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DIVING—AND DYING—FOR RED GOLD: THE HUMAN COST OF HONDURAN LOBSTER

The Walton Family Foundation invested in a Honduran lobster fishery, targeting
its sustainability and touting its success. Ten years later, thousands of
workers have been injured or killed.

By Alice Driver

December 6, 2023

Injured divers work on various exercises in a small rehabilitation room at the
hospital. Dr. Henzel Roberto Pérez, the deputy director of information
management at the hospital, said that one of the many problems with the lobster
diving industry is “Children are working for these companies. At least one of
the companies is from the United States.” (Photo credit: Jacky Muniello)

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READ MORE ABOUT

* Business
* Food and Farm Labor
* Food Justice
* Seafood
* Walanthropy

The Long Reach of the Walmart-Walton Empire

Walmart’s ‘Regenerative Foodscape’

Op-ed: Walmart’s Outsized Catch

The Year in Civil Eats Investigations, 2023

The True Cost of Tuna: Marine Observers Dying at Sea

Op-ed: Catch Shares Enable Wealthy Landlords to Gobble Up Local Fisheries

Próspero Bendles Marcelino was 15 when he began diving for spiny lobster in the
Caribbean waters between Honduras and Nicaragua. That was in 1965, and if he
caught an average of 10 pounds of lobster, he earned the equivalent of $30 in
today’s terms. A member of the Indigenous Miskito community, he was born in
rural Ahuás, Honduras, 29 miles from Puerto Lempira, the capital of the Gracias
a Dios region, in the most remote and biodiverse part of the country.

Since childhood, during the eight-month lobster season from July to February,
Marcelino would wake at dawn with 20 Miskito divers, slip out of his tomb-like
bunk on a 40-foot dive boat, and gather the diving equipment: rusty air tanks,
cracked fins and goggles, hammers, and the metal rods with hooks used to pry
lobsters from their lairs. He would hand the equipment to a friend, who waited
in a cayuco, a canoe carved out of a tree trunk. The cayucero, usually a family
member or friend, paddled the cayuco with the diver and gear and waited for
Marcelino to surface between dives to throw the lobsters into the dive boat. All
around it, cayuceros paddled in a constellation of effort, positioning divers to
descend to lobster lairs.

Walanthropy: Walmart and the Waltons Wield Unprecedented Influence Over Food,
Policy, and the Planet.

Read all the stories in our series:

* Overview: The Long Reach of the Walmart-Walton Empire
In this ongoing investigative series, we take a detailed look at Walmart and
its founding family’s influence over the American food system, over the
producers and policymakers who shape it, and how its would-be critics are
also its bedfellows.
* Walmart’s ‘Regenerative Foodscape’ Walmart’s efforts to redefine itself as a
regenerative company are at odds with its low-cost model, and combined with
the Walton family’s vast investments in regenerative agriculture, have the
potential to remake the marketplace.
* Walmart and EDF Forged an Unlikely Partnership. 17 Years Later, What’s
Changed? We talk with Elizabeth Sturcken for an up-close look at the
sustainability alliance between the environmental nonprofit and the retail
behemoth.
* Op-ed: Walmart’s Outsized Catch: Walmart and the Walton Family Foundation
have relied on a debatable definition of “sustainable” seafood that allows it
to achieve its sourcing goals without fundamentally changing its business
model.
* Diving—and Dying—for Red Gold: The Human Cost of Honduran Lobster: The Walton
Family Foundation invested in a Honduran lobster fishery, targeting its
sustainability and touting its success. Ten years later, thousands of workers
have been injured or killed.
* Walmart’s Pandemic Port Squeeze: While most retailers dealt with congested
ports and unprecedented shipping prices, Walmart chartered its own ships,
increased sales, and used its market gains to sideline competitors. Then it
weighed in on shipping reform.

The sea, a deep blue from above, was darker 70 to 130 feet below where the
lobsters hid in lairs. Marcelino navigated swift, cold currents and poor
visibility to reach them. They used their sharp spikes to anchor themselves in
their lairs. He pulled them out with a hook, putting them into a bag. Hooking
the lobsters by their tails was easier, but dive boat captains discouraged
divers from leaving marks on the lobster that would indicate how it was caught.
This allowed captains to sell their lobster as if it were trap-caught and for
that lie to be told all the way through the supply chain, until it was comingled
at processing facilities.

Honduran spiny lobster is a $46.7 million industry, exported almost entirely to
U.S. markets. While some of the lobster is trap-caught, it is cheaper to rely on
divers. But dive boats and the processors that buy their catch do not invest in
training or equipping divers. In the remote region with few jobs, the owners of
the lobster boats save money at the cost of the divers, paying poverty wages,
offering no protective gear, demanding an unsafe number of dives per day, and
sometimes offering divers drugs to increase their tolerance for pain and
weariness. When divers are injured, most dive boat owners do not want to pay for
their care.

