Several hours down a clandestine road that slithers through the rotting remains of what was once protected rainforest in north-eastern Honduras, a rusted bulldozer overgrown with vines and a locked gate appeared ahead.
A vinyl banner hanging from a wooden fence advertised the sale of cattle for breeding. Behind, a palm tree stood above an empty corral like a watchtower. The driver got out to retrieve a key, a pistol tucked inside his belt.
Here, the road split into two. The right-hand fork to the Indigenous Tawahka community of Krausirpi sparked controversy in 2020 when it became the first cut through the forest to reach the remote department of Gracias a Dios. The left was a newer road to a destination unknown. The dirt in either direction was powder soft from a fresh grade.
It was all part of a network of illicit roads slicing through the Moskitia, an Indigenous territory rich in tradition that stretches from the Caribbean coast deep into Honduras and Nicaragua and encompasses the Moskitia forest, a crucial biological corridor the size of New Jersey that weaves together four natural reserves.
With the advance of these roads, the loss of virgin forest in Gracias a Dios nearly doubled between 2019 and 2021 from an already accelerated rate. If the cutting continues at its current pace, most of the Moskitia forest – and the way of life it sustains – could be lost by 2050, much sooner for many parts.
“In 20 to 30 years, we’ll have lost all of Tawahka [Asagni biosphere], all of Patuca [national park] and we’ll probably just have a little bit left of the central zone of the Rio Plátano biosphere,” said Héctor Portillo, a leading Honduran biologist, of the three reserves that join with Nicaragua’s Bosawás biosphere reserve to form the Mosquitia forest.
“We’re going to have chaos, at the level of loss of coverage, loss of biodiversity and aspects of social, economic and health wellbeing in the area,” said Portillo, who also noted the forest’s vital function as a guard against the climate crisis.
Underpinning much of the destruction are drug traffickers and their associates – bankrolled by cocaine consumption in the US and Europe – who are building the roads and laundering vast sums of money through cattle ranching and land speculation.
Drug trafficking took off in the Moskitia roughly two decades ago as narcos shifted routes to the region in response to US drug interdiction tactics in Mexico and the Caribbean. A military coup in 2009helped usher in a golden age of drug trafficking in Honduras.
Loggers and ranchers had already opened up the first tracts of the road, clawing into Indigenous Pech territory and the buffer zone of the Rio Plátano biosphere, a Unesco world heritage site. But, as trafficking intensified, one narco faction pushed deeper into the forest and installed a heavily guarded gate. When that clan fell, others bulldozed through to the Tawahka Asagni biosphere.
“There was nobody enforcing that entrance to La Moskitia and it sort of opened up more widely to both criminal actors and land speculators,” said Erik Nielsen, a professor at Northern Arizona University.
The narco-road became a money-laundering highway of destruction.
“Getting money from the narco trade means you have access to a lot of money and a lot of ways to harm others,” said Kendra McSweeney, a professor at Ohio State University. “You can get whatever you want, and they all want to just become cattle ranchers.”
Researchers call these people the “narco-enriched”. In the Moskitia there are many names, of which one is perhaps most apt: los poderosos, or “the powerful ones”. And as fewer kilos of cocaine passed through the region in recent years, the exploitation of the forest has sustained their strength.
In January 2022, the center-left president, Xiomara Castro, took office after a dozen years of conservative rule, pledging to fight drug trafficking and protect natural resources. Deforestation slowed compared with the year before, but remained at a pace well above pre-2019 levels. Members of Castro’s administration attributed the deceleration to a renewed focus on environmental issues and the creation of a Green Battalion, an army unit tasked with protecting the forests.
But the driver on the narco highway had a different theory. Heavy rains last year had made it difficult to travel the roads. “The forest saw nobody was going to protect it, so it protected itself,” he said.
At the end of the road in the village of Krausirpi, smoldering pastures gave way to towering grass, then emerald trees and a handful of wood-slat homes on stilts before the gravel curled around a cemetery and downhill to the Patuca River.
