Broken by the bends: the deadly toll on Honduras’s Indigenous lobster divers

Driven by poverty to work in the dangerous fishing industry with inadequate equipment, Miskito all too often end up crippled or dead

On the main avenue of Puerto Lempira, a man sits outside a restaurant in a wooden, hand-propelled cart and waves to another man ambling by in a cart of his own. A block down, a man in a wheelchair is pushed by a young woman past a man on crutches. At a corner, a pair of men clutching canes lounge in the shade.

It could be a description of a retirement community. But the men are of all ages, and such scenes are common across the coast of Gracias a Dios, an Indigenous territory in north-east Honduras, where decades of unsafe fishing practices have crippled thousands who dive the Caribbean Sea to harvest marine life.