On June 24, Venezuelans were struck by two powerful, back-to-back earthquakes, each measuring more than seven points on the Richter scale. The destruction is widespread, especially in Caracas and the coastal city of La Guaira. There’s now more than a thousand dead and thousands missing, but those numbers are going to grow. One hesitates to politized natural disasters, to rush to impose some larger moral geopolitical morality on heartbreak. But—considering that Washington has placed Venezuela in receivership and has seized billions in oil revenue, depositing the money in US escrow accounts—it’s hard not to. Over the lasts two decades, Washington has sanctioned Venezuelans to death. The White House, in the wake of the quakes, has lifted some of those sanctions, but the damage has been done, leaving government and society with a significant lower capacity to cope with the damage. The United States flew 149 Venezuelan deportees, including 19 women and seven children, from Miami to Caracas just a few hours before Wednesday’s earthquakes. They were brought to brought to the Hotel Santuario La Llanada in La Guaira, which collapsed. Hundreds remain missing.

What follows is an account of an earthquake that hit Caracas in 1812, one whose aftershocks changed the world. The quake led to the end of Spanish America’s first independent republic but propelled a young Simón Bolívar to the head of a continental insurgency that, about a decade later, would topple the three-century old Spanish Empire. It’s an adapted excerpt from my America, América: A New History of the New World, which is now out in paperback.

—Greg Grandin

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Thursday, March 26, 1812, Caracas: What image better captures the cusp between old and new than Simón Bolívar standing defiantly on a mountain of rubble? His audacity signaled not just the beginning of the end of Spanish colonialism but the breaking of the chain that linked slave, peasant, servant, man, woman, priest, master, lord, and king in a hierarchy reaching to the sky, a sky crisp and clear that tragic Thursday. The earthquake had destroyed most of the city and its hinterlands. At one point, Bolívar, who was back in Caracas from his military campaigns when the quake hit, drew his sword on a priest and ordered him to stop praying for souls and start saving lives. Pull bodies out of the rubble, Bolívar ordered the cleric. After scrambling atop a high pile of stones from a ruined convent, Bolívar came face-to-face with José Domingo Díaz, a medical doctor loyal to Spain who for two years had written weekly polemics against the foolish dreams of republican liberation. Bolívar, as Díaz described him, looked desperate.

“What now?” Díaz asked, as if mocking the republican arrogance that it was history that mattered, that it was history that could be overcome by man’s will—that it was history and not nature that decided who ruled. Bolívar’s answer came back quick: Si se opone la naturaleza lucharemos contra ella y la haremos que nos obedezca: If nature itself opposes us we will fight nature and make it obey.

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There’s nature as reason, as a justifier of beliefs and ideals. And there’s nature as force, impulsive, terrifying, and marvelous. Bolívar, climbing the convent’s rubble and pledging that he would compel nature to submit to republican will, was defying both. He wasn’t disputing the royalist argument that the natural disaster was a manifestation of God’s displeasure. But if true, then God’s will had to be defeated and the old world He presided over had to end. During this moment of earthshaking crisis, Bolívar was Milton’s rebel angel hurling defiance toward the vaults of heaven. If nature stood in the way, nature would be destroyed.

After surviving Caracas’s 1812 earthquake, Bolívar would spend the next 12 years of his life waging war against Spain, and against the institution that enriched Spain: slavery, in all its many guises.

Caracas had been suffering from a long drought that spring, and the sky was blue on the day of the quake. But a few raindrops fell just before the church bells started to ring: at 4:07 in the afternoon, not to mark time but because their towers were swaying. The undulations of the earth came from different directions, north to south, and east to west, like two waves cutting across each other.

The city sat at the intersection, and the waves crashing together sounded like thunder rising from “hell,” one survivor said, like the “voice of the Angel of the Apocalypse.”

Columns gave way. Balconies fell. The timing of the earthquake was uncanny. March 26 in 1812 was Maundy Thursday. On that day two years earlier, Caracas had expelled its royal overseers. On that day one year earlier, the city had commemorated the expulsion in a wild night of revolutionary exuberance, and then shortly thereafter declared independence. Believers were in the city’s many churches and convents celebrating Mass when the buildings started to collapse, and many of them, maybe most, were crushed to death. When the sun went down at 6:10, the dust rising from the rubble deepened the darkness. The “lamentations” of those buried beneath the ruins “lacerated the heart,” recalled one witness. The destruction was near total, the terror absolute. Washington’s envoy to the new republic estimated that 20,000 people had died immediately, and tens of thousands more would perish in the weeks to come from hunger, disease, and injury. Church buildings in wealthy mantuano parishes were made of heavier stone, with larger buttresses, so most of them remained standing. Casually built churches in poorer areas of the city nearly all collapsed, crushing the city’s servants, along with their children. This meant that there was a shortage of laborers and domestics to help upper-class families recover: a preview of what a world without slavery might look like.

