Blood Barrios Read online

  “A number of times we were almost kicked out for not paying, but they found new patrons, got money from business owners. They’d cover our expenses. The bosses would give them a scare, tell businessmen and other people with cash that they could be targeted for kidnapping and extortion. They were voluntary donations, but we had to scare them first. There was a businessman in charge of renting us different cars every week. They came without plates, or we’d take the plates off ourselves. Who was going to stop us? We were authorized for that kind of thing. Pickups and SUVs. We had Uzis, AK-47s, AR-15s, we didn’t know where they came from, not even the police are supposed to have those kinds of weapons. We also had police vests, which we wore, turning the patch around so you couldn’t see the tags. We also had helmets, all of it was just there for us. I was part of the crash crew, but there were others with less experience, and if there was a difficult mission they didn’t go, we couldn’t use them. They picked people based on experience.

  “Over time everybody had a hand in everything, from the chiefs to the agents. If we needed to clean up a neighborhood to start working, we had to call the local police chief. We couldn’t push out the local patrols on our own, we needed orders directly from the chief. And the chief himself made the orders and did the torturing, but he didn’t participate directly in the executions, he only gave the orders. The chief had the power to decide who was going to live and who was going to die, and he consulted with his bosses. The chief made the decisions. In almost every operation there was someone in charge. But when we were actually working we were all equals, you couldn’t tell between the chief and a soldier during an operation. We were discreet about it. If we were in a torture room, and someone killed a detainee accidentally, and if I said the killer’s name out loud, I’d be asking for a death sentence. Why would I risk all that? If I slipped someone’s name and someone else getting tortured overheard and was able to escape and leak the name—no, nobody wanted to run the risk that a name would get out. A number of police were killed because of that.

  “Weeks could go by in one of the houses with us just loafing and doing nothing. Zero kidnappings. Some guys lost it and went out to kill for money. If there wasn’t work, there wasn’t money, and so they would have to go looking for assassination jobs to survive. If there was an operation and some dead bodies showed up, the bosses would charge you for it, under the table. They’d take advantage of you, and you wouldn’t even realize it. In the end I didn’t make any money.

  “I was in from October 2007 to June 2011. I wanted to retire, because I was realizing that, throughout my life, I hadn’t killed anybody, and I didn’t think that things had to be like this. If I’d known how it was going to be I never would have joined. But by the time I had that realization, there wasn’t any going back. I’d been in battles before, but I never had to kill anybody, especially not in cold blood. When you’re in you get to a point where, with so much death, you don’t feel anything for other people anymore. One time there were eight bodies in the house and we had to go and dump them, we piled them into the truck bed, put a sheet of plastic over them, and then sat down on top of the pile. All the police officers recognized us and looked the other way—we were famous killers.

  “Those first people we killed, right when I arrived, I remember like it was yesterday. There were three young men somehow linked to the kidnapping of a businessman in La Ceiba. The three of them were all in one car. We picked them up together, and that was when I saw how ugly it could get. Only one of them was actually involved, but the chief said we had to give it to all of them. I’ll always remember that first kill. We had it on film. One of them was named Tony; I even know where he lived. Another one was his nephew, a kid about twenty years old, and the third one was related to a soccer player. We stopped them in two cars, one in front and one behind, right in the center of San Pedro Sula. The only one who was actually guilty was Tony.

