The Senior James Pouchie of Calabash Bight

The soft-spoken gentle man celebrates his birthday on December 29. He is the second of 13 children born to Mr. Yule Wendell Pouchie and Mrs. Sera Pouchie. Life has not been easy, but Mr. Pouchie talks of his journey through this world with a satisfied smile on his face. The way he sees it, life has been good to him. He remembers the path that he has had to follow on this journey with fondness and gratitude.

At a young age, while his younger siblings were going to school, he had to help his father on the family farm where they grew yucca root, bananas and coco which they sold around the island and in La Ceiba. If business was good on the mainland, his father would send for more produce. “I would load the paddling dory with the produce and take it to Capt. Ray’s boat on Pointed Cay, now Oak Ridge Point, to be shipped to La Ceiba,” he says.

As a teenager, Mr. Pouchie got the opportunity to travel and work as a sailor in the US but needed his father’s permission to get his passport. After Mr. Pouchie insisted that he needed to work to help with his younger sibling: six younger brothers and five younger sisters, his father reluctantly agreed for him to travel to the US. “Because there were no roads back then, I had to paddle to Coxen Hole to pick up my passport. I was very excited,” he recalls.

I like the independence of being my own boss.

Mr. Pouchie worked on the boat in Texas ‘heading’ shrimp, something he became an expert at doing. While most boat hands head one shrimp at a time, he was heading one in each hand. For a while back then, the white captains would only work with an all-white crew while the black captains would work with an all-black crew. You had the ‘white boats’ and the ‘black boats,’ said Mr. Pouchie abut the segregation in US fishing industry.

While working in the US, Mr. Pouchie earned $150 per month, most of which he would send most back to his family. One time a son of one of his captains tried to cheat him out of his wages by paying him 50% less than what he was supposed to earn. Not accepting the injustice, he refused to work until the boss agreed to pay him what he had rightfully earned. The captain was afraid of losing the one worker who could do the job of two men and, in the end, agreed to pay him.

A religious man, Mr. Pouchie was baptized in the Seventh Day Adventist Church in Calabash Bight where his father was once the leader, and where Mr. Pouchie also spent a stint as a preacher, something he loved doing.

James Wendell Pouchie is as healthy as many 20-year-olds. He does not take any kind of medications and his diet consists of mostly seafood. “I love fried bara [barracuda] and I eat a piece of meat every now and then,” he says. He has, however, suffered many accidents. At the age of 13 he accidentally split his left knee in two with a machete and later he busted a vein in his left arm while lifting a load on the farm. At the age of 40, while hunting deer, he stood up on a stump and the shot gun slipped out of his hands, hit the ground, discharged, and hit his left arm leading to an amputation from the joint down. After losing his arm, Mr. Pouchie had to abandon his profession as a seaman. He loves to tap dance and he says he talks to God every morning and evening. “If you always remember God, you would not worry with the world.”

Mr. Pouchie enjoys the simple life; he says that there is too much foolishness happening with technology, he had a cell phone, but gave it away. “I could live without a phone”, he says. “It’s too much torment and it’s hard handling it with one hand.”

He had intercepted the French ship on its way to Martinique from the notorious slaving port of Whydah, in present day Nigeria. It was loaded with 516 slaves, twenty pounds of gold dust, and 40 cannons which had to be unloaded before the hull could be properly cleaned. This was not the last visit that Blackbeard would make to Roatan waters.

Thatch was born to a respectable family in Bristol, England, a coastal city located not far from Liverpool, England’s main slaving port and its second largest city. He served in the Royal Navy with honors, and only turned to piracy during his mid-30’s when a temporary ceasefire between England and Spain left Thatch and hundreds of able seamen without jobs and itching for income.

With Jamaica and Isla de Tortuga both firmly under the control of the English and French and Roatan abandoned, Thatch and his band chose New Providence Island in the Bahamas as their base. The island was close to American and Spanish shipping lanes and housed a modest English settlement. Fortunately for Thatch the government turned a blind eye to their illicit comings and goings, because of the pirates outnumbered the local population by three to one.