Marcelino, like most divers in the region, always dove without a wetsuit, air
gauge, or depth gauge. If his air ran out and he had to ascend quickly or he
dove beyond the 130-feet limit for single-cylinder diving, he could get
decompression sickness, also called the bends. Of the 9,000 divers in the
region, 97 percent have suffered from the bends after ascending too quickly and
breathing compressed air that contains nitrogen gas, which can accumulate in the
diver’s body tissue, according to the Centre for Justice and International Law
(CEJIL), a nonprofit human-rights organization that has worked with the divers
and their families. Trained divers make safety stops while ascending, the length
of which are usually calculated by their dive watch, taking into account their
maximum depth. If divers are not taken to a decompression chamber within 24
hours of getting the bends, they can suffer numbness, impaired coordination,
paralysis, and cerebral disorders.

Miskito divers, partially paralyzed due to decompression sickness, work on
rehabilitation exercises at the ho spital in Puerto Lempira. Divers often live
in small villages and must travel hours by boat to reach the hospital. Many
can’t afford the cost of travel by boat and so have no access to medical care or
rehabilitation. (Photo credit: Jacky Muniello)

The U.S. companies that import spiny lobster and the U.S. organizations that are
active in fisheries in Honduras try to avoid the labor rights issues inherent in
lobster diving. They say that they only source from and work with trap-caught
lobster. Some, including the Walton Family Foundation and Darden Restaurants,
the former owner of Red Lobster, have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars
trying to turn this lobster into a success story. For the people that live here,
it isn’t.

When sharks circled too close, Marcelino would hit them with his air tank. He
completed 12 to 18 dives per day for 12 to 14 days in a row, although experts
recommend a maximum of three dives per day. He dove for many years, an Olympian
athletic feat, surviving conditions that few could, until he could not.

“In Gracias a Dios, most men live from this work; there is no other work. . . .
This work is so difficult that my husband never slept well.”

Marcelino perhaps believed, like many Miskito, that when the sickness struck
them, they had seen Liwa Mairin, the mermaid spirit of the sea. Liwa Mairin
punished them for taking too many lobsters. And yet, to dive or work in the
lobster industry was the only way for many of the 78,000 Miskito to make a
living. Like their fathers and grandfathers, many Miskito divers end up
paralyzed, disappeared, or dead. Like Marcelino.

Marcelino died in 2003. His death occurred in the fishery that conservationists
funded by the Walton Family Foundation later called a “success story.” Ten years
ago, the foundation announced, to much fanfare, that it would create a fund to
improve Honduran lobster management with Darden, the world’s largest
full-service restaurant company. Announced at the Clinton Global Initiative, a
gathering where world leaders discuss global challenges, the effort received a
steady stream of congratulatory press coverage, including from preeminent
seafood publications like Intrafish, Undercurrent and Seafood Source, as well as
from mainstream press like GreenBiz and Yahoo Finance. All celebrated the news
as corporate do-goodery.

Walton and Darden put hundreds of thousands into a fund for Honduran fisheries,
managed by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF). About $220,000 was
used to execute a fishery improvement project (FIP), intended to improve fishing
practice or management, in this case to benefit the lobster. Over the next
several years, grantees tasked with addressing overfishing of the lobster
undertook work under the FIP to slow the catch to an ecologically sustainable
rate. It eventually turned spiny lobster in Honduras into the first fishery in
the world with the potential to trace seafood from boat to plate.

A report about the work later described how it “achieved significant results,”
noting a “full digital traceability system is now installed in 80 percent of the
packing plants and 60 percent of the commercial fleet—not only for lobster but
for all commercial fisheries.” The FIP encouraged trap use. However, while
investing in a landing data collection system and vessel monitoring system to
prepare the fishery toward an eventual sustainability certification from the
Marine Stewardship Council, the FIP also licensed boats in the program,
including the ones that demand 12 dives a day, day after day, from workers like
Marcelino. Thousands ended up paralyzed or dead.

The Walton Family Foundation has since distanced itself from the FIP, writing in
an email to Civil Eats that it only contributed funds—$300,000 to Honduran
fisheries generally, a rough third of that to the lobster FIP—and that the
purpose of the fund was to “encourage corporate actors to make sure their
seafood was more sustainable,” according to a statement from spokesperson Mark
Shields. “NFWF had ultimate control over the selection of all subgrantees of the
fund,” Shields said. When searching for a pilot project to attract more
corporate actors, he said NFWF and Darden recommended spiny lobster “because of
Darden’s interest and offer for matching funding at the time.” Darden
contributed $125,000, according to Rich Jeffers, a senior communications
director at Darden Restaurants.

