so a lot happens lots starts here in
Washington DC for me it was my career
there’s a lot of else that’s going on
here too which is that Washington has
the distinction of being one of the
great capitals of the world for cocaine
consumption there’s greater per capita
cocaine use here particularly among
white-collar workers
second only to New York so what I want
to do is begin in this point of
consumption of cocaine consumption and
take you back down the commodity chain
not to where we typically think of when
we see these crazy maps full of arrows
pointing north not back to where coca is
grown in cocaine is produced in South
America but rather I want to take you
halfway back down the commodity chain to
those areas hiding under those red
arrows in Central America those spaces
through which cocaine is merely moved
like packages in a DHL hub these are
transshipment zones through which
cocaine moves on its journey northward
to markets such as those I’m sure just
outside the door here so I want to take
you specifically to look at a region in
eastern Honduras it’s known as the
Mosquito Coast region of Eastern
Honduras and Nicaragua and this is an
area of tremendous biological and
cultural diversity it has many protected
areas internationally recognized world
heritage sites and so on and I want to
take you specifically into the
communities of the two waka people
they’re one of Honduras is smallest
ethnic groups fewer than 2,000 people
they’re regionally known for the
spectacular dugout canoes that they
produce almost entirely by hand no
chainsaws here that just pure acts and
ads and I want to take you through the
ways that I’ve become aware that this is
an area that is being both culturally
and ecologically devastated by both the
consumption here in the US of cocaine
but also what I would argue are the u.s.
is deeply flawed policies with
to the global war on drugs all right so
how did I get into drugs well uh after
working the National Geographic I went
to live in Eastern Honduras for two
years working on a research project
there and that began a career as a
geography professor by which I’ve been
very privileged to be able to repeatedly
return to this place over time and that
has allowed a wonderful opportunity to
really understand the very dynamic
relationships between people there and
the forests with which they coexist and
I’ve learned a lot about how forests
make people and people make forests in
this region and one of the things that
my repeat research trips to the region
had shown me and it really convinced me
of was just how profoundly resilient the
to walk of people and their eco and the
ecosystem which defines them have been
and by resilient I mean they have shown
a remarkable ability to bounce back for
example in the 1930s their population
was devastated by a smallpox epidemic
they were reduced to about a hundred
people and it was through the choices
made by women like Dona Rufina here she
was pushing a hundred when I saw her in
2011 she just died before Christmas last
year because there was so few to walk
him in to Mary she among her six
husband’s life is short and in the
region for men snakebite disease and
other things on your six husband there
was not a single to walk a man but she
raised all of her children to speak to
walk it and to learn that to walk away
so all of her children though
genetically diverse some in
incorporating much non Amerindian blood
they nevertheless speak to waka and
identify themselves culturally as to
waka so she and other women like her
have been essential for passing on what
it is to be too waka talk you’ve also
been extremely successful at bouncing
back from the threat of colonists
incursion into their territory savvy
political leaders like Edgardo Benitez
have been able to organize international
allies to have in 1999 their territory
declared the toake sangmi biosphere
reserve
and then perhaps most impressively after
Hurricane Mitch wiped out two of their
communities and almost all of their
horticultural and agricultural lands
decade’s worth of agroforestry plots
they were able to rebound in a way that
used the storm as a window of
opportunity to reorganize their
agricultural activities and to in fact
be more sustainable planting precious
trees like mahogany for example so it
was with funding from the committee for
research and exploration from National
Geographic that I returned in 2011 to
walk a territory thinking that I was
going to be able to research the latest
ways in which they were manifesting
their cultural their socio ecological
resilience and went down with an
undergraduate and a graduate student and
it had been a while since I’d been back
I’d had two kids I got in tenure and
this had been my longest time away after
three days of traveling through the
region to get into the Tohoku area by
dugout canoe this is a community prior
to our visit this is what we saw we saw
landscapes just devastated this is the
site where a community I’d known and
where I’d eaten my first monkey and
drunk all sorts of fermented beverages
and people were gone I was told they’d
fled to Nicaragua some of them were
living poor in the capital city
we saw patterns of deforestation I never
seen before right down to the water’s
edge on incredibly steep slopes and when
I talk to people about what was going on
they kept telling me the same thing
narcos now when I had lived in this area
in the mid 90s we heard planes in the
