A blanket of colorful plastic waste coming in from tributaries covers Lake Suchitlan in El Salvador.

It’s a sad image that has also become all too commonplace on the Caribbean beaches of Honduras, where thousands of tons of garbage arrive from neighboring Guatemala.

Bubbling beverage bottles, medicine packs, tattered flip-flops: All kinds of plastic waste are of international importance on the 13,500 hectare Suchitlan Lake, which serves as a reservoir for a power plant and is considered a wetland of the sea by UNESCO.

Local fishermen say the pollution is forcing tilapia and cichlid fish deeper into the artificial lake — the country’s largest freshwater basin — where they can’t be reached with fishing nets.

“It’s been more than two months since we’ve been able to fish,” angler Luis Penate, 25, told AFP.

To make ends meet, he has started driving tourists around in a boat owned by another fisherman.

Ducks make their way through the garbage, baby turtles climb on floating bottles to sunbathe, and skinny horses wade into the lake to drink the contaminated water.

The contamination is unprecedented, said Jacinto Tobar, the mayor of Potonico, a small village 100 kilometers north of San Salvador in Chalatenango department.

“The fauna and flora are suffering a lot,” and there are fewer and fewer tourists, he said.

The fishermen also have to compete with 1.5 million black cormorants that inhabit the lake, according to Tobar, who says they’ve become something of a nuisance since they arrived as migratory birds and then stayed there.

With a population of 2,500, Potonico is the hardest hit of 15 riverside villages.

The state agency that manages the reservoir employs dozens of workers to clean the lake by hand.

Some locals are also helping with the task, which Tobar says will take three to four months.

“What can we hope for the future if we don’t take care of our environment, if we pollute our roads, rivers, lakes, forests and beaches,” President Nayib Bukele said earlier this week while unveiling a “Zero Rubbish” campaign . Campaign.

Environment Minister Fernando Lopez said the country generates 4,200 tons of waste every day, of which 1,200 tons end up in rivers, beaches and roads.

One of the worst-hit areas of the Central American Caribbean coast are the beaches of the Omoa region of Honduras.

It is a beautiful coastline of lush vegetation and palm trees about 200 kilometers (120 miles) north of Tegucigalpa.

But in some places the sand is almost completely covered with plastic waste of all kinds, including syringes.

“This garbage is coming out of the Motagua River on the Guatemalan side, they couldn’t stop it,” said Candido Flores, 76, a local resident.

“When the river rises, it returns again.”

It has created islands of floating garbage that have been denounced by local authorities and activists, and even created tensions between the two countries.

According to The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch NGO, around 20,000 tons of plastic waste come through the Las Vacas, a tributary of the Motagua, every year.

Most of it comes from a landfill site in the Guatemalan capital.

Environmental activists say the problem must be tackled at the source.

“We have to attack where the biggest stream of garbage comes from,” says Eduardo Arguera, 29, an architecture student at the University of El Salvador, who has launched several clean-up campaigns.

To contain plastic waste and prevent it from entering rivers and lakes, he suggests fencing it off at strategic points.

Ricardo Navarro, president of the Center of Appropriate Technology, says only 30 percent of the waste floats; the rest sink to the bottom of the waters.

That said, what is visible is literally just the tip of the iceberg.

The United Nations Environment Program says 11 million tonnes of plastic enter the world’s oceans every year and warns the number could triple in the next 20 years.