The quake radiated hundreds of miles beyond Caracas. Town after town fell, with waves felt as far west as Bogotá in Colombia. Storehouses collapsed, burying shovels and other needed tools, medicines, linen, and food. Rescuers used their bare hands to dig survivors out from the rubble. The quake blocked springs and broke pipes running to public fountains, so there was little safe water to drink or to clean wounds. Suddenly, for the well-off, the abstractions of revolutionary slogans proclaiming liberty and equality were materialized in their worst fears: The city’s poorer survivors were seen “entering the houses that were still standing” and “carrying off everything they could lay hands on.” Some called it looting, though it might more rightly describe survival. To prevent the spread of disease, bodies were burned by the dozens. Corpses were carted to the beach of La Guaira, Caracas’s port town. There, they were burned “about forty at a time in one fire,” with the flames visible to ships far out in the Caribbean.

“The City has disappeared,” wrote the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who had visited Caracas during his American travels, upon reading of the catastrophe. So too, for many, republicanism. Congress held its last session on April 6, 1812.

Nine out of 10 prosperous caraqueño houses, compounds in the Andalusian style, thick adobe chambers surrounding lush courtyards, were destroyed. Simón Bolívar’s, just off the Plaza San Jacinto, survived. Its beams buckled but held. Witnesses recalled the 29-year-old Bolívar in a tattered, stained shirt with sleeves rolled up, alternating between pulling people from the wreckage and arguing with those who said the calamity was a divine strike against republicanism, against the “sin of independence.”

Disaster Royalism

Republicanism in Venezuela, as mentioned, wasn’t anti-Catholic. In Caracas, as well as in key provincial cities, especially in the Andean city of Mérida, there existed emancipationist priests, of the kind that might read a passage from Las Casas rather than a chapter of the Gospel while saying Mass. But a larger, opposing group was mobilized by Archbishop Coll y Prat. A few conservative clerics had been preaching for years against republican perversity, warning of the wrath that might befall a people arrogant enough to believe they could rule themselves. Others held their tongue. Until Caracas collapsed.

The archbishop, born in the Cataluña foothills of the Pyrenees, urged his priests to preach disaster royalism. They were to tell people that “hell was opening to swallow them.” Clerics cited the fact that the city’s buttressed cathedral was spared destruction as evidence that God protected the faithful. Christ’s Crucifixion, people were reminded, was followed by a similar upheaval: “And the earth did quake, and the rocks rent.” The destruction was “terrifying,” Coll y Prat remembered. But “well deserved.” The earthquake “confirmed for our times the timeless prophecies revealed by God to men about the ancient cities impious and proud: Babylon, Jerusalem, and the Tower of Babel.”

Royalists who had previously fled republican Caracas, many to Caribbean islands where no integrated balls were held, came home. They brought with them a new stock of servants and a strong dose of Catholic revivalism, including exaggerated displays of public penance. Survivors and returnees roamed the streets in impromptu processions, dressed in sackcloth, dragging makeshift crosses, and confessing their sins. The churches left standing were packed day and night, and anyone who didn’t, according to one account, “surrender himself to the ridiculous mania of living in penance was regarded as a dissolute libertine who provoked the anger of heaven.” Not just republicanism but all transgressions were regretted. Couples living together out of wedlock sought out priests to marry them. Fathers recognized their bastards. Republicans lost their audience.

The drought let up after the quake. Hard rains that would have been welcome in any other year now tormented a city not given time to repair its roofs or drainage systems.

Caracas’s conservative clerics were quick to seize on the marvelous to strike at the republic. Aftershocks continued for weeks; another large quake on April 5 threw the ground into a “state of perpetual undulation.” For many, there existed “only one recourse.”

Make peace with God. And stop calling one another citizens.

Chastisement of Heaven

In Spain, the Cortes de Cádiz had been too occupied fighting Napoleon to mount a full military campaign against republican Venezuela. It left the pacification initiative to a loyal, poorly armed frigate captain named Domingo de Monteverde. Short on men, Monteverde had begun to try to win over some of those insurgentes de otra especie who were stirring in rural Venezuela. Before the earthquake, Miranda and Bolívar, as leaders of the republic’s defending army, had kept Monteverde in check. After the quake, though, with disaster Catholicism spreading fast through the land, the counterrevolution grew.

The United States hadn’t officially recognized the Venezuelan republic, but it did send a consul, Robert Lowry, to Caracas’s port city of La Guaira to monitor events. In June, he reported to Secretary of State James Monroe that royalist forces had “penetrated” deep into the interior. Monteverde’s army was growing with “superstitious” recruits who had been “excited by the Priesthood.” The earthquake, they were told, “is a chastisement of Heaven for abandoning the cause of Ferdinand the Seventh.”

The counterrevolution had begun to consume the revolutionaries. The Sociedad Patriótica successfully demanded that the government name Miranda “dictator,” giving him extraordinary powers to put down royalists. Miranda ordered the arrest of all Spaniards and Canary Islanders (mostly merchants who had prospered under Spanish mercantilism and were thus hostile to the independence movement).