  “We would say that we were the police so people stayed calm. To keep traffic moving. Inside the city we rode with a team of four in the cabin: the driver, the boss, and two more. We were just going to do a stop, cuff them, and put them in the truck. The fella knew what was up, that he was caught, and he didn’t put up a fight. But we didn’t all fit in the cab since they were big guys, and so I had to ride in the back, and one of them rode with me, uncuffed, I had him lying down, it was absurd, my pistol held right against his head right in the middle of the city. At first I thought we were just capturing them. We took them to the house. We tortured all of them, but only one of them knew why. The money was already gone, there was nothing left. They sent it to Nicaragua with some other folks. We roughed them up to try to get information, bags over their heads, hanging them up by their arms, for about three hours. The chief gave me the order directly, you have to give it to them. All of them. He’s starting to act tough, I thought, though I still didn’t know how bloody it was going to get. This was in the Trejo house. We hauled them out at dawn on the Omoa highway. They were all tied up inside the cab, cuffed, gagged, blindfolded. They couldn’t see anything, didn’t know where they were going, didn’t know what we were going to do with them. We pulled one of them out, told him to walk. Generally we leave them face down on the floor. It’s better for them not to know. They’re crying, it’s heart-breaking, it’s better not to tell them anything and then give it to them at once, one quick shot. It’s not as hard that way. Some of us would lose control, shoot them all up, crazy angry people. Some of these guys would shoot them twenty times. If one of us didn’t shoot, it would be a mutiny, a threat to the whole group, and you could get killed for that. If you’re supposed to shoot, you shoot. That day one of the officers who’d just gotten out of the academy was with me, it was his first day, later he turned into an assassin, but that day he was crying. Since it was his first day, they made him do it. They gave him a pistol, but it’s better if the people who are used to it go first, or to let a person volunteer. There’s always someone who wants to do it. I made sure to busy myself with something that day so that I wouldn’t have to shoot, but the rookie came to me and said he was raised in a Christian house. He was like, No man, I can’t do it. He was crying. No man, I can’t, my friend. The rest of the guys were waiting for him in the cars. I had to do it for him.

  “We were the San Pedro crew, but there was also another crew in La Ceiba, and another in Tegucigalpa. It’s impossible to know how many people were killed. In just my crew I could count about 200 deaths. And then you have to factor in that the vice of killing doesn’t just fade away. I saw only a few cases of police who thought about backing out, and there was one guy I remember who actually tried to leave. I went to pick him up and brought him to the boss—for lack of respect. The boss ordered us to kill him for insubordination. That was the last job I did, in early 2011. I never knew his name, he was just a young white guy. That was my last job, I did it, and then didn’t go back to the crew. I left them hanging. Didn’t say a word. Just disappeared. I went and hid. I’d been wanting to leave. I couldn’t take it, I needed out. I saw how indifferent we’d become to death.

  “I tried to tell a few crew members that there were kidnappers who, when you triangulated their phones, you figured out were working with the bosses. I wasn’t the only one who had caught on. A few said that they were retiring, but I didn’t believe them for a minute. I’ve distanced myself from all the friendships I had. We used to go out to eat together, to celebrate out on the town. Now I don’t touch them, don’t even answer their calls. At night I take the battery out of my phone and I don’t ever stay in one place. Two days here, one day there. Always changing, and if I’m in a house for three days, I’m locked inside, watching TV. I can’t even work, because if I did find a job, they’d find me there. I’m already falling into a routine, and they can track you down quick here. I’m totally stressed. I hear a dog bark and I’m pulling my pistol. They’re going to come for me, but they’re going to have a standoff. They’re not going to just take me away. It’s not going to be easy. I alway
s have a pistol on me. If they catch me I’ll kill myself going out. Knowing what they do to people, I won’t let them take me. I’m not meant to do this kind of thing, to kill. I was raised by humble people, with principles, I wasn’t meant to be like this. If you even hesitate they’ll off you, they’re always nervous about that kind of thing. Which is why you can’t ever get out. It’s like the mafia—death is the only path to freedom. The only thing I regret is being needy, needing a job, you think that they appreciate you, respect you, but they were just using you, and it took me a while to realize that.”

  13

  DEATH SQUADS

  The masked men riding in a 4-by-4 without plates came by night. They opened the neighborhood gate and, without shooting, fighting, or yelling, took twenty-eight-year-old Kevin Said Carranza, known as “Teiker,” and his nineteen-year-old girlfriend, Cindy Yadira García. But they didn’t only take them. They also took his home theater system, a music player, and a collection of sports shoes, as well as an indeterminate sum of money. A dog, who escaped as his owners were being apprehended, was collateral damage. Teiker was one of the leaders of the Barrio 18 gang in Tegucigalpa.

