Blood Barrios
‘It takes a true reporter – gutsy, bloody-minded, driven – to work the streets of Tegucigalpa. Alberto Arce’s ballsy, bravely-told account marks him out as the real deal. The world needs more reporters like Arce – who meet bullets with ink, head on. This is a troubling, gritty, brutally truthful book.’
Oliver Balch, author of Viva South America!
‘Alberto Arce writes with stunning power and pace. Under the most difficult circumstances, he tells stories from violence-torn Honduras with an authenticity that reveals to readers terrible realities and the victims, but with an elegance that suggests there are no false notes … [He is] a journalist who seems fearless.’
American Society of News Editors
‘Reminiscent of The Wire. Blood Barrios is full of perceptive vignettes, each of which shows how cocaine trafficking, and the war on the traffickers, have sent the country spiraling into the abyss. Arce’s tone is that of a journalist teetering on the brink of despair.’
Tom Feiling, author of Short Walks from Bogotá
‘It took courage for Arce to write what he did in such a lawless place – naming names.’
Tim Ferguson, Forbes and jury member for the Overseas Press Club Award
‘Arce’s stories uncovered government-sanctioned death squads, human rights abuses in prisons and corruption among police and military forces. Overcoming a lack of public records available to him, Arce persuaded sources to give him copies of government documents and developed sources within the government, military, court systems and NGOs. He befriended prison officials and gang members alike to gain access to areas they controlled. Arce was eventually pulled out of Honduras after he was warned his reporting would get him killed.’
Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE)
BLOOD
BARRIOS
Dispatches from the
World’s Deadliest Streets
ALBERTO ARCE
TRANSLATED BY JOHN WASHINGTON
AND DANIELA UGAZ
Illustrated by Germán Andino
Blood Barrios: Dispatches from the World’s Deadliest Streets was first published in 2015 by Zed Books Ltd, The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SE11 5RR, UK
This ebook edition was first published in 2018
www.zedbooks.net
Copyright for the text © Alberto Arce, 2015.
Copyright for the illustrations © Germán Andino, 2015.
The rights of Alberto Arce to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
Typeset in Haarlemmer by seagulls.net
Cover design: David A. Gee
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78699-049-5 pb
ISBN 978-1-78699-051-8 pdf
ISBN 978-1-78699-052-5 epub
ISBN 978-1-78699-053-2 mobi
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Map: Routes of cocaine and violence in Honduras
Part I: Red Journalism
1.Inside the Volcano
2.Crime beat Rookie
3.Night of the Chepos
4.Death of a Taxi Driver
5.Four Boards Strapped to the Back
Part II: The Curse of Geography
6.A Little Known War
7.Mosquito Coast
Part III: Houses, Coffins, and Graffiti
8.Refugee Camp
9.One Coffin, One Vote
10.Hallucinations
11.Night of the Fire
Part IV: The Police
12.An Assassin
13.Death Squads
14.Police Reform
15.El Tigre Bonilla, A Culture of Simulacrum
Part V: Storytellers
16.Journalists
17.The Politicians
18.Those Who Imagine
Epilogue: What Am I Doing in Honduras?
About the Author and Translators
About the Illustrator
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
What helped me endure so long in Honduras was my constant desire to return home to see Sarah and Selma.
I want to thank the three editors of Associated Press, Marjorie Miller, Trish Wilson, and Katherine Corcoran, who gave me the opportunity, the means, the time, and the resources to cover for almost three years the events of a country that, in theory, matters to no one.
“So, when we all, all of us, have killed one another, and between Guatemala and Nicaragua nothing is left but one hideous and solitary puddle of blood, these texts may help the countries of the future not turn out like us...”
(Juan Martínez)
In the last fifty years, Central Americans have survived twelve coups d’état, one successful revolution and two failed revolutions, four declared wars, one genocide, one American invasion, eighteen hurricanes, and eight earthquakes. To the 320,000 dead from the wars of the 1980s we add 180,000 homicides. Most of these occurred in Honduras, where more than 55,000 people have been murdered in the last decade.
Routes of cocaine and violence in Honduras
PART I
RED JOURNALISM
1
INSIDE THE VOLCANO
You’ll notice the delicate pink flowers of the bougainvillea crawling over the cobblestoned street corners, the dusty mudbrick of the adobe, and the red tiles of the colorful houses, but only if you can get your head out of the volcano.
Living in Teguz is like drowning inside a volcano. In Tegucicrater—as some of us call it when there are no Hondurans around to hear us—you leave your house at six in the evening, you have your daughter’s tricycle wedged under your arm, and, on the street corner in Parque de la Leona, you approach the small group of people gathered around a dead body. You smell the blood; you coolly look at the bullet hole stamped into the head—you’ve learned to contain your nausea—and you begin, without your notebook, to ask questions, just out of curiosity, just as a citizen. No one can live in a place for two years without feeling a part of it.