night I mean cocaine has been moving
through Central America since the disco
era and I was able to use knowing the
local language and being able to talk to
people in the 20 years of trust I built
up in this region to really ask people
what was going on why why were drugs
why was the mere passage of drugs
through this area having this effect and
key to understanding this is to
understand that when a plane lands and
is unloaded of its a 700 kilos of
cocaine the plane is burned that gives
you a me
an idea of how little the plane is worth
relative to its cargo it’s just not
worth flying back so what you see is an
absolute tsunami of money hitting these
communities that comes with that brings
in that buys impunity and that buys
weapons so traffickers in this region
have been able to buy up land from –
walka and other indigenous groups and
pay for the labor to have that force
those forest lands converted into cattle
pasture and they’re doing it in huge
swaths 500 hectares at a time and the
question is why would drug traffickers
want to be interested in cattle ranches
well these are untraceable transactions
right so they’re a wonderful way to
launder drug profits otherwise known as
the land laundering and in fact when the
US Treasury Department froze the assets
of a Honduran trafficking organization
they found that a lot of the assets that
they held were in palm plantations and
cattle ranches so it’s a great way to
launder money but it’s also a really
excellent way for criminal organizations
to diversify their investment portfolios
they are good capitalists like everyone
else and they are investing in the
tropical land rush driven in part by
high demand for ethanol which is fueling
literally the expansion of African oil
palm plantations these were planted on
illicit lands on lands illicit ly
purchased very close to the Mosquitia
and in fact moving into the Mosquitia
and the result of course is that the
money narcos can can manipulate buys
complicity with government officials
leaving the to walk a very much on their
own to fight this scourge and not
surprisingly this was a group of men of
to walk and mosquito men who went to
challenge some traffickers who were
clearing land very close to their
territories and they were rebuffed with
ak-47s an m16 so leaders are threatened
if they speak out there was literally no
one in the region to witness this
process
no one knew this was going on and so to
walk they’re also unable to move through
their traditional seasonal agricultural
and fishing activity so they’re stuck
fishing for crappy little fish
near their home communities because they
are not allowed basically they’re sealed
off by a narco cordon to secure the area
and perhaps one of the most pernicious
effects of the traffickers is their
tremendous skill at being able to pit –
they’re dividing conquer strategies
their ability to turn neighbors against
neighbors so one of the things they do
in approaching a remote indigenous
community has identified that weakest
link that one family that is so poor
that they can act as the lane
consolidators on behalf of the narcos
and this pits family against family this
is a picture of Walter I took it in
about nine years ago we were finishing
up post hold survey in his community
he’s in the one-room schoolhouse that
has since been sold to narcos and we
were having a little dance Walter and
his brother this past Easter had heard
that their cousins were clearing land
for narcos in the area he went to
confront those narcos and was killed
with an m16 the man behind these
children is the man who shot him and I
know this man he was a lovely man he’s
the father of these four and other
children these are good people
caught in an impossible situation and
they really are hanging on by their
fingernails this incredibly resilient
community that I once knew is as the
Tabaka leader said really not far from
disappearing so the question is what can
we do about this I think one of the
things there are three things we can do
one tell your friends who recreationally
consume cocaine to just what the cost of
their recreational use is doing two
places overseas second I think we really
need to rethink the war on drugs we’re
not talking about legalizing cocaine
let’s not get carried away here just
talking about sitting down and reviewing
drug policy orthodoxy which has for 40
years done nothing but move traffickers
into ever more remote regions where they
create all sorts of social and
ecological chaos not to mention the
damage going on in urban areas I think
the Organization of American States has
broken with drug war orthodoxy it’s one
of the first big organizations to do so
I’m working with the UN
UNDP and the UN EP to kind of change the
conversation within the UN system so
that they can get on board with kind of
ways to rethink the drug war but I think
also we have to look at the ways in
which our retirement portfolios and
other financial mechanisms and the fear
over not having enough farmland in the
future are pushing financial markets to
take great interest in tropical forest
lands and their destruction and I think
there are alternatives to that wasting
less food is one of them using more
solar energy so we don’t need to be
feeding African oil palm to our cars is
another so let’s think about those
things about connecting the dots and
understanding how we are all complicit
in the destruction of this of this
really quite unique place thank you
you
