TRUJILLO

You are a town spun in history, from Cristóbal Colón’s last voyage to a port protected from pirates by the Spanish Fortaleza Santa Bárbara, from the first capital of this nascent country to the execution of filibuster William Walker. Many had their embassies here: France, Spain, England, the US.

And both United Fruit and Standard Fruit left their cobwebs, too.

~      ~      ~

I wander through the odd clutter of Señor Galván’s museum. A band’s musical instruments, collections of coins and bills. Ship anchors and moorings. Old wine and patent medicine bottles. Treadle sewing machines, branding irons, the chair and bed of a man who lived to be 106. Mayan artefacts from the sierra. Assorted alligator and shark skulls. Caged monkeys reaching for a human hand.

And from the Companies themselves. A Standard Fruit lamp and sugar cane press. A United Fruit telephone and fan, railroad jacks, a brakeman’s lantern. And a 1940s brick of the Yunay Fruit Co. Mamita Yunai … United Fruit

Out front corrodes the wreckage of a C130 that crashed near Puerto Castilla. All 21 crewmembers were killed from Howard AFB in Panama. It was never explained to us what this plane was doing here that 22 January ’85 … in Contra territory.

~      ~      ~

I am spellbound by the tangled web. I pass days talking with Mr Galván and in the public library unraveling history.

For only a short two years did Vaccaro Brothers and Co (later Standard Fruit) spin its domain eastward to here. Those siblings had their fincas of sugar cane and syphilis-curing sarsaparilla. They timbered the precious hardwoods of these surrounding jungle hills.

Afterwards United Fruit came (in 1904, Señor Galván says) and later hid under the guise of the Trujillo Rail Road Co. For lands in this area, it promised to build the railroad to Jutigalpa and beyond to Tegucigalpa. It laid the line from port to plantations: Puerto Castilla and Trujillo to Olanchito, Tocoa, Savá and no further. Amid excuses of land blackened by sigatoka, United left in 1940, before the Honduran government could confiscate the fincas and rails for not fulfilling its contract.

When the Boston Octopus pulled out, families sold their furnished homes for a mere 400 Lempiras. Still, to this day, some rich people have a hundred houses or more.

And so this town fell into a quiet backwater. Black Caribe and whiter ladino intermarried. Over the years, the memories faded. Only Mr Galván remembered why the Fruit Company submerged a train east of the pier: To protect the beachhead from erosion. The plantations way out yonder changed once more to Standard Fruit.

In the 1980s, the US-Contras arrived with training camps and cocaine-for-arms trade routes. Within these jungle swamps, the US military had clandestine bases (or so say its veterans, in fear-hushed voices).

And little by little, the foreign travelers came, seeking the tranquil sea, the safe beaches, a town free from crime.

A new posh resort is built, The Christopher Columbus. Ninety-two full-time staff but few guests. The locals say it’s a CIA den owned by Ollie North, Secord and former-Contra friends.

And after almost 90 years, Standard Fruit makes its return. A high concrete wall with barbed wire surrounds the eight or so unseen houses within. Strong floodlights safeguard the grounds. These are the homes of the CEOs who work at Puerto Castilla.

~      ~      ~

One evening in a pleasant hide-away café – with rattan chairs, glass-topped tables, plants, English newspapers – an ex-pat United Statien tells the owner and me her family wants to move from Tela. The scene is getting too heavy there – the crime, the cocaine. They have found a house near the Company’s complex. But it has no electricity. They must ask Standard Fruit for permission to put it in. Its security comes first.

When I first came to Trujillo during Christmas holidays in ’93, I could stroll alone several kilometers along the beach. I’d leave my belongings on the powdery sand and swim in that crystal-blue Caribbean.

But two years later, with clenched fists and teeth, trujillanos tell me, It isn’t safe any longer to walk those isolated stretches. Inlander ladinos are migrating in search of the work the tourism surely brings. But there are no jobs … One night from Olanchito they came to the Garífuna bars in Cocopando. A white woman danced with a black man. Six redneck ladinos shot up the place.

Two more years or so pass. One evening, walking through town, seven foreigners are robbed and stabbed. One dies.

And that cocaine now floats like a blizzard along these ex-Contra coastal routes.