Families of fallen lobster divers, including Marcelino’s, had already filed a
lawsuit against the Honduran government for failing to protect the divers
through labor law before the FIP began—a lawsuit they would eventually win.
Today, the Miskito community is one where paralyzed former divers can be seen
from house to house, lying in outdoor hammocks, unable to move, and former
divers walk the streets with crutches because of partial paralysis. But while
the fishery is widely recognized for its horrific labor conditions, the money
invested in improving conditions for the lobster in Honduras wasn’t directed at
improving conditions for the divers that catch them. The situation underscores
how investments in sustainability, and the attending publicity, can obscure
significant labor problems, sometimes to the detriment of workers.

THOUSANDS DISABLED, HUNDREDS DEAD

Marcelino did what he could to stay alive during his two-week stints on the
40-foot fishing boat. Like other Miskito divers, he was mostly illiterate and
had no dive training, but he knew that when he was anxious or scared underwater,
he used his air tank faster. So, he tried to remain calm while doing strenuous
physical work and fending off sea creatures like sharks. Each tank lasted
roughly a half hour, but he never knew when it would run out, endangering his
life. And if he didn’t return to the fishing boat with enough lobster, the
captain would berate him, or, worse, abandon divers in the water as punishment.

Lobster lairs were deceptive, often looking closer than they were, which caused
Marcelino to take risks. He needed to deliver as much lobster as possible since
he was paid by the pound. And when he ran out of air, he had to speed to the
surface. He did not know to make safety stops along the way.

His life unfolded against this backdrop. In 1975, nearly 10 years into lobster
diving, he met and married Melvia Cristina Guerrero. They lived in Puerto
Lempira in the Gracias a Dios region and had six children. His diving was their
only source of income.

On March 30, 2023, Guerrero, now 65, met me at the door of her home, her eyes
dark and sad. She wore a gray and white head wrap and a dark blue dress. She
ushered me into the house and said of lobster diving, “There are many boats and
divers, each with 40, 30, or 25 divers. In Gracias a Dios, most men live from
this work; there is no other work. . . . This work is so difficult that my
husband never slept well.”

Melvia Cristina Guerrero, and her phone displaying a photo of her husband
Próspero, inscribed with the message: “We can’t see you or touch you, but we
miss you.” (Photo credit: Jacky Muniello)

In 2003, Guerrero—who, like many women in the area, never finished elementary
school—was home when she answered a knock on the door. She opened it to find the
sacabuzos, a woman in the community who recruited divers, standing before her.
The sacabuzos said, “I came to see how you were doing. All the men are fine, but
your husband is slightly sick.” The sacabuzos said nothing more. Panicked,
Guerrero decided to search for her husband by the dock and found eight men
putting his body into a car. “That is when I fainted. My husband was already
decomposing. I felt half dead, half alive,” Guerrero said. In recent years,
roughly 4,000 Miskito divers have been disabled; many are paraplegic or
quadriplegic. At least 400 have died.

As divers and their families do, I had traveled to Puerto Lempira by motorboat
to meet her. Although the city can be reached by tiny plane, the cost is out of
reach for divers. To get there, photographer Jacky Muniello and I boarded a
motorboat in Brus Laguna, on the same route as the divers take, to Puerto
Lempira. The motorboat was small, a piece of tinfoil compared to the ocean we
needed to cross. We sat with a dozen people spread across wooden planks. Several
large tires weighed down the bow.

A map of the Gracias a Dios region of Honduras where our reporters developed
this story.

When we reached the open ocean, the waves were higher than the boat. The
captain, his boyish face looking out to the horizon, sped into the waves. The
boat went almost vertical as passengers gripped the sides. And then there was a
moment at the top of the wave when we all felt a pause. We fell, and the boat
smacked the water. The next wave loomed over the boat, covering us in water.
Someone, probably the captain, threw a black plastic tarp over us to protect
passengers and their goods from getting soaked, surrounding us in darkness as
gasoline fumes became our air.

Over seven hours, passengers screamed, cried, and prayed. Muniello passed out
and vomited, and I held onto her limp body. I don’t know how much time passed
before she opened her eyes and squeezed my hand. The captain removed the tarp,
and we found ourselves in a tangled mangrove forest. We made our way slowly
through the narrow waterway to the Caratasca Lagoon. Arriving in Puerto Lempira,
originally called Ahuya Yari in Miskito, near the dock, we saw men hobbling on
crutches, paralyzed from the waist down, their eyes vacant. To travel in the
region to access the hospital or clinic, injured divers had to take these same
boats, limiting their access to medical care.

Most Miskito in the region, including divers, travel via motorboat from their
scattered villages to reach Puerto Lempira and the only hospital and hyperbaric
chamber in the region. (Photo credit: Jacky Muniello)

There are other limits to surviving here, mostly economic ones. There is no road
to Puerto Lempira, which feels abandoned. The region is vast and wild, the
territory of drug traffickers like Juan Mata-Ballesteros, an infamous Honduran
trafficker who moved cocaine in this region, and who appeared in the Netflix
series Narcos.