Washington DC for me it was my career
there’s a lot of else that’s going on
here too which is that Washington has
the distinction of being one of the
great capitals of the world for cocaine
consumption there’s greater per capita
cocaine use here particularly among
white-collar workers
second only to New York so what I want
to do is begin in this point of
consumption of cocaine consumption and
take you back down the commodity chain
not to where we typically think of when
we see these crazy maps full of arrows
pointing north not back to where coca is
grown in cocaine is produced in South
America but rather I want to take you
halfway back down the commodity chain to
those areas hiding under those red
arrows in Central America those spaces
through which cocaine is merely moved
like packages in a DHL hub these are
transshipment zones through which
cocaine moves on its journey northward
to markets such as those I’m sure just
outside the door here so I want to take
you specifically to look at a region in
eastern Honduras it’s known as the
Mosquito Coast region of Eastern
Honduras and Nicaragua and this is an
area of tremendous biological and
cultural diversity it has many protected
areas internationally recognized world
heritage sites and so on and I want to
take you specifically into the
communities of the two waka people
they’re one of Honduras is smallest
ethnic groups fewer than 2,000 people
they’re regionally known for the
spectacular dugout canoes that they
produce almost entirely by hand no
chainsaws here that just pure acts and
ads and I want to take you through the
ways that I’ve become aware that this is
an area that is being both culturally
and ecologically devastated by both the
consumption here in the US of cocaine
but also what I would argue are the u.s.
is deeply flawed policies with
to the global war on drugs all right so
how did I get into drugs well uh after
working the National Geographic I went
to live in Eastern Honduras for two
years working on a research project
there and that began a career as a
geography professor by which I’ve been
very privileged to be able to repeatedly
return to this place over time and that
has allowed a wonderful opportunity to
really understand the very dynamic
relationships between people there and
the forests with which they coexist and
I’ve learned a lot about how forests
make people and people make forests in
this region and one of the things that
my repeat research trips to the region
had shown me and it really convinced me
of was just how profoundly resilient the
to walk of people and their eco and the
ecosystem which defines them have been
and by resilient I mean they have shown
a remarkable ability to bounce back for
example in the 1930s their population
was devastated by a smallpox epidemic
they were reduced to about a hundred
people and it was through the choices
made by women like Dona Rufina here she
was pushing a hundred when I saw her in
2011 she just died before Christmas last
year because there was so few to walk
him in to Mary she among her six
husband’s life is short and in the
region for men snakebite disease and
other things on your six husband there
was not a single to walk a man but she
raised all of her children to speak to
walk it and to learn that to walk away
so all of her children though
genetically diverse some in
incorporating much non Amerindian blood
they nevertheless speak to waka and
identify themselves culturally as to
waka so she and other women like her
have been essential for passing on what
it is to be too waka talk you’ve also
been extremely successful at bouncing
back from the threat of colonists
incursion into their territory savvy
political leaders like Edgardo Benitez
have been able to organize international
allies to have in 1999 their territory
declared the toake sangmi biosphere
reserve
and then perhaps most impressively after
Hurricane Mitch wiped out two of their
communities and almost all of their
horticultural and agricultural lands
decade’s worth of agroforestry plots
they were able to rebound in a way that
used the storm as a window of
opportunity to reorganize their
agricultural activities and to in fact
be more sustainable planting precious
trees like mahogany for example so it
was with funding from the committee for
research and exploration from National
Geographic that I returned in 2011 to
walk a territory thinking that I was
going to be able to research the latest
ways in which they were manifesting
their cultural their socio ecological
resilience and went down with an
undergraduate and a graduate student and
it had been a while since I’d been back
I’d had two kids I got in tenure and
this had been my longest time away after
three days of traveling through the
region to get into the Tohoku area by
dugout canoe this is a community prior
to our visit this is what we saw we saw
landscapes just devastated this is the
site where a community I’d known and
where I’d eaten my first monkey and
drunk all sorts of fermented beverages
and people were gone I was told they’d
fled to Nicaragua some of them were
living poor in the capital city
we saw patterns of deforestation I never
seen before right down to the water’s
edge on incredibly steep slopes and when
I talk to people about what was going on
they kept telling me the same thing
narcos now when I had lived in this area
in the mid 90s we heard planes in the
night I mean cocaine has been moving
through Central America since the disco