The republican army had been enfeebled by the quake and the chaos of its aftermath. So Miranda took steps to bolster its ranks by finally fulfilling a promise that he had made to British abolitionist William Wilberforce to end slavery. The revolution had already ended the slave trade. Now, Miranda issued a decree promising “liberty for all slaves that take up arms for Venezuela.” The city’s white elite and conservative clergy were outraged. They understood Miranda’s edict as “an attack on their property and dissolvent of the social order,” a perilous unleashing of forces best kept chained.

A tipping point had been reached. In response to Miranda’s decree, anti- republicans did the same. They began to mobilize people of color. Archbishop Coll y Prat sent secret instructions to priests in the provinces to encourage enslaved and free Blacks to fight in defense of our “legitimate sovereign.” A rumor spread throughout the provinces that the archbishop had been taken prisoner, and soon a column of armed people of color was marching on the city to rescue the cleric and “end the republican government.” By the end of June, reports came in that large stretches of the coast east of La Guaira were under the control of royalist negros and pardos. Miranda had pulled troops out of the city to attack Monteverde, leaving Caracas undefended against the archbishop’s would-be rescuers, whose battalion was 12 leagues from the city’s gates and moving fast.

Miranda didn’t have the will or heart to fight back. He was, at this point, carrying on back-channel communications with London officials, who were urging moderation. Miranda opened talks with Monteverde, and, in exchange for being allowed to return to London, surrendered on July 25, 1812. Spanish America’s First Republic was no more.

Bolívar was enraged. Miranda might have believed he had no choice, but his former comrades charged him with treason. Still, Miranda, caught in his lassitude, delayed his departure for London and that delay allowed a group of revolutionaries, including Bolívar, to capture the old general and turn him over to the royalists. What exactly happened next is unclear, but Monteverde’s promise of safe passage was revoked. Royalists sent Miranda to Spain, where he died in a prison cell on July 14, 1816, on the 27th anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Bolívar, after giving up Miranda, gave up the fight as well, for the moment. Monteverde’s troops allowed him and a handful of revolutionary officers to escape to the English island of Curaçao, on a small sailboat named Jesús, María y José, where the exiles were given shelter by Mordechai Ricardo, an Amsterdam-born Jewish lawyer (and cousin of the economist David Ricardo).

Monteverde entered Caracas at the end of July and began arresting the city’s remaining republicans, including the drafters of the Declaration of In- dependence and the constitution. Calling them “monsters of America,” Monteverde imposed, according to the United States envoy charged with delivering food relief, a “system of proscription, sequestration, imprisonment, and cruelty almost unexampled.” They were put in irons and thrown into dungeons, “noxious in all countries, but doubly fatal in a climate like this.”

The Country Is America

Taking control of Caracas was relatively easy. More difficult for Monteverde was putting down the rural insurgentes de otra espiece, including those he had mobilized himself. The column determined to rescue Archbishop Coll y Prat was now camped on the outskirts of the city. The archbishop sent a message ordering slaves and peasants to return to their masters. The church was safe, I am safe, he said. The leaders of the march refused to disperse. Instead, they invoked Miranda’s decree, saying that by fighting for king and Church they should receive their freedom. “Nonsense,” said the archbishop. We “promised you nothing.”

The leaders of the assembled masses let Spanish officials know that their allegiance was conditional. They had already killed several of their “masters, overseers, and many whites” and could easily expand their ranks, raising an army of thousands of enslaved and free Blacks. “All armed,” as the archbishop’s envoy noted. Suddenly, victorious royalists were faced with the prospect of having to fight the forces that helped carry them to victory. As the archbishop’s envoy noted, the ragtag army bivouacked outside of Caracas could easily live off the land. “They all have been hardened by labor and the torrid heat.” Rumors began to circulate that their leaders were in contact with republicans, who didn’t hesitate to confirm that if they switched sides, they would indeed be emancipated.

Negotiations averted a siege of the city, and the “black corsairs,” as the archbishop called them, retreated. But Venezuela fell into chaos. Monteverde was injured in battle in October 1813 and eventually relieved of duty.

To the fore of the royalist pacification campaign came a ruthless horseman from the eastern llanos, or grasslands, named José Tomás Boves. Royal officers had released Boves from prison, where he was being held on charges of smuggling, and, after witnessing his merciless efficiency in the field, set him loose.

Essentially operating as a paramilitary field marshal, Boves practiced a unique form of royalism, which consisted in the waging of relentless class and race war. He held an implacable hatred of both republicans and Venezuela’s antirepublican landed aristocrats. His army, at its height, counted 7,000 men, mostly former slaves, cowherds, and peasants, who raised a piratical black flag—what he called his “banner of death,” adorned with a skull and crossbones and the words “Liberty or Death”—in every town they occupied. They slaughtered republicans by the thousands and terrorized white aristocrats, threatening to divide their great estates among the impoverished masses. All in the name of King Ferdinand.