Thatch joined the “The Flying Gang“, a group of outlaws whose members included: Josiah Burgess, Thomas Nichols, Charles Vane and Benjamin Hornigold. Along with them came Calico Jack Rackham so named on account of his preference for wearing women’s undergarments, which he found to be more comfortable attire in the tropics. Another man named Stede Bonnet, “the Gentleman Pirate”, was a wealthy plantation owner from Barbados. Stede turned to piracy as a business venture. Not one of these men would reach forty years of age, all were either hanged or went down with their ships. Vane was captured on a cay near Roatan. As a rule the Spanish treasure ships were too heavily defended to attack so The Flying Gang took to using fast, open sloops to intercept smaller trading ships and relieve them of their cargo to sell in America.

All were either hanged or went down with their ships.

Thatch’s first venture as a pirate was as first mate for Benjamin Hornigold on a successful excursion into the Gulf of Mexico, around the Yucatan peninsula and along the coast of Honduras in the summer of 1717. Their thirty-gun sloop, “Ranger”, intercepted Spanish flour merchants’ ships and Portuguese wine traders from Madeira. Later in the year, Thatch and Hornigold intercepted a boatload of Englishmen sailing to Roatan. Clad in black and wearing burning fuses twisted into his hair, Thatch looked truly ferocious surrounded by a cloud of smoke from the fuses. The English sailors were truly surprised when Thatch explained that he and his men had thrown their hats overboard during a drunken party the previous night, and that he had boarded their boats only to relieve them of their hats. Thatch was never known to have killed anyone until his final battle the following year. He simply preferred to look the part of the Devil incarnate and to intimidate his foes.

Later in 1717 Thatch and Hornigold parted ways and Thatch was given “The Revenge” as a reward for his work. As captain of “The Revenge” Blackbeard went on a rampage throughout the Caribbean that cemented his place in pirate lore and history.

His reputation made it impossible for Thatch to return to Providencial, so he sailed to Charleston, North Carolina. There he received a full pardon from the colony’s corrupt Governor, Charles Eden with whom he then conspired to rob ships leaving the port in order to sell the goods on the black market. Blackbeard was now considered to be such a menace on the Atlantic seaboard, that Governor Spotswood of Virginia, sent Lieutenant Robert Maynard with two sloops to hunt him down.

On November 22, 1718, Thatch was cornered in an inlet off the shore of North Carolina. With most of his men onshore and with his crew outnumbered by three to one, Thatch put up a desperate last stand after consuming some wine to fortify him. He was killed in hand-to-hand combat by Maynard on the deck. It was discovered that his body had five gunshot wounds as well as twenty cutlass slashes. As a deterrent to others he was decapitated, and his head hung on a pole at the mouth of the Hampton river. Blackbeard’s notorious, yet short lived, pirating career had come to an end.

Roatan’s road traffic is worse than on the mainland and I have no idea where we are going to put all these vehicles in a couple of years. Maybe we just ship back the ones that are no longer road worthy. These rust buckets are not only dangerous but a time waster as just one car accident or breakdown can and does paralyze the entire section of the island where it occurs. In my humble opinion no vehicle that can’t do 45 mph should be allowed on the main highway.

I understand that people do need to get around, but not by endangering other citizens and themselves. The main road is not currently designed to accommodate slow moving scooters. Maybe a bike lane would be a good plan for future road work. Or perhaps we could follow Bermuda’s lead and institute restrictions on the size and number of vehicles allowed per household.

Currently we have quite a collection of vehicles travelling our roads: 18 wheelers, dump trucks, heavy equipment with no restrictions whatsoever. Essentially, if you can afford to ship it over here, you can drive it anywhere. The population is exploding out of control and, as a result, so are the number of vehicles. We need decent public transport and minimal regulations that ensure that vehicles are road worthy so that we no longer must-read news reports where buses slide down hills due to maintenance failures.

It’s unfortunate that my tax goes to San Pedro and not Roatan.

Nobody keeps track how many cars and motorcycles arrive daily on the freight boats from the mainland and how many more are imported directly from the US. I am also curious as to the how many pay the municipal tax locally. Let me pause here. Every year we pay registration on our vehicles. This payment includes an automatically collected municipal but, by way of example, my car that was purchased at a dealership in San Pedro Sula, so the tax goes to SPS municipality.

Now, my car is polluting the air in Roatan, using the roads here, oil changes and old tires stay here. It’s unfortunate that my tax goes to San Pedro and not Roatan municipality. When I questioned this, the previous mayor stated he would investigate it and the then DEI now SAR offices stated that Roatan municipality would have to petition the tax offices to collect the tax locally.

Years ago, I remember having to get a sticker from the local DMV offices to certify my vehicle was road worthy and my local taxes were paid. That program is long gone.

