On Little Corn Island, Nicaragua life can best be described as a strange amalgamation between Gilligan’s Island and The Lord Of The Flies. It lies about 45 km from the mainland and is a median on the highway that brings Colombian cocaine into Central America en route to California. The island can be circum-navigated by foot in about two hours. There are no police. No phones. No McDonald’s. No roads. You can’t drive there. You can’t fly there. You can’t buy a postcard or a t-shirt that says that you were there. The only way to get to the island is via panga boat. A fourty-five minute ride across the open sea in a 30’ skiff with dual 200 hp Everons. It is a very remote island off the coast of an impoverished and under-developed country.
Colombian coyotes would run skiffs to Little Corn and it’s brother, Big Corn Island. They would change Colombian hands to Nicaraguan and eventually get trafficked to the mainland, usually in the Bluefields area. On occasion the Nicaraguan military would make shows of force on the island. They would position themselves at various points and look for boats that were riding low in the water from enormous loads. Questions weren’t asked. If you were a runner who got caught you got an opportunity to plea your case through the barrel of an AK-47 before the seasoned and salty Nicaraguan who in addition to the role of policeman also played the roles of judge and jury.
Boats were shot up and would occasionally appear within sight of the shore. This would sometimes result in some serious bales of cocaine and weed that were floating randomly about the sea. Some would float ashore. The islanders would call it the “lottery of the sea”. The police in Nicaragua earned roughly US$60 per month. The locals earned less. So you can imagine the excitement when an industrial-sized garbage bag marijuana or a hefty sack of cocaine floats ashore. It changes the whole island. Not because the people get all fucked up and destroy the face of moral purity. But because the Colombian kingpin is usually on the island before the police looking to buy his stash back for maybe 10% of it’s street value. It is a win-win situation. The kingpin gets his shit back. And the locals are able to buy school books for children, build churches, afford new clothes, etc.
I went to Little Corn Island so that I could study Caribbean seafood in an environment that wasn’t spoiled by commercialism. I wanted to see what sort of African influence was brought to the island, if any, during the slave trade. I was there to study the natural ingredients. It was an opportunity to get away from Florida’s blackened chicken with mango salsa which appears on damn near every menu south of Tallahassee.
I picked the brain of anyone who would listen. My staff was Spanish-speaking and my Spanish was far less than fluent. I could pick apart sentences and somehow put things together. I was asking my assistant in the kitchen about indigenous ingredients, particularly from the sea. I wanted to know about seaweeds that were harvested from the area. So I made a half-assed attempt and asked her in broken Spanish what sort of seaweeds did the Nicaraguans farm from the sea. It translates roughly to “what are the sea vegetables that the Nicaraguuans use?”.
The question left her perplexed. Her face tightened up and I could tell that she was really trying to put together what I was trying to communicate. Or maybe she was thinking “what the hell is this crazy gringo talking about?”. I waited in silence for a minute and then it came. She looked at me with a dead honest face and said “solamente marijuana y cocaina”. It turns out that the only vegetables the Nicaraguans were farming from the sea were marijuana and cocaine. Most likely harvested by the Colombians.
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