Meanwhile, Bolívar, who had eventually made it to Cartegena, in Colombia, regrouped. He raised troops and rode back to Caracas, defeating all opposition and taking the city again in 1813. But in the countryside, Boves’s army was growing, cutting a line of mayhem through the provinces. Caracas, at least, was again in the hands of republicans, the capital of a “Second Republic.” But Bolívar was no longer interested in creating a besieged backwater nation on the littoral of a vast continent. He became the agent of his mentor Miranda’s grander vision, pledging himself to fight for a greater America. “Para nosotros la patria es la América”—For us, the country is America, he declared in one field speech.

Bolívar, on June 15, 1813, in the city of Trujillo, decreed a “war to the death.” It wasn’t just a figure of speech. The struggle to recapture Valencia had given Bolívar a sense of how deep-rooted royalism was in the countryside and an awareness that it would take significant coercion to defeat monarchical allegiances. He wanted his troops to terrorize Spanish loyalists, to avenge the “horrific desolation” left behind by Monteverde and the atrocities committed by Boves. Tactically, he wanted the remaining “accursed race of European Spaniards” to know they had three choices: accommodate to independence, return to Spain, or die. Spaniards who conspired with the enemy would be considered traitors and executed. Those who joined the rebels would be given an “absolute pardon.”

Bolívar was making it clear that the war was not simply a colonial rebellion but a conflict between two nations, Spain and America. Once set loose, such furies were hard to contain. The more Spanish heads his soldiers took, the faster they rose in the ranks. Some of the first such trophies to arrive at Bolívar’s camp were cut from the corpses of an elderly aristocratic husband and wife, along with a note written in the victims’ blood.

Churches Filled with Blood

Boves continued his own war of extermination. In early February 1814, in the town of Ocumare, his army pillaged, raped, and murdered, cutting off “the noses and ears of inhabitants, the penises of the men and the breasts of women.” “Blood was everywhere.” Survivors took refuge in the Catholic Church. Boves’s marauders murdered everyone they found inside. In retaliation, Bolívar ordered the execution of hundreds of Spanish prisoners. Historians guess that, between February 14 and February 16, 1814, as many as a thousand Spanish prisoners were shot or macheted to death.

Earlier, during the First Republic, political terror had been relatively contained. That restraint now fell away. Bolívar thought mass executions would force Spanish officials to curb Boves. If the Spanish knew that they’d pay “dearly” for Boves’s “atrocities,” they would rein him in. Bolívar was wrong. Royal officers had no control over Boves.

By June, Boves had begun his march on Caracas. Along the way, Massacre followed massacre, with Boves’s men building pyramids with the heads of decapitated victims.

Bolívar couldn’t defend Caracas. His generals and their troops, having suffered staggering losses, were dispersed, and Bolívar didn’t want to test the loyalty of the people of the provinces, who he feared would join with Boves upon his advance. On July 6, 1814, he ordered Caracas evacuated. Thus ended the short-lived Second Republic. Twenty thousand residents hastily gathered what they could and left their homes, with republican officers stripping the churches of silver to finance the fight. With Boves descending on the city from the west, thousands fled eastward, while Bolívar escaped by sea. Boves entered Caracas and once again ordered the execution of all remaining white residents. There weren’t many left. He also ordered troops to pursue the refugees.

The exodus was chaotic. From the western plains to the eastern marshes, Venezuela was filled with roving armed men with shifting allegiances. Some refugees made it into republican-controlled territory. Others straggled. Thousands died, of snake bites, dysentery, and hunger, among other causes.

Boves’s troops moved fast. In October, his army arrived at the town of Cumaná, where a group of Caracas’s exiles had taken refuge. Another day of carnage. Another dance. This time, though, he had in his custody Caracas’s republican orchestra, headed by Juan José Landaeta (the composer of Venezuela’s national anthem, “Gloria al Bravo Pueblo”). He ordered the 30-member group to begin playing their instruments as his soldiers waltzed with the city’s widows. Blood from the day’s killing still moist on their boots turned the dance floor red. As the orchestra played, Boves took one musician out at a time to be executed. He ordered them to continue to play as he shot them in the head. When the last musician had been executed, Boves announced that the “party was over.” Then the rapes began.

“The roads and fields are filled with unburied corpses, the towns are leveled,” said a royalist tax collector, “the churches defiled and full of blood.”

Everything Will Become Nothing

Boves was a phenomenon difficult to explain. He turned everything on its head, a black flag–waving royalist waging a counterrevolution to spark a more profound revolution. He terrorized those who presumed themselves, due to their Spanish blood and white skin, immune to terror.

Boves shook Bolívar. Bolívar would continue to fight for more than a decade longer—as if he were sure the fight was worth it, as if he were certain that what came after Spanish rule would be better than Spanish rule. But he wasn’t sure. Boves represented a greater chastisement than any earthquake, a warning that the war against Spain would unleash powers resistant to reason, forces pulling Spanish America apart more powerful than those fighting to hold it together.

