The Mosquito Coast, a remote area of Honduras that's home to a large number of tribal communities, has become a stomping grounds for drug traffickers.
Most people in the region speak Miskito. They typically depend on fishing and farming but now they say young people are being lured into the drug trade by easy money and easy jobs.
"The drug activity here creates a danger to all of us,” Sinicio Ordoñez, the president of the indigenous Council of Elders, told The New York Times. “The people here, they just wanted to be rid of it.”
Locals blame the problem on an influx of traffickers from Mexico and Colombia.
But they say the response by the Honduras government -- aided by the
Drug Enforcement Agency, whose agents were recently involved in a deadly shooting in a tribal community -- isn't helping.
"Helicopters and soldiers are not development,” Raymundo Eude, a tribal leader who wants the DEA out of the region by May 30, told the Times. “It doesn’t help.”
Get the Story:
Drug Trafficking and Raids Stir Danger on the Mosquito Coast
(The New York Times 5/24)
Related Stories:
DEA agents claim they didn't fire weapons in
Honduras incident (5/18)
Four dead in DEA-involved
shooting in tribal area of Honduras (5/17)
Join the Conversation