To get your head out of the volcano you have to pierce through the hills of trash and the dogs that live in them, the invasive labyrinth of electrical cables and bootlegged wiring, the car exhaust, the pervasive sound of the cityscape, and the night that falls like a blanket over streets without lampposts or traffic lights. As you lift your head you’ll start to notice changes in the weather, the rain. By this point you’ve learned to hurry to beat the mudslide that will soon flood the neighborhood, to stick a hand out of the window to wave on the taxi behind you, and to drive on through the night with the anxiety of a junkie in search of one of the few gasoline stations that sell Marlboro Reds.
To exist here you have to learn to live with fear, rage, boredom, impotence, and frustration. The boredom of interviewing politicians and bureaucrats, the frustration that in a country where a woman is murdered every twenty hours, the half-dozen protesters gathered at a feminist rally can’t agree on what their banner should read. The anger of seeing a boy drop out of school to push a squeaking ice cream cart eight hours a day. The impotence of thinking about that girl who was shot in the leg by her dad, but who doesn’t want to go to the hospital because they might report the accident—the accident that happened when he, a police officer, was cleaning his gun while waiting for dinner to be ready after a 72-hour shift.
To survive the volcano, I’ve learned to protect myself against the ugly. I don’t need Google glasses; I only need my time machine. In the dead hours of a traffic jam, I’ve learned to
imagine the city in black and white. Dozens of times, I’ve dreamed of the Teguz of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, with its colonial houses, its gossiping crowds huddled at a church entrance, its billiards, its political hangouts, like the barbershop where Kapuscinski would get a straight shave before waiting in line to send a telegram, and where old men still sit to while away the hours, the type of men who touch the brims of their sombreros to greet passersby.
Most foreign journalists don’t pass the first cut, not even with the generous hazard-tax they can charge; they throw in the towel, leaving behind a defeated city where even party streamers are made of rusty barbed wire. Nicaragua, just a few hours away by car, is too close to Honduras to seem a legitimate place of refuge, and correspondents (myself included) lack the intimacy—the political or religious will—to live in Honduras without being Honduran. But those of us who make the cut—those of us who think we’ve made the cut—we fight it out together in our Central American Melrose Place. In the Giraldilla, protected and surrounded by eucalyptus and guava trees, by squirrels, and by the aloe vera that covers the wall separating us from the streets, and protected by Lucas, a father of eleven children who doesn’t know how to read or write, but who, with a machete in hand, guards over us night after night.
Lucas heats up a can of beans and a tortilla over burning embers in the yard; he makes less in a month than we spend on a Saturday night out on the town—we who party and love to talk about social justice, and yet refuse to open our door on a cold night lest Lucas come by to ask us for a little extra money for medication, or because his wallet’s been stolen. Nor do we open the door to the million people living just outside, a stone’s throw from the few houses remaining in the upper district. Many, in any given moment of bad luck, would kill us for what we have in our pockets. They don’t do it, though, because we don’t expose ourselves. Because we don’t step onto their streets or into their markets, and we think that, in this way, they’ll never reach us. The night I write this, however, the dead man, Don Esteban, a taxi driver with Parkinson’s, was left slumped with a bullet hole between his eyes on the same street corner I stand on every day while waiting for my driver.
For a reporter who likes both the mud and the lava, this place is basically a rave. Ecstasy comes by way of a hunk of flesh and a spurt of blood. Like the modern mother who swallows pills made out of her own placenta, we reporters seek out the dead bodies to harden ourselves. My neighbor, Germán (the illustrator of this book) dropped his notebook as he was sketching a crime scene, staining it in blood. The blood soaked into the paper, staining it, just like the spurts of machine gun fire soiled our Sunday evening cocktail party a few days before. Yesterday, when Don Esteban, shot dead, slumped over the steering wheel of his taxi, we could only think of one thing: “There’s nothing more to tell here.”
Tegucigalpa is a city where you don’t complain about somebody cutting you off in the street. Especially if that person is driving a double-cab pickup without plates. It’s a city where you don’t go looking for what you don’t want to find. Where you buy beer at the corner market and can feel the fear emanating from Gladys, the cashier who, despite having known you for a year, now only talks to you from behind metal bars, speedily snatching your two dollars before handing you your groceries. Where, when you turn around, beers in hand, you see a fifty-year-old man in rags sitting on a stack of Coca-Cola bottles in the back of a delivery truck, wearing a cheap bulletproof vest and holding a loaded shotgun at the ready. Where the same scene repeats itself on an egg delivery truck. Where they kill these guards to rob them of their shotguns, which cost less than a day’s wages. Where the businessmen making money from these robberies are also army colonels or chiefs of police. Where my daughter, just a year and a half old, sees a dead body for the first time and knows that something’s different, that I’m trying to hide something from her, that the body we walk by is a dead body, and not a man taking a nap.