“All will return to its most basic element: matter,” Bolívar lamented during one of his dark moments. “Everything will become nothing.” His experience defending Venezuela’s republic deepened his conviction that a strong executive was needed to hold the forces of disunion at bay. Bolívar could express world-weariness in racist terms. “Guinea and more Guinea we will have,” he wrote, as it became clear that his enemy would not just be royalist troops and accursed Spanish but, in some places, masses of poor people of color. Yet for all his pessimism, Bolívar never posited race as an ontological category, an essence found in drops of blood.

Race was for Bolívar an artifact of history. Like Las Casas, whom he read and hailed as an “apostle” of freedom, Bolívar believed the Conquest was a crime, not just because of its violence but because it imprinted racial difference in its legal codes. “Everything that has come before us is wrapped in the black cloak of crime,” he sighed. The fight for independence wasn’t sparked by a divine touch from on high but came up through muck and mire, centuries of colonial exploitation: Spanish Americans, those who fought for and against independence, were “the abominable offspring of those raging beasts who came to America to spill her blood and to breed with their victims before sacrificing and discarding them.” Some of those beasts, like Boves, still prowled the land.

And Bolívar remained committed to emancipation, both as part of the republican ideal and as a military tactic, even though he feared that emanci- pation would evaporate elite support for republicanism. In Haiti to regroup and request assistance, which the free Haitian government provided (a thousand rifles, gunpowder, clothing, and military advisers), Bolívar pledged to continue to work to free South America’s slaves. “That portion of our brothers who have labored under the miseries of slavery is now free,” he said upon returning to the mainland; “From here forward, in Venezuela there is only one class of men: all will be citizens.”

Bolívar would continue to issue horseback emancipations, galloping from one hacienda to another and freeing its slaves if they promised to join his fight. Other revolutionary leaders in Argentina, Chile, and Peru—such as José de San Martín—did the same. Battalions of emancipated slaves helped win some of the most important battles of the independence movement, at Junín and Ayacucho, for instance. Montevideo, dubbed the New Troy after it lived under Spanish siege for more than a decade, never fell, thanks to its African defenders.

Nor did Bolívar, with Las Casas imprinted onto his consciousness, blanch from admitting that republicans were founding their new “free” nations on stolen land, that nationalism entailed its own form of colonialism. “We find ourselves engaged in a dual conflict: We are disputing with the natives for titles of ownership, and at the same time, we are struggling to create a new country.”

Whether such a new country could come into being or not—much less be a vehicle for justice—was a question left for the future. The fight itself was what Bolívar called an “obligation of atonement” to those who came before, especially to the “annihilated Indians” and their descendants. To break Spain’s hold on the New World was a debt “of the greatest transcendence.” Be there earthquakes or be there beasts like Boves, he’d fight on, even if “heaven has determined that our conquerors shall be our brothers.”

Boves was killed in battle by one of Bolívar’s men in 1814. Spain followed by dispatching an expeditionary army of 10,000 soldiers, along with a new suite of royal officials to impose order. The troops were led by Field Marshal Pablo Morillo. There wasn’t much left of Boves’s counterrevolutionary army, and those soldiers who had survived were in rags.

“If these are the victors,” Morillo asked, of the men who had defeated Venezuela’s Second Republic, “who are the vanquished?”

In the years to come, Bolívar would march through Indigenous communities, cattle lands, and haciendas worked by peons and slaves, continuing to offer freedom for all who joined the fight. Bolívar the utilitarian thought, abstractly, that racial divisions could be transcended with education. Bolívar the military leader hoped that war would create unity. Bolívar the existentialist doubted that any of it would matter.

And so by 1824, enslaved peoples were abandoning their masters and signing up to fight the Crown in exchange for their emancipation. Indigenous peoples came down from their highland villages, hoping that, after centuries of colonialism, their lot would improve under republican rule. One of the last battles of the long war for independence would take place in August, in the marshy highland plains of Junín, with Bolívar’s 8,000-strong army routing Spanish troops.

Save for a few last skirmishes, Bolívar had decisively defeated Spain.

Still, in victory, he remained haunted. He’d return again and again in future writings to history’s capriciousness, to a gloom that could rival the prophet Amos. “My time is a time of catastrophes: Everything created is destroyed in a flash, like lightning,” he wrote to his former vice president. “How foolish I was to believe I could stand firm in the midst of such convulsions, in the midst of so many ruins, in the midst of the universe’s moral upheaval.… It would be madness to see the storm that is coming and not take shelter.”

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(Roberto Lovato)

Activism / The Weekend Read / June 27, 2026

Saving the Scarlet Macaw in Narco Country

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

Roberto Lovato

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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.

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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.

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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 the cocaine superhighway.

