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Saving the Scarlet Macaw in Narco Country

In eastern Honduras, Indigenous guardians are risking their lives to protect the famous red parrot.

La Moskitia, Honduras—The DHC-6 Twin Otter from Tegucigalpa touched down on a 12,000-foot strip of dirt. There was no signage confirming that this was the Puerto Lempira airport in eastern Honduras. Most passengers carried suitcases and boxes brimming with food, clothing, medicine, and other materials. But I had traveled light, ready to cross more than a hundred miles of rough road to reach inland communities where I hoped to better understand the allure of one of the most beautiful—and most highly coveted—birds in the world: the scarlet macaw, known to the Afro-Indigenous Miskito majority as the apu pauni.

Puerto Lempira—the capital of Honduras’s easternmost state, Gracias a Dios—sits on the edge of La Moskitia, a 14,000-square-mile rainforest often called “the second Amazon” and “the lungs of Central America.” In English, it’s known by the exoticized misnomer The Mosquito Coast. (Oral tradition says La Moskitia is named for Miskut, a legendary Indigenous leader—not the blood-sucking insect.) Until 1957, Gracias a Dios—literally “Thank God”— remained largely unmapped and had no formal government presence. Its remoteness—pipantes (motorized canoes) and small planes are the main mode of transportation—has helped protect its scarlet macaw population, but it has also made it a haven for groups looking to avoid the law and whose activities now threaten the iridescent bird.

My mission in La Moskitia was a simple one: to see if and how it’s still possible for scarlet macaws to live in harmony with humans in a shared community. I had already visited several macaw conservation projects run by universities, nongovernmental organizations, and wealthy individuals across Central America and the Caribbean. But as important as these efforts are, few of these incorporate Indigenous people whose ways of living have sustained both the birds and the forests they’ve lived in for millennia.

In La Moskitia, the fates of the Miskito and the scarlet macaws are inseparable. By dispersing seeds, the scarlet macaws regenerate the forests that feed the Indigenous communities, who in turn safeguard the bird. Now both the macaw and the people are under threat: Poachers raid nests for eggs bound for international buyers; settlers burn down forests for cattle and agriculture; and narco-linked groups exploit the region’s lawlessness to traffic along La Ruta, the mass of jungle and forest they use to move billions of dollars worth of drugs north.

Thankfully, I wouldn’t be undertaking the six-hour drive to La Moskitia’s villages alone. Outside the airport’s rusty gate, Santiago Lacuth, a leader in the Miskito village of Mavita, greeted me with a hearty smile, and beside the lanky Lacuth was Lorakim Joyner, a five-foot-tall Atlanta-born wildlife veterinarian and Unitarian Universalist minister who leads One Earth Conservation, a US nonprofit that works with parrot preservation efforts. They stood in front of a faded white 2005 Toyota pick-up truck. Packed with barrels of water, boxes of foodstuffs, electrical equipment, and other materials for Mavita, the Toyota had the look and feel of a reliable but tired workhorse, a Rocinante with cracked windows.

The sides of the Toyota were emblazoned with a luminescent yellow, blue, and red parrot soaring against a blue sky. Above the image were the Spanish and Miskito words: Proyecto Apu Pauni, or the Apu Pauni Project. After stalling momentarily, the Toyota awakened, and our journey to Mavita began.

Anticipating a long, bumpy ride, I asked Lacuth and his son Jarri, who sat next to me in the back wearing a baseball cap to teach me how to say things in Miskito. Their native tongue bears the marks of regional history, migration, and conquest. Miskito is a mix of local Indigenous Sumu and other regional languages, South American Chibcha, Nahuat (the language of the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican peoples), West and Central African languages, Spanish, and Caribbean languages, especially Jamaican English. Jarri began the Miskito lesson with words he thinks might be easiest for me to understand.

“We’re riding in a ‘truk,’” he told me in Spanish. “And this is the dur, he added while hitting the car door. Rice and beans mixed together—called casamiento (marriage) in my parent’s homeland of El Salvador and moros y cristianos (moors and Christians) in Cuba—is called riceanbeans in Miskito.

After I explained that I’m writing a book about scarlet macaws, he said (in Miskito-inflected Spanish), “We would say you’re writing a buk about the apu pauni.”

The English loan words in Miskito traveled to this part of the Central American Caribbean through different subjects of the British empire: formerly enslaved people who escaped plantations in Jamaica, bureaucrats, and English explorers who set foot here from the 16th to 18th centuries. Also influencing the Miskito language were pirates like Blackbeard (Edward Teach), Henry Morgan, and John Coxen—some of whom had pet scarlet macaws rumored to speak fragments of pirate English.

The pine forests and grass lawns surrounding the road give this part of La Moskitia the look and feel of one long tropical golf course, a hundred-mile mirage to someone like me coming from the drought-ravaged, soon-to-be-grassless desert of Las Vegas.

A few minutes into our trip, it became obvious that the Miskito’s Apu Pauni Project has made their marks on the land: Its signs in Miskito and Spanish dotted the road to Mavita. One of the first billboards we encountered had a picture of a large macaw flying and declared, “SAY NO TO ANIMAL TRAFFICKING!—In La Moskitia We Protect Parrots and Guaras.” (Guara is the Indigenous-derived Spanish word for the scarlet macaw in Central America.) This and other signs bear the logo of Miskitu Asla Takanka or MASTA, the organization of Miskito unity that fought for decades to secure the collective tenure over 1.6 million acres (about 7 percent of Honduras’s landmass) to the Miskito and other Indigenous groups who inhabit the region.

Further down the road, another sign declared, “These Titled Lands Belong to the Indigenous Miskito People.” Below those words, in all caps, the phrase “NO SE VENDE, NI SE COMPRA,” signaling that the land is not for sale and can’t be bought. Other signs had similar messages: “Miskito territory is not for sale” and “Whoever buys titled land buys nothing!”

“There is no such thing as private property here,” Lacuth explained. “Our Miskito statutes are very clear about this. People are invading our land and using it for cattle ranching, burning forests, and other illegal activities. The guaraand the forest are threatened by the terceros.”

The terceros—“the third ones” or “third parties”—are non-Miskito settlers from outside La Moskitia, who, for decades, have invaded the territory and cleared forests for migratory agriculture, monoculture, oil exploration, and other uses. Many of the terceros conduct their activities under the protection of Los Poderosos (literally “the powerful ones”), the cartel leaders and big ranchers making profits on this pit stop on........

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