, the main port on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast.

Mr Hayman, 37, Tasbapauni’s most “blessed” fisherman, has converted his shack into a three-storey mansion with iron gates, a satellite dish and architecture best described as narc-deco.