The Miskito inhabit the area from Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast to Honduras.
Christopher Columbus encountered them in Honduras in 1502, and the myth is that
he was so thankful to reach the land he said, “Gracias a Dios.” Gracias a Dios,
known by locals as la Mosquitia, has 94,450 inhabitants, mostly Miskitos, who
speak their Indigenous language, and often Spanish, English, and Garifuna.

Of those, 22 percent, like Marcelino and his wife, live in extreme poverty and
cannot read or write. Honduras has invested little in the region, leaving the
Miskito with poor schools, no universities, and few options for work aside from
diving for lobster, sea snails, and sea cucumbers. Puerto Lempira, the site of
the region’s only hospital and a hyperbaric chamber that helps divers recover
from decompression sickness, has 6.5 inhabitants per square kilometer. Of the
deaths in the area, 37 percent are due to diving accidents.

Guerrero, whose house was bare except for a bed and a couch, held up her phone
to display a photo of Marcelino, inscribed with the message: “We can’t see you
or touch you, but we miss you.” After his death, she spoke to divers who worked
with her husband. They said that when he surfaced from a dive, he felt the
sickness, and “he told other divers that he felt almost dead. He said that when
he died, he didn’t want the boat owner to abandon his children.”

Eighty-six percent of Honduran spiny lobster still lands in the U.S. market,
according to trade data from the United Nations, capturing imports between 2018
to 2022. The lobster is imported by a handful of customs brokerage firms in
America. Among the largest are Concept Brokerage, Inc. of Miami, which did not
respond to inquiries about which restaurants and grocers buy the lobster, and
All Ports Air & Ocean Consolidators, also of Miami, whose spokesman said they
did not know who buys the lobster. A man who answered the phone at a third
brokerage firm that also imports the lobster, New York Customs Brokers, Inc.,
said their work is akin to filing taxes, and that by law they could not discuss
the imports unless authorized.

Despite the continued risk of injury to lobster divers—the pursuit for Honduran
lobster maimed more than 100 divers last season—early efforts at improving the
fishery did not address the safety of divers. Jeffers, the senior communications
director at Darden Restaurants, said in an email that a year after the company
donated $125,000 in 2013 to help create the fund for Honduran spiny lobster,
Darden sold Red Lobster and ceased involvement in the lobster work. Jeffers said
the company had never been involved in implementing projects, but confirmed the
fund had been intended to improve management of trap lobster and did not address
dive-caught lobster.

WE’LL BRING THE NEWS TO YOU.

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“We have found fishery improvement projects to be most effective when
communities, governments, and supply chain partners all work together over
time.”

In a request for proposals, NFWF instead sought to work with local buyers and
other supply chain participants “to implement a traceability system that
distinguishes trap-caught from dive-caught lobsters.” Potential grantees for the
$220,000 in projects were asked to acquire traps best suited to protect the
area’s habitat and “provide incentives to fishermen for their use.”

The Walton Family Foundation is a long-time supporter of such FIPs, arguing that
they shift government’s management of fisheries “to ultimately ensure a
sustainable global seafood supply for future generations.” In 2013, when it
announced the Honduran fund, the organization estimated that more than 400 FIPs
were needed to meet buyer demand for seafood worldwide.

“To protect fisheries and the communities who rely on them, there needs to be
long-term, large-scale support. This grant was an attempt to attract other
funders and corporate partners to the table,” said Teresa Ish, the senior
program officer and oceans initiative lead at the Walton Family Foundation. She
later told Civil Eats that the fund never attracted other corporate partners,
however, and that it fizzled after Darden sold Red Lobster and no other
corporations showed interest.

The Walton Family Foundation has since become involved in dozens more FIPs,
which foundation spokesperson Shields said account for millions in spending. “We
have found fishery improvement projects to be most effective when communities,
governments, and supply chain partners all work together over time,” he said. He
added that it takes years to be effective.

Katrina Nakamura, a responsible seafood advocate who runs the Sustainability
Incubator and is a planner at the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, however,
characterized FIPs as a market tool that allows retailers and grocers to call
seafood products “sustainable” to satisfy corporate sourcing policies. “A FIP is
just something the retailer needs, the supermarket needs, to sell fish,” she
said.

‘WRETCHED, AS IF THEY WERE DEAD’

Divers have the best chance of survival and recovery if they reach the
hyperbaric chamber at the hospital in Puerto Lempira within 48 hours of
surfacing. But dive boat captains don’t want to waste the gas money required to
send injured divers to the hospital on the skiff they carried—the richest
lobster banks were often three to four days by sea from Puerto Lempira.