  Teiker was a gangster running the streets of Honduras, extorting, kidnapping, and killing. He was a veteran with more than a decade in the Barrio 18. Someone who had the final word, who, in gang culture, is referred to as a palabrero; someone who gives orders; someone who takes the floor. Someone to obey. I never would have known about him had I not come across a report of his disappearance the next morning, 10 January 2013, in the largest Honduran newspaper—which is basically nothing but a crime beat: “Gangster Tied to Extortion Crimes Falls,” read the headline. Along with the text was a picture of the kid tied up and thrown on the ground, with obvious signs of torture, though seemingly still alive. His face was wrapped in tape, his chest bruised, his left arm tied behind his back, apparently dislocated, with an abrasion around the elbow. On his chest you could see an enormous tattoo: 18. The first thing I thought was that that picture could only have been taken by a police officer, and then leaked to the press. The second was that someone had thought to publish it. The third was that I had to dive deep into this story.

  I’d been investigating death squads for months, ever since I first heard, straight from the mouth of a police officer, that police killed gangsters whenever they had the chance. With the help of my colleagues—the circle of journalistic photography is not so wide—I was able to confirm, in just a couple of days, that it was the police that had leaked the picture to the media. It seemed that the officer in question was a collector of torture pictures and enjoyed sharing them with his photographer buddies. Sometimes, when they played with fire a bit too much, they made a mistake and got to feel the burn. A bored intern working the night shift receives a flashy image, no editor is around, and proof of police torture lands front and center in the digital edition of the most widely read newspaper in the country.

  I went to look for some sign of his disappearance. The officials of the National Directorate of Criminal Investigation recognized that there was an arrest order against Carranza, and that he’d passed through one of their dungeons. Two months later, when I sat down to write the story, Carranza and Yadira were still missing. After the circulation of that picture, they’d vanished. The image only showed that Teiker had suffered severe torture. The pair hadn’t been formally arrested, nor were any charges brought against them. The habeas corpus petition presented in Teiker’s name was dismissed. They had vanished. The same police office that had acknowledged Teiker’s apprehension and had leaked the torture pictures to the press was now claiming they knew nothing of the case.

  “At this point I can only think of death,” Carranza’s mother said to me.

  * * *

  Gangs have existed in Tegucigalpa since the early 1970s. At first they were merely groups of kids from different schools differentiating themselves by the music they listened to, their clothes style, and the haircuts they sported. Armed with sticks or just their fists, they’d fight for control of neighborhood parks. Their names were Los de arriba (From above), Los de abajo (From below), and Vagos asociados (Lazy partners). They didn’t traffic drugs or extort people. The society they belonged to hadn’t yet collapsed.

  Everything changed in the mid-1990s. The United States, dealing with drug abuse and violence in its suburbs, started deporting Central American immigrants to their distant countries of origin. Many of them were teenagers who barely spoke Spanish and had no family in Honduras to turn to for help. They started banding together in neighborhood parks to look out for each other. Some of them were criminals with experience in the south of California. The old gangs dissolved. There was no interest or capacity to deal with arriving deportees, and weapons and drugs started circulating the streets. Mairena, my driver, always remembers it the same. At first they were just some recent arrivals who roamed the streets asking for a lempira to buy a soda in exchange for watching over a parking spot. Central American thugs. You pitied them, but didn’t pay them much mind. No one foresaw or planned for what was coming. Least of all the badly paid, poorly educated, illiterate cops, who were often the neighbors and cousins of those deportees. They shared the same snacks bought on credit at the corner store, and they lived in the same cardboard houses.