On the bluff, newly built, cement-block stores surround a plaza of sorts where trucks brimming with people or merchandise zipped in and out. The once isolated village of about a thousand residents was buzzing like a border town.
It was the first visit since 2019 for Juan Pablo Suazo, a program director for the federal Conservation and Forestry Institute who has traveled throughout the Moskitia for decades.
Suazo encountered some old friends in the plaza just before sunset and summed up what he’d seen along the way there. “It looks like an atomic bomb was dropped,” he said.
The next morning, he was troubled by something else. In past visits to Krausirpi, he was woken up before dawn to a pounding cacophony of pestle striking mortar. “It drove me crazy,” he said.
This time, however, no one could be heard husking rice.
Most of the land where people grew rice had been sold, often under duress, or taken by force, residents explained – despite communal land titles that prohibit the sale or transfer of property. Now most locals buy rice at the stores built by newcomers.
The head-spinning pace of change has residents nostalgic for the past, and regretting mistakes. “There was no danger, there was plenty of food, all these lowlands were places where the people grew crops, went fishing, it was abundant,” said Gil Cardona, a teacher. “Due to the carelessness of all the parties, we are as we are.”
Many have called for the narco-highway to be destroyed, but Cardona said that such a move would be complicated given that the main transport route of old has become unreliable. He pointed to the sluggish Patuca, where motorboats skidded on rocks as they navigated narrow passages in the shallows. Water levels were unusually low this year at the beginning of the dry season in mid-March, complicating travel. Cardona blamed a hydroelectric dam built upriver and the deforestation for the shriveling waterway.
Just outside the village, a bulldozer with the emblem of a cattle ranching association smoothed over potholes. For a few months, instead of a several-hour boat ride then a flight to the department capital to visit a hospital, the road means the Tawahka are just half a day’s drive to an even better one in Catacamas, an option that is particularly important at night when the low water makes the river dangerous to navigate in the dark and there are no flights. One local man had recently survived a machete to the skull thanks to the road, Cardona said.
In late 2022, the Castro government installed a control post in Krausirpi with support from the Wildlife Conservation Society and EU to put a brake on deforestation – and the road. About a dozen soldiers from the Green Battalion arrived, but without a truck or boat of their own to use for patrols.
Residents said the soldiers provided some welcome security, but not enough. Even some of the young soldiers confessed they felt outgunned by the enemy they were sent to confront. “What if they show up with 20 or 30 heavily armed men?” said one soldier. “Or 50?”
And in much of Tawahka territory, the forest is already gone, and so is much of an ancient way of life for the people.
“If you have cancer and at the first symptoms you seek treatment, perhaps you can be cured,” said Rommel Sánchez, president of the Tawahka Indigenous Federation of Honduras. “But a well-advanced cancer, when you see that life is already exhausting, that’s where we start to react.”
Over the past 15 years, poderosos have driven the Tawahka from four communities, said Sánchez. Although the population has grown during that time, he estimated 3,500 Tawahka people today, many have fled to the cities. Some are doing what had been unthinkable – attempting to migrate to the US.
“We were forgotten and left to battle against powerful people that we as a minority people don’t have the capacity to fight against,” said Cardona.
It’s an experience shared by Indigenous Miskitu, Pech and Garifuna communities throughout the Honduran Moskitia, and a warning for others.
As Suazo awaited a boat to head downriver, young men with sticks and horses guided a herd of white cows splashing into the Patuca. “I never thought I’d see that,” he said, explaining that the water here is normally too high to cross cattle on foot.
For centuries, the Tawahka have kept any pigs, chickens, or the occasional cow, on one side of the river, crops on the fertile banks of the other.
Among the men wading the cows through the muddied water was a friend of Suazo’s. “His family sold their land,” he said. “He told me he’d been promised [four dollars] for the work.”
Shouts echoed from the bluffs as families rushed to their dugouts and paddled frantically across the river to harvest what they could before the cows could destroy everything in their path.