“The captain was evil, and he would withhold food, scold them, and insult them,”
Guerrero said of her husband’s boat captain. Some captains put injured men in
row boats, saving gas money but ensuring the divers would be paralyzed, dead, or
their bodies decomposed by the time they reached the shore. Stories abounded of
boat captains who abandoned divers in the ocean to punish them or gave them
drugs to make them more apt to endure abusive conditions.

Guerrero remembered one captain who, upon seeing a paralyzed diver who had
worked for him, yelled, “I wish you had died!” Boat captains often resisted
pressure from families to provide money to injured divers, but had to live with
the constant reminder of their actions when they saw the paralyzed divers.

An injured lobster diver walks through Puerto Lempira on his way to a clinic
that provides basic services to divers. (Photo credit: Jacky Muniello)

Guerrero recommended we visit the Puerto Lempira hospital to understand the
situation better. It was painted bright yellow, and a concrete entry walkway led
to a small blue and white rehabilitation room littered with used exercise
equipment. A dozen partially paralyzed divers worked on different exercises in
the afternoon heat.

A diver paralyzed from the waist down gripped two rails, moving forward as his
legs hung limp. Porfirio Valeriano Carrington, 32, had experienced partial
paralysis in his legs after a diving accident. During lobster season, he spent
six to seven hours per day below the water, saying, “I had no watch, nothing to
mark the air levels in the tank, no wetsuit.” He lived on a boat with 47 other
divers.

When diving, he said, “You don’t know where you are going or where you are,”
adding, “That is how I got sick. I thought I was at 115 feet, but I was at 137.
The pressure got to me. The company doesn’t provide food for me or anything. The
day after I got sick, another guy died. He was very young. And the next day,
another died.” The doctor told Carrington that if he dove again, he would die.
But he had no other way to support himself, so like many other injured divers,
he would return to the sea.

Left: Porfirio Valeriano Carrington experienced partial paralysis in his legs
after a diving accident. He explained that when diving, “without a watch,
without any equipment, you don’t know where you are.” Right: Dr. Henzel Roberto
Pérez, the deputy director of information management at the hospital, said that
patients who recuperated and returned to diving often experienced decompression
sickness a second time, which left them more severely paralyzed than the first
time. “It is common to see the same patient several times,” he explained. (Photo
credit: Jacky Muniello)

Dr. Henzel Roberto Pérez, the deputy director of information management at the
hospital, sat at a large desk, sweating. He said, “Sadly, we don’t have a diving
school here. There is no training.” The hyperbaric chamber at the hospital,
which fits up to four divers simultaneously, costs $100-$300 per session. Each
session lasted 20 minutes to four hours, allowing the diver’s tissue to degas
the nitrogen slowly by simulating a very slow ascent. Divers often needed
multiple sessions to recover. Although boat captains were supposed to cover
those costs, they often didn’t.

Pérez explained that when a diver was injured, “The person who delivers the
injured divers is the sacabuzos. Sometimes, they tell us the captain’s name;
sometimes, they don’t.” Many divers knew their captains by their first names
only and were afraid to talk about them for fear of retaliation. Pérez noted
that many young divers became paralyzed and lost sexual function, and their
wives left them. The hospital couldn’t afford to provide follow-up care to
paralyzed divers, many of whom lived in communities that were hours away by
boat. For those divers who recovered, “Even though you tell them that they can’t
dive again, they always do,” said Pérez.

Today, Chris Williams, a fisheries expert at the International Transport Workers
Federation, said that dive-caught lobster is still sold as trap lobster in
Honduras to avoid those labor concerns. Williams spent a year and a half working
on a project about lobster divers in Honduras. He said dive and trap-caught
lobster is still commingled at processing facilities, and captains continue to
pressure divers to avoid hooking the lobster, which marks it as dive caught.

“How many men are walking with crutches in the street, wretched as if they were
dead because they can’t do anything?”

Following the FIP effort, a 2016 report to NFWF co-authored by Smithsonian and
World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) said grantees had nevertheless been optimistic
about what they’d achieved. “Our science-based approach combined with sustained
commitment to problem solving has catalyzed a sea change in the lobster fishery
in Honduras, which has dominoed into other sectors. Honduras is now positioned
to be the first country globally to have all its marine fisheries fully
traceable from boat to consumer,” reads the report.

According to the report, 80 boats from eight plants had been brought into the
traceability system and numerous vessels had been licensed. Grantees had also
outlined a reserve network of cays around the Miskito area, where fishing would
not occur to help support lobster habitat, and pushed for a rights-based fishery
management system that would privatize the fisheries.

The privatization policy is controversial for its potential to deepen social
inequities and empower the wealthiest actors on oceans, no matter their
treatment of resources and workers. Many philanthropies and supply chain
entities support it, however, in part for its ability to make it easier to
predict the catch of wild fish and stabilize prices. The policy had passed
Congress and was awaiting ratification by the executive office of Honduras at
the time of the report. The work stalled, however, for lack of support from the
Honduran government.

