Fraught with scandals president Xiomara Castro has pushed ahead with another white elephant project of building a prison on Swan Islands, an archipelago that was once used as a CIA radio outpost. Honduran government had allocated $72 million for the Swan Islands prison in 2025. While over 300 kilometer to the north east, the big and little Swan islands are a part of Roatan municipality and seem to have great tourist potential, if the government doesn’t get there first. If Castro gets her way, Bay Islands will receive a financial boost from families visiting country’s 2000 most dangerous convicts. Some of these prisoners might even get so used to Caribbean weather and Hurricanes that hit the Swan Islands with record frequency and might even decide to stay in the Bay Islands once their sentence is completed. Fortunately for those supporting this Devil Island 2.0 Honduras has a history of unfinished prisons, one of them being abandoned prison in Naco, Cortés.

Exploding Pagers, Radios

The biggest, most complex, terrorist operation since September 11, 2001 took place on September 17 and 18 in Lebanon and Syria. At 3:30 pm, after receiving a text, over 3000 pagers exploded killing 42 people and injuring 2,800 more. Next day hundreds of handheld radios were triggered in other explosions. The pagers were distributed by Hezbollah mostly to its civil servants and medical staff. The pagers used in the attacks were branded by Taiwanese company Gold as Apollo AR924 and made by a company based in Hungary. While Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president denied Israel’s involvement, he also insinuated Druze community could be the culprit. While Booby-trapping harmless devices violates signed by Israel and 126 other entities Conventional Weapons Convention, practically everyone understands that this has be an Israeli operation. Israel is unique in possessing the motive, sophistication and ruthlessness to carry south such an operation. In a rare moment of honesty Leon Panetta, a former CIA director, described the pager attacks as an Israeli “form of terrorism.” The implications for the future of setting a precedent of a mass market consumer object being used in a state terrorist attack could be vast.

Who is El Comandante?

A bombshell video was released by InSight Crime.com on 3 September, 2024 of a 2013 meeting of convicted drug traffickers and Olancho Congressman Carlos Zelaya discussing how the criminals will fund the Libre Party’s political campaign. Curiously the video recording surfaced less than a week after president Xiomara Castro had suspended the extradition treaty to US. Fallowing the video release Carlos Zelaya has fled Honduras and renounced his seat in Honduran congress. In the video Carlos Zelaya, AKA Carlón, discuses the $650,000 bribe with several well known narcos. Amongst them Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga “El Cachiro,” Javier Maradiaga and better known on Roatan Carlos “El Negro” Lobo who was recently released from a US prison. In the video Carlos Zelaya states that the 50% of the money has to go to comandante… Presumably his brother Mel, and ex president of Honduras and husband of the current president. No arrests have been made over a month since the video surfaced.

Assange is Free

After being a scapegoat of the US deep state since he fled to an Ecuadorian embassy in 2012 Julian Assange is finally free. In 2019 Assange was dragged out of the embassy by British authorities. From 2019 till his release in 2024 he was held in top security Belmarsh Prison. While Assange took refuge in Ecuadorian embassy, CIA discussed the ways he could be kidnapped or killed. According cia CIA officials sources Trump’s Mike Pompeo, then CIA director, was trying “to get even with WikiLeaks founder.” That chapter finally ended when in June 2024 Assange signed a plea bargain with US Department of Justice. He pled guilty to one felony count of violating the US Espionage Act in exchange to his immediate release after serving 62 months in British prison. Assange’s plight was meant to give a chilling effect to anyone considering revealing crimes committed by the US government and deep state that controls it. In an act of vindication-of-sorts, on October 2, Council of Europe classified Julian Assange as political prisoner.

Roatan started out as a self-sufficient island around 5,000-7,000 BC. There were no industries to speak of and the Paya Indians grew their own food and had enough fish to never worry about hunger. The Mayan traders would sail in their canoes to bring them cacao beans and some metal tools to trade for dried fish, shells, and pottery.

Then in the 1580s the island become a hub of the ‘pillage industry.’ Hundreds of pirates lived here and careened their boats in preparation for raids on the Spanish ships carrying silver and goods from nearby Trujillo and Puerto Bello. That industry came crashing down in 1650, and the Paya were deported by the Spanish to Rio Dulce, leaving the island unpopulated for almost a century-and-a-half.

As slavery was abolished in the British Empire, hundreds of Cayman islanders came to Roatan to begin their lives anew. It took another 140 years of quiet, self-sustaining life before the coconut and banana fruit industry motivated islanders to plant thousands of trees and to sell the fruit to Standard Fruit company ships visiting the island. As that banana boom wound down in the 1960s, the shrimp and lobster industry arrived on Roatan. There were lucrative contracts with Red Lobster plenty of jobs and stressful shrimp-boat loans from Honduran banks to pay.

That fishing industry lasted until about the early 2010s when cheaper, farmed raised shrimp drove down the price of wild shrimp and the lobsters “got smaller” and harder to catch.

The tourism industry on the island began with dive resorts such as Anthony’s Key Resort and Coco View springing up in the 1970s. The sailing industry, created courtesy to Reagan era tax shelters, discovered the island in 1980s. Brick Bay Resort or CSY (Caribbean Sailing Yacht) was hopping and bopping with beautiful sailing vessels. The tax shelters went away and so did the sailboats.

Drug smuggling industry had discovered Roatan in early 1980’s.

The construction industry has been a growing employer on the island since the first bulldozer was shipped to the island in 1970s. There are now a dozen construction companies tearing down hills, filling in gullies, and constructing metal and cement buildings all over the island. The construction industry is perhaps the main driver of migration to the island form mainland Honduras. If you have a heart beat and two hands you can get a job on a Roatan construction site.

The drug smuggling industry had discovered Roatan in early 1980s, just as the Iran Contra cocaine smuggling operation was winding up to the deep state kabaal dispatched CIA Et al to move cocaine to the waterfront condos of Miami and street corners of south LA. The industry brought employment, money, addiction and violence to Roatan.

The smuggling spiked in 2009 right after the coup against president Mel Zelaya. While the ‘War on drugs’ continues, so do the smuggling operations that supply millions of US and Canadian cocaine addicts. At least Roatan’s international airport has gotten too busy to bring in drug planes as it did six or seven years ago.

After the first cruise ship visited Roatan on September 5, 1989, there was no turning back. The Ocean Spirit was the biggest cruise ship in the world: it was nearly 500 feet long, weighed 20,000 tons and brought in 360 passengers, a fraction of the 7,000 passenger behemoths that are bound for Roatan visits currently. On the horizon there is the possibility of a third cruise ship dock in Port Royal.

There is yet another industry player eyeing the island: all-inclusive hotels, much less focused on diving. Sandals, Wyndham, Hilton, and Inter Continental are all said to be exploring possibilities on the island and development is inevitable. This growth will likely require expansion of the Roatan’s international airport leading to additional filling in of the reef. Roatan appears to be, yet again, meeting the supply for others’ addictions at its own expense: European addiction to gold, American addiction to cocaine, and American addiction to cheap, all-you can-eat, holidaying.