This is a country where the president goes on national TV, interrupting regular programming on every channel, to denounce the high-profile businessmen who import, tax-free, French mineral water they claim is necessary for their health. He doesn’t name the businessmen, or file any charges, and certainly he doesn’t change the laws that he himself approved, which allow the tax-free imports in the first place. The announcement is just his way of extorting the businessmen so they’ll help fund his next campaign.
Honduras is a country where nobody has ever seen a mailman or a place to buy stamps, and yet UNICEF released a series of stamps to promote children’s rights, and, one Thursday afternoon, you receive an invitation to eat Peruvian food at the Presidential House to help promote internal tourism.
Here we are, those of us who come home after a day’s work and say, “I saw six dead bodies today,” and those who want to change the subject. Those subject-changers charge thousands of dollars to solve a problem they neither understand nor try to understand. They’re the same people who’ve never had trouble lifting their heads out of the volcano, those who realized much sooner than I have that Tegucigalpa is a city full of trees with red flowers and sunshine that breaks through the fog of the surrounding green hills. Because they can see more clearly looking towards the sky than they can with their eyes fixed at street level.
2
CRIME BEAT ROOKIE
The telephone rings one Saturday night, bringing news of death.
They just dropped two bodies, the policeman tells me over the phone. We’d asked him to show us the violence in San Pedro Sula, the so-called most violent city in the world. The cop—I can tell—feels useful lending a hand to a couple of international reporters.
I turn off the TV, put on my shoes, and tell the photographer about the call. As he routinely checks his memory cards and lenses, he phones for a taxi and checks the address with the receptionist. It’s just another day for him. He’s been covering this beat for more than a decade, since before I even started writing. He tells me to bring a phone charger, water, and some snacks to get us through the night—it could be a long one.
* * *
The first shots were fired through the front windshield. The victim’s head reclines against the headrest. Inside the shattered skull there’s something pink. Blood is spattered on the window, the steering wheel, the shirt.
The next victim is less bloody.
The bullet entered through the open window with nothing to interrupt its path. One shot is all it took—a little red dot at the temple. It’s not as messy, but has left the body contorted, slumped to the side where it wanted to fall. The seatbelt is the only thing keeping the victim upright.
The bodies belong to the drivers of two mini-busses. This night, sweating as you can only sweat during Holy Week in the Caribbean, is my first night working the streets of Honduras.
They call it red journalism because of the blood. But the sparks that explode into the darkness are blue. The lights atop cop cars—rhythmic, hypnotic, as on American television shows—flood the scene like a spectacle for the faithful, those attending the nightly liturgy.
The police, four of them dropping grim-faced out of the bed of a pickup truck, look exhausted before they even begin their work. One of them makes a gesture with his rifle and, without even needing to issue an order, the crowd around the two mini-busses backs away. The officers wrap yellow tape around the scene. To get close enough to see, you elbow your way through the wall of crowding neighbors. A notepad or a camera is all the verification needed to let you scrutinize the corpses without raising eyebrows. The photographer doesn’t waste time. He lifts the yellow tape, leans in, and shoots the victims again and again.
Lingering, I sit on a curb to smoke. In a little under an hour the scene has turned into a death carnival. Street-sellers jingle their cart-bells and onlookers gather around to buy candy, water, juice, and baleadas, Honduran-style tortilla sandwiches. The public eats, chats, loses enthusiasm. But almost nobody leaves. The television crews, completing the cast, move from one body to another
. They get shots of the bodies, the curious spectators, the fat cop working the crowd. This is what they came for. Finally, someone drapes sheets over the bodies, and the local journalists turn off their cameras as if the show were over.
On that hot, viscous night in San Pedro Sula, there were eighteen murders. It’s a city that averages fifteen homicides a day, and about 5,400 a year. In San Pedro Sula there are more violent deaths than in Baghdad or Kabul.
To write red journalism is to collect first-hand material from cadavers, to submerge yourself up to your eyeballs. Your Saturday nights will be dates with dead bodies and open notebooks. The challenge for the photographer is to capture the death scene without ruining the reader’s breakfast the next morning; my challenge is to explain why it matters that these people are dying. No. That’s too clichéd. To deliver to my editors a story that will justify their expenses. To find witnesses who will speak. To get them to talk, though talking puts them in danger. To give their personal details: full name, age, profession. To set up road signs on the map for whoever wants to find them, and charge them—with their lives—for speaking. Just basic professional standards.
I look around. The local journalists aren’t asking questions. All they need is the number of bodies and the number of gunshots. They tend to avoid complication. And they help witnesses avoid complications. The script tells you to wait until the dust settles. I’m the kind of writer who always sticks close to the photographer. If he’s going to linger at a scene, so am I. Minutes tick by. There, in plain view of the body, we talk about vacation plans, apartment rentals, sex, movies, our kids, Spain, Peru, the heat, the beach, prices for discount flights to Roatán Island—which is just half an hour from here. Another thirty minutes pass. Then an hour. An hour and a half before the forensic official comes to haul away the corpses.