About an hour into the drive, Lacuth pulled over. To the right of us stood a cross bearing the name of Osvaldo Jacobo, one of the early Miskito environmental leaders who founded MASTA in 1976. “This is where they killed Osvaldo,” Lacuth said, describing the incident that took place in 2000. “They ran trucks over him, killed him because he fought for our rights.” Lawlessness here did not die with the pirates.

An hour later, Lacuth pulled over to a spot that resembled every other spot on the long road. He pointed to a shallow hole in the ground and said that hit men hired by poachers “followed me on motorcycles until they thought it was safe to kill me at this spot. They fired several shots into the truck and cracked the windshield there.” He gestured to the truck’s still-splintered windshield. The projectile’s path included my seat.

Seeing Jacobo’s cross and hearing about the assassination attempt on Lacuth amid the tropical air gave me vertigo and an eerily familiar feeling. My mind went back to the 1980s, when I drove on Honduran, Nicaraguan, and Salvadoran roads and saw crosses, heard similar stories, and had my life threatened by anonymous men—Salvadoran death squads—for doing what we called “Solidaridad.”

Being here also stirred memories of reports about how La Moskitia was used as a landing base of operations for a more silent actor in the story of the region: the CIA, which illegally transported arms and drugs though Honduras as a part of the Reagan administration’s logistical and political support for the contras, violent extremists who were trying to overthrow the Sandinista government just across the Coco River in Nicaragua.

It reminded me that drugs continue to loom large in the story of La Moskitia, including that of the scarlet macaw. Lacuth told me large swaths of La Moskitia are dotted with narco airstrips used to fly cocaine from Colombia to the United States: “The terceros don’t act alone. They respond in coordination with the narcos. Both would benefit from eliminating me.”

Lacuth and his people are risking their lives to save the scarlet macaw. “We do this for love,” he said. “One of our words for ‘love’ is latwan kaikaia. Miskito is funny. Latwan kaikaia means ‘love,’ but it can also mean ‘pain.’”

To tell someone you love them in Miskito literally translated means “it hurts me to see you” or “to see pain.”

“The guaras touch our hearts when they’re happy and when they’re sad,” Santiago told me. “We used to take them for granted—but now we don’t. Our survival depends on them, and we need to protect them.”

For the remainder of our journey, I returned to learning Miskito. Lacuth adjusted his rearview mirror, and I asked him what it’s called.

“Lookingglasska.”

I’m besotted by the idea that this archaic term—“looking glass”—has been in use here since explorers and pirates used collapsible telescopes to survey the Caribbean coast of modern-day Honduras in the 16th century.

And our arrival in Mavita felt like stepping through a looking glass into a different world: one where people defend both the scarlet macaws and the forests that sustain both birds and humans.

Thoughts of assassinations, narco planes, and corruption melted before the sight of the morning mist hovering over the hills above the tropical savanna grass, coconut palms, and pine trees surrounding Mavita’s wood huts.

It was 5 am. The sun was rising. So was the bird whose bright red head, neck, chest, and wings have inspired native peoples across the continent for millennia to associate it with the sun and light.

Synchronized with the dawn, scarlet macaws began to fly around the village. Dozens of red, yellow, and blue streaks descended from the pine trees into the grassy spaces between Mavita’s wooden huts, offering a glimpse of what human-macaw coexistence has likely looked like for much of history. Soon the birds erupted into the squawks that for centuries would have marked the start of day—its loudest moment—across Indigenous settlements throughout the tropical Americas.

Recorded at over 102 decibels from 15 feet, these squawks are louder than a Harley Davidson without a muffler, and they signal that it’s time for Anayda Pantin and her assistants to begin their daily ritual of feeding the scarlet macaws.

“Bal patampis bal. ¡Bal patampis bal!” Pantin, Santiago’s wife, said, calling the macaws to feast on the cart full of rice mixed with beans, yucca, and plantain she feeds the birds with twice a day.

“We sometimes run out of money and can’t buy them their food,” she said as she shoveled out breakfast for the 30–40 macaws that descend on the cages where another dozen or so macaws are healing in the Rescue and Liberation Center of La Moskitia, which Pantin founded and codirects with Lacuth. “Even when there’s no money,” she added, “we always find something to give them.”

As years passed and she married, she and Lacuth started noticing that the skies were less luminescent. Fewer and fewer birds flew in and around Mavita. “We started counting them and noticed that the number of scarlet macaws was decreasing. So we started feeding and caring for them at home.”

Their efforts drew the attention of police and military personnel who began to bring them confiscated birds, many of whom were abused and injured by poachers or their former owners. As the number of macaws grew, Pantin and Lacuth sought the help of Miskito authorities and NGOs, formalizing their work with the help of Honduran conservationist Hector Portillo Reyes, who had spent years in the region.

Soon after, Reyes introduced them to Joyner. Her organization, One Earth Conservation, raised funds, conducted classes on parrot conservation, and set up labs and veterinary clinics. The work of monitoring nests and patrolling forests eventually got a boost from drones, motorbikes, cameras, and other technical assistance.