Grantees in the Walton/Darden-funded FIP had had other hopes. At the close of
their round of projects in 2016, the NFWF report said that the project had a
“strong partnership with the government of Honduras” on lobster, and that the
FIP had led to sustained engagement and “truly important outcomes for the
sustainability of Honduran lobster and the fisheries sector as a whole.” The
Honduran government was drafting legislation to make the traceability system
mandatory at the time, the report said, and a committee for the control and
monitoring of fisheries had been established with better coordination between
the fisheries department, navy, and port authority in Honduras.

Lobster importers in America were optimistic enough that 10 businesses signed a
pledge to adopt the tracing system for Honduran lobster in the seafood supply
chain as a result of the FIP, including Red Lobster and Chicken of the Sea. At
LobsterPledge.com, all said they supported efforts to transition the fishery
toward fishing techniques other than diving and were using their buying power to
“provide an incentive to establish and maintain high standards for environmental
and social welfare.”

Despite those words, dive-caught lobster remained in the supply chain, and
practices to exploit divers continued. “The vast majority of the landings do
still come from diving,” said Williams, with divers delivering lobster to those
larger, 40-foot boats whose captains can claim to have caught it in traps. He
emphasized that Honduran factories are aware of the practice.

While the supply chain continued to obscure dive catch, and divers continued
dying, Guerrero had more success than many widows of divers. A widow at 46, she
had limited education, no job, and six children to support. She requested
financial support from her husband’s boat captain, who gave her 40,000 lempira
($2,365). She survived her husband’s death and educated her children so they
would not follow in their father’s footsteps and become divers. Now, she runs
into injured divers daily when she leaves her house. “How many men are walking
with crutches in the street, wretched as if they were dead because they can’t do
anything?” she lamented.

ONE VILLAGE, 60 PARALYZED DIVERS

To understand the lives of paralyzed divers in the region, we traveled with
Víctor Arias, 30, to the village of Cauquira, about an hour by boat from Puerto
Lempira. Arias, who is Miskito and a nurse whose father was a diver, works at
the Center for Integral Treatment for Disabled Divers. As we crossed the
Caratasca Lagoon and neared a village lined by mangrove forests, Arias said, “I
am proud of who I am, of who my father is, and what he had to do to raise us.
Everything we have suffered is because we are a small Indigenous group of
Miskitos. The only thing the fishing companies have done is exploit us. The
state has abandoned us.”

Rosendo Teodoro Calderón, 60, worked as a lobster diver until at 25,
decompression illness left him paralyzed from the waist down. “I spent my entire
youth in a wheelchair,” he said. (Photo credit: Jacky Muniello)

Landing in Cauquira, we walked down sandy lanes through a village of tiny wooden
homes, past porches with one or more wheelchairs visible. Rosendo Teodoro
Calderón, 60, wearing jeans and a striped shirt, sat in a wheelchair outside his
one-room house. As he spoke, an injured diver in a wheelchair could be seen in
the distance. Arias, who had treated Rosendo, greeted him and began translating
from Miskito to Spanish.

“I spent my entire youth in a wheelchair,” said Calderón. When he was 25 and
working on a lobster boat, he experienced decompression illness. He was over 100
feet down, and something blocked his air supply. Calderón had to reach the
surface quickly, and although he could have done that by dropping the lobsters
in his hand, he didn’t. He said, “There was no hyperbaric chamber at that time.
The captain threw me away like a piece of trash. The owner was named Kenny. The
company did nothing.” Calderón’s twin brother sent him money to build a house
and help him survive.

Calderón wheeled inside his home, his face half in the shadows, and said, “I
don’t have hope of walking again. I’m completely paralyzed. We never receive
money; we never receive help. The government should do its part to aid the
injured, poor, and suffering.” His house was spare with concrete floors, a bare
mattress in one corner, and a bathroom in another. As we left, Calderón said, “I
felt good being a diver because it was how I supported my family.”

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From his father’s experience, Arias knew the difficulties of lobster diving. He
said, “The physical force required to hook the lobster, kill it, and return to
the surface with damaged fins and masks and without a wetsuit is incredible. I
don’t know how those men survive. They work like mules and have to go deeper and
deeper to find lobsters.” Arias said, “The death of a diver here is nothing; it
is normal. The state has to prevent this from happening.”

Years before, others had tried. In 2004, Guerrero, wanting to convert her pain
into justice, joined the families of 41 divers who had been injured or died and
filed a case against Honduras at the Inter-American Court on Human Rights. They
argued that the Honduran state had shown indifference to dangerous working
conditions for divers and permitted labor exploitation by national and
international fishing enterprises. In 2007, CEJIL, a nonprofit human-rights
organization, began working with the divers and their families to present the
case before the court.

