Honduras sends soldiers to protect 'lost city' from drug cartels

By Philip Sherwell  

Photo: Dave Yoder
National Geographic

The Honduran president has dispatched troops to protect a "lost city" rediscovered deep in the jungle amid fears that looters could pillage ancient artefacts from the abandoned home of an unknown civilisation.

There were deep divisions among the expedition team that found the site in the Mosquitia rainforest about whether to remove ancient relics for safekeeping because of the risk of looting, or leave them intact, it has emerged.

The archaeologists in the expedition won the day when they flatly opposed digging up and moving any artefacts to the capital Tegucigalpa, despite the dangers that priceless objects could be lost forever if looters found the site.

Chris Fisher, the US lead archaeologist, argued that the scientific value of the artefacts would be destroyed if they were excavated too abruptly as they needed to be studied in their setting amid the buried remains of plazas and a pyramid.

It is believed that the inhabitants who abandoned the site at least six centuries ago may be the same civilisation that built a fabled "White City", also known as the "City of the Monkey God", long sought by Western explorers and adventurers.

The team deliberately held back the location of the "lost city" when its discovery this month was announced by National Geographic in news that made headlines around the world.


But although the Mosquitia is a barely populated expanse of jungle, mountain and swamp, it is also the most popular transit point for drug cartels smuggling South American cocaine north towards the US.

There were fears that the location would quickly become known locally, with one Western security consultant on the team predicting that looters could reach the site within three days. Others were also alarmed that ranchers clearing the forest nearby for cattle rearing could damage the site.

Juan Orlando Hernandez, the Honduran president, has now ordered his army chief to deploy troops to protect a site that is thought to date back to 1000AD and to have been abandoned by 1400AD.

^{A cache of at least 51 artifacts, lie in a secret location in the Mosquitia jungle in Honduras}
 
The first soldiers are believed to have reached the remote site via a helicopter airlift to a landing scene hacked out of the jungle. But it is not clear how large or effective the force will be.

The military has failed to combat the much better-resourced Latin American drug gangs that use the Mosquitia to land small planes laden with Colombian cocaine on rough airstrips cleared by local hired hands. There are also persistent accusations of corruption against some senior figures in the security forces.

The disagreement about what to do with the relics was revealed in a New York Times comment piece by Tom Lutz, an American writer and broadcaster who was part of the joint expedition of US and Honduran scientists, film-makers, British ex-SAS consultants and local military.

He said that the team shared the "once-in-a-lifetime" thrill of discovering the remarkable cache of artefacts, including an apparent jaguar-effigy stone sculpture jutting from the ground and elaborately decorated stone bowls with handles shapes as serpents and birds.

The scientists mapped the now-buried remains of extensive plazas, earthworks and an earthen pyramid at a site first identified as a possible abandoned city by aerial laser surveillance of the jungle floor.

^{In 1940, the Milwaukee Journal published this artist's concept of the jungle city discovered by Theodore Morde}

"We all agreed about our good fortune," Mr Lutz wrote. "But we all disagreed about what should happen next." He agreed with Steve Elkins and Bill Benenson, the American film-makers who organised and funded the project, that some of the items should be taken back to the Tegucigalpa anthropology and history institute because of the danger that the site would be looted before it could be properly excavated.

But Prof Fisher, a Colorado State University academic, was adamant that the site should not be disturbed. "Everyone has a responsibility to protect the site as it is global patrimony," he argued.

Mr Lutz said that he hoped that the Honduran president's decision meant that the site "appears to be safe for now". But he expressed fears that if a permanent solution is no reached, "many of this long-lost city's secrets will be truly and irredeemably lost".