Joyner also helped them draw more international attention to Mavita, one of the few places in the world where scarlet macaw preservation is led by Indigenous people. Forced by hunger and poverty, locals—Miskitos and non-Miskitos—had poached so many birds that, between 2005 and 2010, the scarlet macaw population in the area had dwindled from 500 to 100 birds.

Joyner and One Earth Conservation responded quickly, providing more funds. The Apu Pauni Project made an enormous difference, safeguarding over 1,000 nests, reducing scarlet macaw poaching by 80 percent thanks to Miskito-led patrols of over 500,000 acres of territory. Dr. Donald Brightsmith, a leading ornithologist and parrot expert based at Texas A&M, told me that Miskito efforts to preserve the scarlet macaws are “incredibly important” because they are “not just fighting and risking their lives for a species, but for an entire ecosystem.” The Apu Pauni Project also provides education, employment, and other benefits to the community.

Pantin departed for a while and returned to a large cage carrying a white cloth bag that’s moving from within. “This little one was injured,” she said while looking at the bird struggling to get out of the bag. “Are you ready? Are you ready?”

The bird broke free, hobbled around the table, and grabbed a nearby tree branch set up in the “liberation center”—a place for birds to practice flying before being set free.

“It was injured, and I had to pick out its feathers one by one to allow it to grow new ones,” she explained as the bird started to flap its newly feathered wings. “It’s trying to get used to them.”

“Being free takes a lot of work,” she said. And at that moment, the bird began its first flight in the large cage. Pantin’s eyes welled up: “It causes me great emotion to see them fly again—or fly for the first time.”

After several minutes, she left the bird to its newfound flight and stepped outside. The wooden table that had been covered with rice, beans, and plantain was suddenly overrun with iridescent blues, yellows, and reds, as the macaws feasted. When finished eating, some of the macaws played; others stared while hanging upside down on a wood plank set up nearby; still others pecked playfully at the feathers of their mates—the only ones these monogamous birds will have for decades (they can live up to 70 or 80 years).

“These birds are very smart,” she said. “They understand a lot of Miskito words.”

The bonds between the birds and Miskitos like Pantin are palpable. I watched Pantin’s son, Wesley, climb a 100-foot-tall Caribbean pine. After a few minutes, he reached the hole in the tree where some macaws nest, turned on the head-mounted camera on his yellow helmet, and started transmitting images to a laptop below. I found the images of tiny, featherless newborn macaw chicks crawling to warm each other in the nest moving, the embodiment of forest vulnerability.

Equally striking was the response to the video from Joyner, Lacuth, and the volunteers down below who came on the monitoring excursion: They repeated and cried out, “¡Es un milagro, es un milagro!”—it is a miracle—at the sight of four eggs in a nest, along with three newborn. The average scarlet macaw nest has about three eggs.

I suspect that scarlet macaws are so moving to people because they are sensitive to human feelings. “They feel what we feel,” Pantin said. “I think they know when I’m sad. Sometimes, they don’t want to eat and just stay sad.”

The emotional reciprocity she described echoes the findings of researchers who told me that because scarlet macaws depend on the flock for survival, they have evolved a preternatural ability to connect and feel. And this ability extends not just to other parrots but to the humans they encounter. It’s perhaps why in the United States, Veterans Affairs psychologists use macaws and other parrots to treat PTSD in war vets.

Scientists and Mavita locals have also told me that the birds may also experience trauma from natural disasters, predators, and the greatest threat they face here: poachers.

“I used to climb the trees, find the nests, take the guara eggs, and sell them,” Tomas Manzanares, a Miskito man from the nearby village of Rus Rus, told me.

In the 1990s, he explained, poachers sold eggs and birds locally to buyers from other parts of Honduras, who then resold them as pets or to hotels and tourist destinations.

“I grew up when the guaras were everywhere you looked,” he said. “But I had a family and needed to feed them. There was no work here. It hurt my soul, but necessity obligated me to sell them.” Manzanares’s statements made sense; according to the World Bank, 72 percent of Indigenous households in La Moskitia cannot afford a basic food basket.

Today, that trade has become more international, as Jarri Lacuth, my Miskito-language teacher, made clear. From his family’s thatched-roof wooden hut, Jarri Lacuth told me that he went to in Nicaragua to find out who was purchasing the eggs, and to do so, he had to go undercover.

“I spoke with the main buyer in Esperanza, Nicaragua, where we have Miskito family,” he said. “He’s from Taiwan but spoke good Spanish with a Chinese accent. Somebody told him I work with scarlet macaws.”