Though the lawsuit was headed to court as the Walton/Darden-funded FIP got
underway in Honduras, the work wasn’t structured to benefit the health and
safety of the divers in the lobster industry, only the health of the lobster and
buyers’ ability to avoid the divers’ labor issues.

“FIPs were first created to address environmental issues, but that has changed
significantly in the last five years,” Walton Family Foundation’s Shields said
in a statement to Civil Eats. “There is no evidence that [FIPs] worsen labor
issues in supply chains. However, it is clear that programs designed to address
environmental issues often fail to address, or even catch, labor issues.”

He said the Walton Family Foundation is now working to remove forced labor from
seafood supply chains, supporting fishing communities and Indigenous fishing
groups building co-management programs, and supporting research “to understand
the value that small-scale fishers retain (or don’t) in global supply chains” in
other regions. He added that vessel monitoring, enforcement, and a credible
traceability system would address the comingling of dive-caught and trap-caught
lobster in Honduras. “Companies sourcing from Honduras should be insisting on
this level of transparency to ensure that they’re not buying fish that harms
workers,” he said.

No such insistence continued, however. Chicken of the Sea and Red Lobster did
not respond to requests for comment. The effort they joined to improve
conditions in Honduras, LobsterPledge.com, became a defunct URL. Circumstances
for the divers have since been left to the litigation.

“They’re doing a dangerous job without the right training, the right kit, out of
desperation, basically. And their misery is used to produce a luxury product for
American diners, and that is wrong,” said Williams, the fisheries expert. “The
supply chain and the government should be investing in those regions and making
sure that people are trained properly and that the law is followed and that they
have rights at work and that they are not dying and paralyzed and then just left
to rot.”

The lawsuit wound its way through the court for years. As it did, the most
severely injured divers, who had paraplegia and lived in remote fishing villages
like Cauquira, didn’t have the financial means to participate in the case.

Arriving at Nixon González Flores’s house via motorboat. (Photo credit: Jacky
Muniello)

Nixon González Flores, 55, a diver paralyzed from the waist down, lived in a
wooden house on stilts surrounded by trees upriver from Calderón. He lay on a
hammock below the house when I visited, and his youngest son sat in Flores’
wheelchair. Flores became a diver because “there is no work here in La
Mosquitia. The only thing is to work in the fishing industry. Diving is
dangerous and terrible work.” He was paralyzed at 37 after a 150-foot dive in
which the pressure got to him. After the injury, the fishing company didn’t
provide financial support. He said, “I have many problems. My body needs a lot
of care. I need food, soap, and Pampers. I urinate on myself day and night.”

Nixon González Flores, 55, is a diver paralyzed from the waist down. His
youngest son sits in his wheelchair. (Photo credit: Jacky Muniello)

On the muddy banks nearby sits the house of Nixon’s brother Martín González
Flores, 61. Walking up the steps to the porch of his house, I saw Martín lying
in a hammock, his body stiff, his hands gnarled but shaking. His wife exited the
house, reached down, and smoothed his clenched fingers. It was a gentle,
practiced gesture. He spoke in a whisper, his lips barely moving, his eyes on
the ceiling. At 45, after a deep dive, he experienced a brain hemorrhage. “He
took me to the shore and left me,” said Martín of the boat captain. His wife had
become his full-time caregiver since the accident. The couple had two children,
but one had died in a diving accident.

Left: Martín González Flores wanted to join the lawsuit against the Honduran
government for failing to protect the divers through labor law. However, because
of his condition and his poverty, he was unable to coordinate and pay for the
travel necessary to participate with the other injured divers. Center: Jony
Anisal (right), Martín González Flores’ son-in-law, has worked as a lobster
diver for seven years. He and his family live with Martín, who is paraplegic.
Anisal said he was afraid of diving but there was no other work available.
(Photo credit: Jacky Muniello)

Martín’s son-in-law, Jony Anisal, 36, sat quietly nearby, his feet dangling off
the porch. He looked into the distance as he talked about working as a lobster
diver. He said of the Miskito community, “We don’t have work. We have to feed
our children, our wives.” He got up, went inside the house, and returned with a
small, rusted hammer and a rod with a hook—the tools for catching lobster and
nearby snails. In addition to his father-in-law, he knew many divers who had
been disabled or died, including his own father. Anisal’s brother was a diver,
and they often worked together. Their boat captain called them cowards if they
got sick and offered them injections, pills, and drugs to keep them diving. “Why
did you come if you don’t want to work?” Anisal remembered the captain shouting
at him.