era and I was able to use knowing the
local language and being able to talk to
people in the 20 years of trust I built
up in this region to really ask people
what was going on why why were drugs
why was the mere passage of drugs
through this area having this effect and
key to understanding this is to
understand that when a plane lands and
is unloaded of its a 700 kilos of
cocaine the plane is burned that gives
you a me
an idea of how little the plane is worth
relative to its cargo it’s just not
worth flying back so what you see is an
absolute tsunami of money hitting these
communities that comes with that brings
in that buys impunity and that buys
weapons so traffickers in this region
have been able to buy up land from –
walka and other indigenous groups and
pay for the labor to have that force
those forest lands converted into cattle
pasture and they’re doing it in huge
swaths 500 hectares at a time and the
question is why would drug traffickers
want to be interested in cattle ranches
well these are untraceable transactions
right so they’re a wonderful way to
launder drug profits otherwise known as
the land laundering and in fact when the
US Treasury Department froze the assets
of a Honduran trafficking organization
they found that a lot of the assets that
they held were in palm plantations and
cattle ranches so it’s a great way to
launder money but it’s also a really
excellent way for criminal organizations
to diversify their investment portfolios
they are good capitalists like everyone
else and they are investing in the
tropical land rush driven in part by
high demand for ethanol which is fueling
literally the expansion of African oil
palm plantations these were planted on
illicit lands on lands illicit ly
purchased very close to the Mosquitia
and in fact moving into the Mosquitia
and the result of course is that the
money narcos can can manipulate buys
complicity with government officials
leaving the to walk a very much on their
own to fight this scourge and not
surprisingly this was a group of men of
to walk and mosquito men who went to
challenge some traffickers who were
clearing land very close to their
territories and they were rebuffed with
ak-47s an m16 so leaders are threatened
if they speak out there was literally no
one in the region to witness this
process
no one knew this was going on and so to
walk they’re also unable to move through
their traditional seasonal agricultural
and fishing activity so they’re stuck
fishing for crappy little fish
near their home communities because they
are not allowed basically they’re sealed
off by a narco cordon to secure the area
and perhaps one of the most pernicious
effects of the traffickers is their
tremendous skill at being able to pit –
they’re dividing conquer strategies
their ability to turn neighbors against
neighbors so one of the things they do
in approaching a remote indigenous
community has identified that weakest
link that one family that is so poor
that they can act as the lane
consolidators on behalf of the narcos
and this pits family against family this
is a picture of Walter I took it in
about nine years ago we were finishing
up post hold survey in his community
he’s in the one-room schoolhouse that
has since been sold to narcos and we
were having a little dance Walter and
his brother this past Easter had heard
that their cousins were clearing land
for narcos in the area he went to
confront those narcos and was killed
with an m16 the man behind these
children is the man who shot him and I
know this man he was a lovely man he’s
the father of these four and other
children these are good people
caught in an impossible situation and
they really are hanging on by their
fingernails this incredibly resilient
community that I once knew is as the
Tabaka leader said really not far from
disappearing so the question is what can
we do about this I think one of the
things there are three things we can do
one tell your friends who recreationally
consume cocaine to just what the cost of
their recreational use is doing two
places overseas second I think we really
need to rethink the war on drugs we’re
not talking about legalizing cocaine
let’s not get carried away here just
talking about sitting down and reviewing
drug policy orthodoxy which has for 40
years done nothing but move traffickers
into ever more remote regions where they
create all sorts of social and
ecological chaos not to mention the
damage going on in urban areas I think
the Organization of American States has
broken with drug war orthodoxy it’s one
of the first big organizations to do so
I’m working with the UN
UNDP and the UN EP to kind of change the
conversation within the UN system so
that they can get on board with kind of
ways to rethink the drug war but I think
also we have to look at the ways in
which our retirement portfolios and
other financial mechanisms and the fear
over not having enough farmland in the
future are pushing financial markets to
take great interest in tropical forest
lands and their destruction and I think
there are alternatives to that wasting
less food is one of them using more
solar energy so we don’t need to be
feeding African oil palm to our cars is
another so let’s think about those
things about connecting the dots and
understanding how we are all complicit
in the destruction of this of this
really quite unique place thank you
you
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