In order to get a driver’s license in Honduras there are plenty of hurdles to jump. You must present your identification card if Honduran and residency card if a foreigner. You have to pass a medical exam and eye test, present a blood type card, you must attend drivers education class at the training facility from 8:00am to 3:00 pm, pass the written and practical test, take a psychological test and finally, reserve an appointment with banco Atlántida where you will pay for the license depending on the type and duration.

After all that you can drive out with a brand-new driver’s license and no freaking clue how to drive. Stay safe out there and only drive defensively my friends.

Jonathan Infuses Ink, Dyes and Pigments into Human Skin

In recent years, tattooing has become more mainstream and tattoo parlors have sprung up around the world, but despite its pirate history Roatan has been late to the party. Mandy, or Miguel Armando Paredes began tattooing on Utila in 1988 and would occasionally come to Roatan to work. Scarlet Lopez, or “La Gata”, has been tattooing in Coxen Hole since 2002. More recently, Jonathan Orellana, 33, who was born in La Ceiba, but moved to the States at 11 to join his mother in Indianapolis, Indiana joined the ranks of Roatan tattoo artists. “The only reason I took [school] art [class] is because I didn’t know how to speak English,” said Jonathan. He got better at drawing and painting and began tattooing during his high school years in Indiana. “It started as like a joke. We decided to tattoo each other, the four of us, and I did better than all of us,” said Jonathan. “We made a homemade tattoo machine with a guitar string and an engine made out of a fan.”He shows off the first tattoo he received on top of his left hand: the word NACO. “It’s the initials of my grandfather,” says Jonathan.

On the urging of a Salvadoran friend and fellow tattoo artist, William Jueso, who traveled to Roatan regularly, Jonathan eventually moved to Roatan and began tattooing again. He began working at Roatan Ink, in the middle of West End, in 2015. The shop was started by Jo French, an English tattoo artist, and Jonathan took it over in 2017. “It’s not a steady work like in the States. I work maybe once-a-day. Some days I get crazy: four, five clients in a day,” says Jonathan.

In Honduras, 95 percent of tattoos are gang and prison made tattoos. “On the coast is more dangerous to be tattooed up,” says Jonathan, “but it’s getting better.” Those tattoos are meant to identify the individual’s gang affiliation and their standing within the organization, and to keep a record of the violent acts they have committed in the name of the gang. “We don’t have mareros here [on Roatan] and if we do, they stay in hiding,” says Jonathan. In fact, Honduran mareros, trying to stay off the radar, are switching to smaller identifying tattoos on fingers and inside their lips. Meanwhile, the tattoo for the “regular folks” had become more acceptable.

Body modification in general is finding a growing following among islanders. It’s become a status symbol for some. “Tattoos are luxury, like a car. You want to buy a quality car that will do you good,” says Jonathan. Unlike their pirate and gang predecessors, these tattoos are purely decorative, symbolic, and pictorial and Jonathan does them all. He especially enjoys inking bigger pieces. “Dots, geometrical, realistic, I go with it. I do any tattoo, any style. If there is a client and he wants a certain type of tattoo and you won’t do it that’s a lost client,” says Jonathan.

Jonathan has aquatic themes, mermaids, and Freemason all-seeing-eye tattoo designs hanging on the wall and ready to be placed on skin. Some clients come into Jonathan’s tattoo parlor for help with a failed tattoo or to correct a tattoo applied as result of spur-of-the-moment, snap decisions. Improving upon those mistakes through the design and inking of what are referred to as a “cover-up” tattoo is also a challenge that Jonathan enjoys. “Some people come to do a cover-up. A tattoo that covers something that a bad tattoo artist had made,” said Jonathan. “It’s hard to do a cover up and make it look good.”

“Certain artists work slow, they take their time. I don’t. I concentrate, I want to get this done, I do. Quick. That’s the way I work so I charge by the piece,” says Jonathan. “It’s all about the details, colors,” says Jonathan, who uses Mom’s Ink brand made of pure, homogenized pigments. “Sometime I go with my tattoo machine and I hit the line and I don’t see anything. I hit it again, I wipe it out and you can barely see it,” says Jonathan. “All skin is different.” A good tattoo artist merges great design with excellent technique, and an ability to adapt to each individual client.

