ero in the book -- that about covered it, Iz declared in a seaside Puerto Cabezas café, listening to a tune of the same name. A sort of Miskito reggae, the song tells the story of a diver who catches lobsters that will be eaten "on the plates of gringos." Now paralyzed, the diver has become el medio hombre -- half a man. He crawls back to the sacabuzo to see what he has to show for all those days under the sea. The foreman opens his ledger and runs a manicured fingernail across the debits and credits. Sorry, he says to the buzo, there's nothing. Nothing but zero in the book.

This was how it was on the coast. The divers had been cast in the roles of sharecroppers, oceangoing, black-lunged coal miners, except they had no John L. Lewis, no Big Bill Haywood, no meaningful union of any kind, said Iz, author of his own buzo blues, entitled "Paralysis and Gold." Sung to the tune of Gordon Lightfoot's "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," with the opening line "Let's raise a glass to the men who won't last, on the reefs of the Costa Miskitia," the song was recorded on cassette by Iz's wife, Susan, whose clear voice can be heard in several church choirs in Louisiana's St. Tammany Parish.

Iz, who describes himself as "pretty much an Old Testament kind of guy when it comes to affixing culpability," was of the opinion that if an evil like the situation on the Mosquito Coast could exist, someone or something must be to blame. There were plenty of villains to choose from. There were the greedy sacabuzos, the cruel boat captains, the rapacious owners of fish processing plants. There were millionaire lobster magnates like Jorge Morgan and his Honduran counterparts on the island of Roatán, the McNabb family, and Albert Jackson, who used his fishing fortune to build a TV-themed sport-dive facility, Fantasy Island (complete with a local dwarf in the Herve Villechaize role). In the late 1990s, when Nicholas Guarino, a former Wall Street analyst, sought to open a rival processing plant on Roatán, Jackson supposedly sent him a coffin as a welcome gift. And then there was Central America's institutionalized corruption.

"There is a sense of lawlessness along the Mosquito Coast, especially in the lobster business," says Paul Raymond, a special agent for the enforcement section of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in charge of monitoring illegal seafood imports into the United States. "If you look hard enough you'll find major abuses in almost all the big seafood import companies. Not that anyone is really looking. Policing by the locals is almost nonexistent."

What is happening on the coast is a shame, Raymond says. His office has jurisdiction to arrest people attempting to import "short," or undersized, lobsters into the United States. But there is nothing NOAA can do about the divers. "There's no law against diving for lobsters, not in Nicaragua, not in Honduras, not in the United States. The fact is, lobster diving is a human rights issue...and human rights are slippery things, beyond our jurisdiction."

Yes, there is a lot to hate on the Mosquito Coast, Iz acknowledges. To narrow it down, he's focused much of his ample ire on the stateside corporations that import Central America's spiny lobsters. Singled out for special scrutiny is the 1,300-outlet Red Lobster chain, a subsidiary of Darden Restaurants Inc. of Orlando, Florida, the largest "casual dining" company in the world (it also operates the midpriced Olive Garden, Bahama Breeze, and Smokey Bones chains). Red Lobster agents first appeared on the coast in the early 1990s, signing deals with a number of the larger boat owners. Berkeley geographer Bernard Nietschmann, the Miskitos' foremost international advocate, decried the involvement of large American seafood companies, calling the overfishing of Caribbean spiny lobster "an ecological disaster in the making."

Red Lobster spokesmen have repeatedly denied complicity in the buzo disaster. Mike Bernstein, media director for Darden, says that while it is true that Red Lobster imports a sizable percentage of the lobsters caught along the Nicaraguan and Honduran coasts, "we do not purchase diver-caught product. We are concerned about the safety of the divers. That's why we only enter into contracts with providers who exclusively trap lobsters."

This is exactly the sort of talk that drives Iz around the bend. He brandishes a letter from Jim DeSimone, Darden's president of communications, asserting that Red Lobster buys only "trap-caught or shallow-dive, hand-caught lobsters."

"What do they mean 'shallow-dive, hand-caught lobster?' How do they know how deep these guys are? The divers don't have gauges; they don't even know themselves."