  Gangs are commonly known as “maras,” a word that, in Honduras, also colloquially means friend. That’s how they see each other, these insecure kids from broken families with high incidences of domestic violence. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch destroyed a large part of the country’s infrastructure and left thousands of children orphaned, displacing families into temporary housing. The perfect recipe for recruiting new mareros. If you’re disowned, feel you have nowhere to go, see no future, or any possibility of education, and you’re sick of going hungry or your stepfather hitting you until you’re black and blue, chances are a gang will be calling your name.

  The Barrio 18 and the Mara Salvatrucha (also known as MS-13), named for their original areas of control in Los Angeles, started to fight for Tegucigalpa’s neighborhoods in the late 1990s. Later, smaller organizations like Los Chirizos or El combo que no se deja (The combo that keeps on guard), started taking over some of the central zones of the city.

  A large part of the violence in Honduras is linked to drug trafficking. The gangs employ load drivers and hitmen from the drug cartels. Often their services aren’t paid for with money but with merchandise that needs to be monetized on the streets through what’s known as narcomenudeo, petty street-corner drug dealing. They also charge the “war tax,” the classic extortion fee in exchange for “protection.” Pretty much all of the city’s taxis and busses, as well as storefront businesses, are forced to pay. Most of the time, businesses pay both gangs. Those who don’t pay will die. Recently, in certain neighborhoods, homeowners have also been targeted for extortion. In Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula there are entire streets of vacant houses abandoned by residents who didn’t want to pay, or were tired of fearing for their lives.

  It’s hard to find a gang member over thirty years old, as so many die or are incarcerated at a young age, but also because gangs recruit increasingly youthful members. At first the kids work as lookouts or flaggers; then as bookkeepers, small-time drug dealers, or extortionists. The highest rung in the ladder is hitman. As they’re more easily manipulated, and because criminal responsibility is legally different for minors, gangs employ ever younger kids to carry out their murders.

  Women and children play specific, albeit secondary, roles within these organizations. When a gang controls any given neighborhood, its collective population needs to submit. They must, at least, respect the demand for silence. No one sees, no one hears, no one speaks. These organizations require total integration into the neighborhood, as well as support and concealment—either voluntary or driven by fear. There are no official statistics on the degree of responsibility gangs have over the rate of violence in Honduras, though all the experts point to them as the nation’s principal
perpetrators of violent crime. It’s also impossible to know the exact number of members, but some estimates point to around 10,000. They control practically all the many neighborhoods in the major cities. Even in the cities they don’t control, they still have enough access to commit criminal acts. This access is afforded them by impunity.

  In the early 2000s, Honduras passed an anti-gang law criminalizing gang membership. The law has been a complete failure. Iron-fist policies have triggered a rise in violence between gangs and security forces. Gangs are also becoming more discreet. The identification codes, like clothes and specific tattoos, can now only be seen in prisons or on the bodies of the most important and oldest kingpins, those who tattooed themselves years ago. Now, needing business administrators to manage the large sums of money they move, they send the smart kids to university. They even payroll full-time doctors and clandestine clinics so they don’t have to go to the hospital when they’re wounded in action.

  During the civil and revolutionary wars in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras military groups and government policy called for the execution of leftists. However, since the beginning of this century human rights organizations decry the policy of social cleansing employed against gang members. The authorities have always blamed gang deaths on internal fighting. But, every so often, the death squads return.

  * * *

  To communicate with Teiker’s family, I needed gang approval. An intermediary explained to them that I was only there to talk about the disappearances. Once I got authorization, however, things weren’t much easier. To enter one of these gang-controlled zones, you have to drive with your windows rolled down, one hand out of the window and the other in sight—slowly, so that everyone can see who’s coming. A lit cigarette also helps. It keeps the driver happy and shows the gang members that he isn’t prepared to shoot. Get out of the car with a coffee in one hand and a notebook in the other. Without a jacket, if possible, and dressed in such a way that there’s no lump around the hip that can trigger any misunderstandings. Then, do your best to find a nearby mother, because no one around here is much help in identifying the house. Ask for the address and let yourself be led. Finally, if you’re lucky, see the kids face-to-face and ask them what happened.