Where Mainland Meets the Island

There are now five colonias in Sandy Bay and each one has its own special flavor. Balfate, the oldest Colonia, is relaxed with a smooth-functioning patronato,  a well, and no establishments selling alcohol as alcohol sales are seen by the community as attracting violence and riffraff. Bellavista has the best views of the northern coast on the island, it is also neglected, but safe. Colonia Policarpo Galindo is the most densely populated and also more dangerous than others. Colonia Montifresco is the smallest, more quiet and safe. Colonia Aldin is the new kid on the block. It is the largest by area, but also the poorest with no running water, no electricity, and no infrastructure. Aldin could also decide the fate of the entire island.

The colonias grew quickly and people from all over Honduras came here. Other than desperation and a desire to try to make a living on Roatan, they have very few things in common. The residents are young and old, mostly unqualified, poorly educated people and they just keep on coming. “We dug a well by hand [in 1994]” recalls Suarado. “The biggest problem is when the rain comes. The garbage just washes down to the beach and onto the reef,” says Suarado .After the death of Doc Polo Galindo things got even more complicated. “Let me be clear. The colonia is here because of land invasions and political manipulations,” said Suarado, who lost both of his legs to diabetes.

He remembers that in 1997 some patronato members got hold of legal documents of the patronato and just burned the “libro de actas” to eliminate the trail of responsibility,. While the colonias keeps growing, memories of conflict don’t die. “There is a great deal of thieves here,” says Suarado.

Aldin could also decide the fate of the entire island.

Services in the colonias are scarce and garbage removal is a huge problem. The creek is filled with tons of plastics and refuse. The municipality is supposed to send their trucks to remove the garbage three times each week, but often that is not the case. The pigs and dogs feed on the scraps of food they find in heaps of garbage on the side of the road. Piles of garbage litter the streets of the colonia. “We clean once a month,” says Ramos describing a local volunteer effort to keep the community clean, but the garbage just keeps rolling down the creek.

Water is also a big issue, and transport, especially emergency transport for people in the more remote areas, is not easy. Yet security is by far the biggest concern for most. “One thing we need is a police station,” says Ramos. There is no police presence in the colonia whatsoever and when there is a disturbance a police unit form Coxen Hole is dispatched, but it takes it half an hour to arrive and sometimes longer to locate the location of the problem in the maze of paths and clusters of homes on the slopes of the colonia.“Some bad people, drug dealers, don’t want the police here,” says Ramos.

The people work and live in the colonia. There is manufacturing, recreation, worship. A public kindergarten, Ramon Villeda Rosales, is located in the colonia. A nearby “modelo” grade school offers 1-9 grade classes and is second biggest on the island. There are two soccer fields, and plenty of places to.

Right as you enter the Colonia there is a footbolito sports field. Hector Ramos, 26, is in charge of the facility. 200,000 plastic bottles were used in building the walls that surround the field. Chris and Theresa Imbach, started a nonprofit “Care for Community” NGO that also has an after hour program.

Let me be clear. The Colonia is here because of land invasions and political manipulations.

The image of the colonias is that of danger and chaos and few foreigners ever come to the colonia, but, some foreigners have chosen to live on the edges of the colonia. Mel James opened a hostel just a stone’s throws away from the hills of the colonia. After a few years Mel doesn’t go there but recommends that her foreign backpackers venture out to explore. “If it’s dark then you don’t need to be there,” says Mel. The colonia is a resource for employment, and an occasional errand, but not much more. “I send my sons to get haircuts there. It’s 50 Lps. A haircut,” says Mel. “If I want to go for a walk I go to the beach.”

Tom Henry, 80, walks his island dog through the lower part of the colonia every day. “There is a lot of extremes here. If it’s a nice day it’s great. If it’s a bad day you wouldn’t find a worse day in your life,” says Henry, a retired Canadian who came to Roatan five years ago. Henry purchased a home in Sandy Bay and is trying to sell it.

Bill Brady, an American, and his wife Irma owned a piece of land adjacent to the colonia and found that the land was being squatted upon. “We fought back, but it was unnecessary. We had a bulldozer and had to take down some houses,” says Brady. “They had the divided the lot into 1,000 pieces from one night to the other,” recalls Brady, describing how the colonias came to be.

“I was here when there was not a single shack in Los Fuertes,” remembers Bill Brady who came to Roatan as a Peace Core volunteer in 1971. “Then someone build a shack by the sea and then they would become organized,” said Brady, an architect who designed dozens of island homes.“It’s like cancer. It has no sanitation, no master plan. If it’s allowed to continue to happen that will accelerate the demise of Roatan. The island will become a sad little footnote in the history of the Caribbean,” said Brady.