“One day,” Jarri continued, “he showed up asking for me. We met at an office in Esperanza, and he showed me pictures of all the eggs and parrots he had. He sells them to zoos, individuals, and other buyers. He asked me how many nests we have near Mavita. He offered about 10,000 cordobas ($272) per guara and up to 200,000 cordobas ($5,445) for 120 eggs. He showed me photos of people in a laboratory feeding 300 to 400 chicks with a syringe in special cages they buy. He offered me work and to be allied with him. People have seen him and others in boats on the rivers, going from town to town offering people money for guara. What he wanted most were eggs. Lots of poachers in Nicaragua and La Moskitia work with him. Authorities are after him, but he’s avoided capture for a long time.”

The Taiwanese buyer is only part of the confluence of criminal interests that threaten the ecosystem: There’s also the terceros, who destroy thousands of acres of pine forest and rainforest for illegal cattle ranching and logging; corrupt government officials and politicians who find creative ways to avoid Miskito and Honduran laws protecting the land, macaws, and people; poachers who steal eggs and birds to sell to illicit national and international markets—all of whom are protected by criminal organizations that operate in La Moskitia.

Coastal and other Miskitos tell stories of roads and sea routes that regional criminal groups like the Cachiros and the Atlantic Cartel control. And everywhere you go, you hear tales of macaws owned and raised by the mysterious narcos who built and lived in now-abandoned mansions inland and along the coast.

The narco bird lovers in La Moskitia and across Honduras reflect how the country’s official bird also symbolizes the noxious effects of the corruption that threatens the bird and its tropical habitats. “The narcos share an interest in continuing the poaching, land grabs, and other activity of the terceros,” Santiago Lacuth told me. “None of them wants any attention to what’s happening here. That allows them to keep doing their drug business while getting cover from the terceros who steal, buy, and sell land that no one can touch or even visit because it’s protected by the narcos.”

The drug ecology here in Gracias a Dios and other parts of Honduras has made cartel and gang members in Honduras rich and powerful. “The narcos and terceros are taking over and destroying thousands of hectares of land,” Lacuth continued. “Because we’re so poor here, even some Miskitos are violating our laws prohibiting private property and selling it for the terceros and narcos.”

Enabling their influence are politicians in Honduras, where for decades, “corruption is the operating system” of the government, according to a report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The contradictions and absurdity of the corruption were on display earlier this year, as Juan Orlando Hernandez—the Honduran president whose administration put the macaw on the $200 lempira bill and supported anti-deforestation and macaw reintroduction programs—was granted a “full and complete pardon” by Donald Trump, after serving just three years of a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking and firearms. Many in Mavita believe that this corruption swallowed government funds committed to protect the scarlet macaw and its habitats. President Nasry Asfura’s Secretariat of Natural Resources and Environment did not respond to multiple requests to comment on where the 1 million lempiras ($37,500) approved to protect the scarlet macaw went. The Apu Pauni Project has not seen any of it.

In recent months, the poaching has reached crisis levels. Outsiders have raided 19 of the 106 active scarlet macaw nests identified by the Apu Pauni Project, according to Joyner.

“This is the worst year for trafficking,” Joyner said. “People are selling the eggs for what are incredible amounts of money here.” She said that one group was intercepted at an international airport with nearly 300 eggs.

In response to the crisis, the Miskitos, Joyner, and the people of Mavita have launched the Unconditional Solidarity campaign, which is aimed at telling the world about the poaching surge and pressuring Honduran authorities to intervene more forcefully.

“We’re signaling ‘emergency,’ because we can’t stop poaching without greater involvement,” she said. “We can’t just have the local Miskito community and a couple of nonprofits taking on the gigantic narco system. If we fail, all the nests will be poached.”

So far, the campaign appears to be having an impact, Joyner said. “Everybody in Puerto Lempira is watching the campaign on social media. Security forces are doing regular checkpoints, and the government has committed some military personnel to increase the patrolling for poachers. We’ve raised some money and raised the level of awareness. People who see us on the road stop and say, ‘You’re the people we see talking on TikTok about the guaras.’”

These efforts have reinforced the shift already underway among some former poachers. Manzanares told me he stopped poaching in 1998 and began educating others about why it was wrong to rob chicks and eggs from their mother. His transformation came at considerable cost: He showed me scars from gunshot wounds.

“I was swimming in a river next to the main road one day, enjoying the sun and beauty,” he told me from the office of the NGO he works at in Puerto Lempira. “And then I felt the burning sensation here [he pointed to his right forearm], here [then to his upper right arm]. There are nine screws here [left arm]. This one [pointing to his chest] came this close to my heart and punctured my lung. The bullet is still in my back.”

He told me this having just returned from patrolling and putting out fires set by terceros and that he was afraid that inhaling the fumes were making him sick.

Why continue?

“Because the guara shows me the saddest and most beautiful things,” he said without hesitation.

He described watching macaws circle above burning pine forests as they searched for “their chicks who were burning to death on the ground.”

“It makes me extremely sad and hits me here,” he said, pointing again to his chest. “But watching them hatch, grow feathers, and fly makes my heart open.… They feel happy when we’re protecting them. That’s why I do my part.”

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