Jony Anisal said he usually catches around 10 pounds of lobster per day,
sometimes 15 if conditions are good. Right: Jony Anisal showing the instruments
he uses to catch lobster, a hook to get them out of their lairs and a hammer for
smashing conch for snails. He tries not to make marks on the lobster with the
hook so that it cannot be identified as dive-caught. (Photo credit: Jacky
Muniello)(Photo credit: Jacky Muniello)

In the village where Martín and Nixon lived, Arias said there were 60 paralyzed
divers “without counting the dead, the many dead.” Martín wanted to tell the
lobster companies they shouldn’t have abandoned him after so many years of work.
He wished he could have formed a part of the legal case with the other injured
divers, but his level of paralysis and lack of resources prevented him from
doing so. Arias said, “As a person, human, and Miskito, I think this lawsuit
must change things.”

MEN IN CRISP SUITS

WWF continued fishery improvement projects in other Caribbean lobster markets.
And the organization’s Honduran work was soon outpaced by success in a very
similar project in Nicaragua, launched the same year with a similar amount of
funding. Government engagement and capacity, it turned out, were the primary
difference. As Walton Family Foundation’s consultants would later note in a
subsequent academic review, FIPs require buy-in from foreign governments when
executed abroad, and “government capacity and engagement in FIPs are essential
for success; most FIPs in low-governance settings cannot make progress without
government action.” The same report noted that, as of 2020, “Nicaragua has
completed 73 percent of its FIP actions, but Honduras has completed only 13
percent.”

In 2022, the Miskito divers won their case against the Honduran government. The
Inter-American Court on Human Rights declared that Honduras was responsible for
the lack of prevention, supervision, and oversight of working conditions for the
Miskito divers, which had resulted in injury, disappearance, and death for many.
It was the first case before the court in which a country was held responsible
for the labor conditions of companies working in its territory. The court held
Honduras accountable for providing monetary compensation to the families of the
42 divers and for creating training and regulations for diving conditions.

On the afternoon of March 30, 2023, in the heat of the day, Guerrero walked 10
minutes from her house to Pawaka Auditorium, a series of circular concrete
benches around a dusty, red patch of ground. I accompanied her to the ceremony
in which Honduran authorities apologized for their role in the divers’ injuries,
deaths, and disappearances. Walking down the dirt road, we saw a man in a wooden
wheelchair, his hands gripping a gear to move it forward. I asked him his name,
looking over his wheelchair, built from wood scraps. He introduced himself as
Filemón Cesión Gómez, a former lobster diver. “I was injured in 1980 at 25. Many
men are dead or disappeared at sea,” he said. As we spoke, another injured diver
limped by on crutches.

Filemón Cesión Gómez, a former lobster diver who gets around Puerto Lempira in a
handmade wooden wheelchair said, “I was injured in 1980 at 25. Many men are dead
or disappeared at sea.” (Photo credit: Jacky Muniello)

Government officials who flew to Puerto Lempira that morning stepped out of an
air-conditioned building, the men in crisp suits and the women in thick layers
of makeup and heels. Officials from the Ministry of Labor and Social Security,
the Ministry of Social Development, the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of
Human Rights took their place on a raised podium.

In compliance with the 2021 Inter-American Court of Human Rights judgment,
Honduran officials vowed to adopt legislative measures to prevent further human
rights violations, strengthen regional public health programs, create a program
to inspect and supervise diving and fishing, and identify victims and prosecute
those responsible. Among the officials was Ítalo Bonilla Mejía, a biologist at
the General Directorate of the Merchant Marine of Honduras. I wanted him to tell
me what none of the divers or their widows could: Who was still buying all the
lobster?

“Darden,” he said. After selling Red Lobster, Darden still supplies 1,900
restaurants in the U.S., including Olive Garden, Longhorn Steakhouse, and Ruth’s
Chris Steakhouse, generating over $9.63 billion in annual sales.

Darden’s Jeffers disputed it was the buyer. “It is entirely possible that Red
Lobster is the buyer and the person said Darden since Darden and Red Lobster
were synonymous for so long. There are still people today who believe Darden
owns Red Lobster, even though we sold the brand nearly 10 years ago.” Red
Lobster, which was bought by private equity firm Golden Gate Capital in 2014,
did not respond to requests for comment.

Guerrero, who had never heard of the Walton Family Foundation or Darden
Restaurants, sat among rows of disabled divers, many resting quietly in their
wooden wheelchairs. One of them held a sign that read, “There are more than
1,982 injured divers, not just 42,” referencing that only 42 divers formed a
part of the lawsuit but many more deserved justice. Guerrero sat for hours as
the sun beat down, listening to the government officials, remembering the day
she married her husband when he was lean and strong, untouched by the pursuit of
red gold.

An injured diver exits the clinic in Puerto Lempira. (Photo credit: Jacky
Muniello)

Alice Driver is a writer from the Ozark Mountains who is working on a book about
labor rights titled The Life and Death of the American Worker. She writes for
The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Oxford American. Read more >

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