Iz is in full j'accuse mode now. "These pirates are trying to absolve themselves, saying they're only trapping, which is civilized, instead of dealing with these primitive fools who keep diving. The cold, hard fact is that most Miskitos can't trap. A fisherman needs at least 50 traps to even begin to make a living catching lobsters. Each trap costs between $25 and $30."

Who had that kind of money on the Mosquito Coast? Iz wanted to know. Not the divers, not the small boat captains or the sacabuzos. In his view, Darden's "trap-only" policy assured that the big fisheries, Jorge Morgan and his ilk, would continue to rule the roost, since they alone had the necessary capital. It might be different if there were some kind of alternative economy on the coast, another way to make money. Right now, however, the only viable options for unskilled Miskito workers are activities such as signing on with the lumber companies deforesting the interior, or joining the gold miners using cyanide leaching in the mountains.

On top of that, Iz contended, the "trap-only" claim was based on a fallacy. There was no way a big importer could claim, with a straight face, to buy only trap-caught lobster. Everyone knew that once you caught a lobster, cut off its head and shoved its tail into a 70-pound freezer bag, it was impossible to tell whether it came from a trap or not.

Determined to prove this, Iz embarked on a typically scattershot but eminently determined investigation. On Corn Island we visited a packing plant owned by Central American Fisheries (CAF), a large exporter that handles both trapped and diver-caught product. Either unmindful or uncaring that many of his stateside buyers were on record as not buying buzo-caught lobsters, Fabio A. Robelo, the laconic general manager, readily admitted that there was "no way anyone would be able to tell which lobster was which" once the processing started. "It is all mixed together," he said.

A subsequent tour of CAF's massive freezer turned up several lobster boxes bearing the logo of the Sysco Corporation. This was a find, Iz pronounced, since Sysco, with reported gross sales of $27.5 billion in 2003, is one of the largest food purveyors in the world. In an implicit acknowledgment of the controversy over Mosquito Coast lobster, the company's website makes a point of saying that its "Sysco classic warmwater lobster tails" are "trapped in the clear Caribbean waters of Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Bahamas." Iz saw opportunity here. After all, Sysco is a publicly traded corporation. If the accuracy of the word trapped should come into question, it could cause a ruckus among the stockholders, especially if some loudmouth international labor-rights organization were to take up the buzos' cause. Indeed, asked what he would do if he learned that Red Lobster was unwittingly buying dive-caught lobster, Darden spokesman Mike Bernstein said, "Well...we'd be very disappointed."

The noose was tightening, Iz maintained later, as we drove over to a shipping yard on Roatán. A dive boat, the Captain Josué, was at the dock, buzo canoes stacked up on its deck. Beside the boat were giant refrigerator containers marked HYBUR, a subsidiary of the Hyde Shipping Corporation, owned by another of the old-time island families. (Jerry Hyde is currently the Roatán mayor.)

A few days later, Iz's sleuthing took us to Miami, where we drove past another stack of HYBUR containers outside Hyde's stateside offices. Pretending to be a lumber buyer inquiring about the price of moving Honduran hardwood, Iz asked what else the company shipped.

"A lot of lobster," the Hyde shipping manager replied.

"Yeah? Who buys it?"

"You know, Red Lobster for the most part," was the answer.

If this didn't exactly put a smoking gun in the company's hand, Iz said, it was pretty darn close.

Still, if you really wanted to point a finger at who was destroying La Miskitia, you had to take the long view. Even if Iz says he feels nauseous when he hears Red Lobster's ad slogan, "Share the Love," there were larger forces to blame here.

It was us, Iz knew. "Big, piggy us."

It went back to the notion of lobster as rich people's food, something extraordinary, a fetish like gold, Iz said. "When they come up with a concept like Red Lobster -- which sells lobster tails for mass consumption, on the cheap -- that fulfills the ideal about everyone getting to feel special. This is good. It is democracy. Part of the American dream. Except if you're going to make every man a king, you've got to have a heck of a lot of lobster. It is a supply and demand problem. Because with every $9.95 lobster fest there are fewer lobsters, and some Miskito diver has to go down another foot to find the next one, and the next one until there are none left. No lobsters, no Indians. But what do we care, as long we've got the bib around our neck and melted butter on the side?"