The economic fortunes of a village in Central America have turned on a tide of errant cocaine shipments either abandoned or lost by Columbian smugglers.

A combination of law enforcement, geography and ocean currents has washed tons of the drug - read millions of dollars - into the village of Karpwala in one of the Caribbean's most desolate and isolated regions.

Villages that once eked an existence on shrimp and red-tinged lobster have been transformed and now eagerly await the next arrival of the income source known fondly as "white lobster".

"They consider it a blessing from God," said Louis Perez, the police chief in Bluefields, the main port on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast.

"You see people all day just walking up and down the beaches keeping a lookout to sea."

Colombian speedboats with 800-horsepower outboard motors can usually outrun US and Nicaraguan patrols, but on occasion they are intercepted, not least when US snipers hit their engines.

"Then they throw the coke overboard to get rid of the evidence," said a European drug enforcement official based in the region.

"Other times it's because they run out of fuel or have an accident."

Currents carry the bales towards the shore.

A decade ago many of the indigenous Miskito people had not even heard of cocaine and some 15 villagers were said to have died after mistaking it for baking powder.

But that innocence is long gone.

Colombian traffickers and Nicaraguan middlemen now trawl villages offering finders $ 4,000 a kilogram, said Major Perez - seven times less than the US street value but a fortune to a fisherman.

Some locals who used to be in rags live it up at posh hotels in Bluefields and Managua, others stock up on wide-screen TVs and expensive beer.

With its creole English and African slave descendants, the community feels more Jamaican than Nicaraguan.

Nearby Tasbapauni's high-rolling reputation has earned it the nickname Little Miami.

That's an exaggeration. There is still plenty of poverty and barefoot children and there are no roads or vehicles and little to break the silence except lapping surf, clucking chickens and the occasional thud of a falling coconut.

But things are different. "Today the toiling is easier. Life is plenty better than before," said Percival Hebbert, 84, a Moravian Church pastor and village leader.

"The community is like this: you find drugs, this one find drugs, the next one find drugs - that money is stirring right here in the community, going round and round."

The white lobster was a blessing, he said, as long as the bonanza was spent wisely. "Almost all you see with a good home, a good cement home, those are the ones who find them things."

The church had just installed a shiny white floor thanks to a donation from a fisherman, Ted Hayman, who reputedly hauled in 220 kilograms.

Mr Hayman chose the colors and tiles himself. "He's a kind man," said Mr Hebbert.

He was grateful but lamented the church's cut was not greater.

"God says that 10 percent of whatever you earn is his. But no one do that here."

Villages further north also oblige finders to give a tenth to the church.

Agencies

(China Daily 10/10/2007 page9)