The colonias are like a living organism. There is always construction and constant expansion.It is somewhat contained on the east and west, but it keeps expanding south. In 2014 the colonia really took off and houses beyond the ridge, facing Watering Place, began to appear. Now there are 600 homes, or structures here. The area is roughly two kilometers wide and 2.5 kilometer long, so there could be thousands of homes here in just a couple of years. This makes some people very nervous. “Mark my words. This colonia will be the end of this island,” says Bill Brady.

The colonias are like a living organism. There is always construction, expansion.

Bella Vista has around 70 families or 280 people. Colonia Montefresco is also home to 70 families and 280 people. Balfate, with 600 families or 2,400 people is bigger still. Aldin, the new arrival, already claims 600 families residing or 2,400 people. The biggest is Policarpo Galindo with 800 families or 3,200 people. All together 8,500 people reside here.

The creek that runs through the colonias is called La Uva, after the grape tree that grows there. The tree trunk grows out of a small restaurant that completely surrounds the tree. La Uva is also a meeting place. The community gathers here to discuss politics, there are church rallies and festivities. It’s also the place where taxis and busses pick up passengers. Up the hill from there it’s mostly 4×4 and on foot. The paved road becomes dirt and also becomes much steeper, so steep in fact that some streets are just stairs made out of used car tires, or washed out rain mud track.

A bit up the hill, all the way on the ridge you will find Jose Modesto, 73, a carpenter with a million dollar view. “They know me not as a big person, but as a good person, a good carpenter,” says Modesto, who has lived on the island for 26 years and works on building apartments in colonia Bella Vista.

Another colonia resident, Santos Lopez, an AKR worker, says he owns 27 acres in Colonia Bella Vista, as he caries a five gallon water jug up a dirt road leading to his house. “High class people don’t come here. They think it’s just dangerous. But we catch the bad guys and kick them out,” says Lopez.

“If you buy a lot there and you won’t live there, you’ll lose it,” says Zelaya. “The land doesn’t come with proper documents and the only guarantee of keeping your house is living there if you stay here.” Zelaya is the president of the Bella Vista patronato, the grass roots organization that runs the day to day operation of the colonias. Depending on the size of the lot and how desperate the seller is, a lot in Bella Vista, costs between Lps. 200,000 and Lps. 250,000 according to Zelaya.

The newest colonia is named after Aldin Webster, an islander who fell behind on his taxes and property payments, but there are at least four other property owners in the area whose land had been invaded, including Marcus Webster and Tim Overfield.

One of the people residing in Aldin is Suzie Beltras, 60, an energetic Lenca lady from Intibuca who moved to Colonia Aldin three months ago. She supports herself selling jewelry to tourists on West Bay beach. Jonathan Gonzales, 19, has been living on the ridge of the Colonia Aldin for the last seven months. “I was born in Colon, but I’m a ‘1101’,” says Gonzales, referring to his Honduran ID that places him on Roatan Municipality.

It looks like the fight is against really poor people, when in fact a lot of the land is owned by lawyers, judges.

Gonzales, skinny with short, black hair shiny with gel, works in Grand Roatan and spends more time at work then at his three meter by three meter home. He collects rainwater from the zinc roof panels into plastic bottles and containers. “It tastes better than bottled water,” says Gonzales. He has a small solar panel that lights up his tiny yard full of chickens. The 70 by 50 foot property was purchased by his father and slopes at a 45 degree angle south to Watering Palace. The view is spectacular. One can see two cruise ships maneuvering to harbor and planes approaching Roatan airport. We’re at 190 meters above sea level.

Many people who live as squatters are not the ones laying claim to the land. “There are people with money that put people on these properties to stay there. It looks like the fight is against really poor people, when in fact a lot of the land is owned by lawyers, judges and people in politics,” said a Roatan Municipal council member who did not want to be identified for fear of backlash.

According to the councilman there is a huge confrontation appearing on the horizon. “There is no free land on Roatan or like the Spanish call it ‘propiedades eriles,” said the councilman. “When the documents are cleared for the owners, the squatters will be removed, regardless if it’s 600 or 1000 homes.” One such removal took place in 2015 in Colonia Brice or “Canaveral” when the military removed around 20 homes. The scale of the problem has ballooned, but the players waiting for a ‘lottery’ payout are, according to the councilman, the same. “Almost all the taxi drivers own properties in the squatting areas,” said the councilman. “It’s almost like a business. Once they manage to get a document to the property then they will sell it.”

There is a family moving to Colonia Aldin every two, or three days. The valley is filled with improvised wooden structures that have no electricity, no running water, and no bathrooms. The people have hope that all that will come one day. “At 6 am all the people head to work. It looks like a stream of ants heading across the hill to Coxen Hole,” says Hector Ramos. The residents of Colonia Aldin come from Colon, Yoro and Atlántida. “These from Yoro are the poorest, they hardly have anything,” says Zelaya. But they are resilient. They carry pieces of corrugated metal on their heads and piece by piece assemble small structures on 45 degree slopes. They clear land to farm corn and plantains. Hundreds of homes cook using cut down trees. But many of the residents don’t have the energy or means to carry much to and from their houses. They cut the organic trash and use it as compost. Some trash becomes a building material for their homes. Cut down trees, sheets of metal, plastic tarps are building blocks of the dwellings here.

The sounds of up-tempo music and shouting come from an evangelical church that has Thursday afternoon services for colonia residents in need of spiritual uplift. Life in the valley is hard and prospects for a more stable, better life are distant. Their speaker is powered by an extension cord running from the last home in Colonia Bella Vista that has access to electricity. “I give them electricity,” says Zelaya who wants to build a small bar on a place called “La Roca,” the rock. The place is indeed spectacular. The views stretch on three sides of the island: Sandy Bay to Watering Place and West End. “You can see Utila, Cayos Cochinos and on a moonless night the light of La Ceiba 60 kilometers away.” The island poor enjoy million dollar views.

By way of example, Roatan’s answer to crime on the Jackson Road was to build a six foot by eight foot wooden shack and abandon it by the side of the road without even posting a ‘Police ‘sign on it. The shack will not last as there is bound to be some entrepreneurial construction crew in need of building materials that will disassemble and remove it. The cost of the wood, labor and transport was around $1,000.

Virtue signaling is all around us. The police shack on the Jackson Road is one such signal: “we care to spend money to show we care, but we really don’t.”

I have another idea about a signal: ”yes we do care about policing, but we have a limited budget.” We live in a virtual world with virtual currencies, virtual friends and virtual pets. Why can’t we have virtual police officers?

In Boston a cutout police officer reduced bicycle theft by 67%. Scottish police have been employing cut-out policemen to reduce speeding on the windy country roads with much success. I’ve seen a police cutout with a motorcycle and a pointed radar gun on Panama’s highways. My reaction was to slow down. I figured out they were cutouts, but I also thought there had to be some police presence, as they had to bring the cutouts and, at a minimum, take care of it. So I reduced my speed and drove more carefully.

Why can’t we have virtual police officers?

The life-size cardboard cutout of a police officer can be purchased for $49.66 on Ebay. This is less than buying uniforms, let alone a gun for a real Honduran police officer. In addition that living and breathing national police officer doesn’t speak English, doesn’t know the island, and doesn’t know who-is-who. The cutout fails at this as well, but is well cheaper.

Being a police officer in Honduras is not easy, in point for fact, its hard work. You need training, require a salary, and have to muster constant self-control not to be corrupted or bribed. It’s tough.

Another advantage to a cutout is the constant, professional, and serious demeanor of the cutout police officer. Most police I see on Roatan are looking at their phones, talking to each other, or looking in a random direction. The cutouts are much more consistent and serious looking. The cutout is always there: it is dependable, it’s weather resistant. It’s there rain or shine. It doesn’t take lunch breaks. The “faux” police officer will work until it fails.

Since there are around 200 live police officers on the island currently I think the right number of cutouts should also be 200. Each police officer would be responsible for their own cutout: make sure it moves location every day, doesn’t get damaged by rain or pesky children. Maybe each cutout could have individualized details like make-up, or a flower in the uniform. That would have the criminals constantly guessing: is it real or is it “faux?”

The public also could help out. Stores and individuals that can’t afford to hire a guard could place cutout police in strategic places. The cutout figures of Roatan police should slow down speeding drivers and make robbers think twice before acting. While California parking lots are patrolled by 5 foot tall robots, Roatan could at least have 5 foot card board cutouts.