Blood Barrios Page 11
To enter Barrio 18 territory is to penetrate a zone sealed by silence, secrecy, and the total control of space, movement, and information. Gang presence starts at the first street corner. They observe me, size me up, control me; they bring me, take me, let me be. They play with me, frighten me, and, high as shit on who knows what, see right through me with their adolescent eyes. They, the gang members, are the state. But it’s not only them, it’s also their neighbors, their sisters, their mothers. Even the dogs and the stones seem perfectly placed to incite a general feeling of unease. If you make a mistake, if you violate one of the unwritten and perhaps unknown rules, you don’t make it out alive. Reporting on the gang is like reporting in a trench full of ghosts—you make sure not to see or hear too much; you weigh your questions, filter your answers, and try to maintain perspective. They’re criminals and will probably lie. They’re a necessary source, but not a sufficient one.
One of Teiker’s neighbors agreed to tell me what happened that night as long as I didn’t reveal his identity. He talked because they told him to talk, and he certainly can’t say no to them, not if he wants to go on living in relative peace. He asked me, the journalist, for a small favor, to leave him out of everything: living where he lived, he already had enough to worry about.
“It all happened around ten at night. They screamed, ‘Police!’ and I knew there were a lot of them because of the footprints they left in the flowerbeds. They opened the gates, there was a lot of noise for a few minutes (like they were kicking things over) and then they left. Silence returned—the doors had been left open and no one was in the house. People around the neighborhood were saying that police cars were on the street, and they came in with a key, or someone opened the door for them since the gates to the neighborhood were intact.”
The neighbor’s version of events matches that of Jonathan Flores, one of the gang lookouts who also worked as a “driver” for Carranza.
“They called me immediately and told me to come see what had happened, because I knew that house. The gate wasn’t broken in. The whole house was a mess, but the dog had been left alone. The neighbors told us everything had happened really fast: no violence, no screams, no fired shots. I went in, I looked around, then left. I saw two Nissan Frontiers, one blue and the other white, both without plates. They were talking with the neighbors. There were like six or seven of them, dressed in civilian clothing, with bulletproof vests, body armor, and face masks. All the neighbors were outside to see what had happened.”
An untrusting journalist will always suspect that the gang member had tried to leave unnoticed. But the gang member’s friend is offended by the question: “He didn’t have any motive to leave,” he says, “he was working fine here. If one doesn’t want to be here, he says so, and he leaves. If he leaves for the States, he says so, and tells his mother too, they don’t leave their moms behind just like that.”
Thirty years ago soldiers conducting guerrilla warfare organized themselves into small cells. In the gangs today these small cells are called cliques. The logic is the same: establish a network of support and control so that gang members are never alone. Each person has a contact who only knows one other contact, or, at most, a few other people, so if someone goes down the whole structure doesn’t crumble with them. If the police take one member down, his absence is immediately detected by his neighbors, the lookouts, and other members of the clique, and then the gears in the machine start turning. They know that if they act fast and find him, they might not only save his life, but also free him. It’s a matter of finding the right person among those who have apprehended him and slapping down a sum of money they simply can’t refuse. Or, at least, that’s how the gang members explained it to me.
That night, Blanca received a call from the gang and, trailed by a group of neighborhood kids, she started searching for her child and his girlfriend. In the offices of the National Directorate of Criminal Investigation she found twenty police officers, some of them masked, playing with their guns. She asked them where her son was. “Go look for those dogs at El Tablón,” she remembers them telling her. El Tablón is a well-known dumping ground in Tegucigalpa, where executed youths have been exhumed, bound by their hands and feet, sometimes with signs of torture. Sometimes they call El Tablón “The Dump.” It’s a handy phrase. Go look for someone at El Tablón is a way of saying they’re dead.
* * *
A few months before the police murdered her son, Julieta Castellanos, dean of the National Autonomous University of Honduras, publicly referenced a report that decried police involvement in the death of 149 Hondurans between 2011 and 2012. The report also counted twenty-five police murders of members of the Barrio 18 gang in the previous twenty-three months. According to other sources, the Public Ministry had also received 200 reports of cases that could be classified as murders perpetrated by death squads in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. The reports made clear that these deaths resulted from confrontations between gangs and police, or a policy of social cleansing, but—most alarming—I repeatedly came across data that pointed to the existence of death squads.
“I don’t have any doubt that a policy of social cleansing exists and has been implemented by the authorities,” a state official told me. Around that same time a local newspaper published a video leaked by the police in which a group of masked men, armed with AK-47s, step out of a car and shoot at five youths walking in the street. Three of them were able to run away, two were forced onto the ground, head down, and were executed in cold blood. One died instantly. The other was still moving when his aggressors ran away. He died a few hours later in the hospital.
Following any and all leads on Carranza and Cindy (Teiker’s girlfriend), I was able to uncover other cases of Barrio 18 members who’d been disappeared or murdered by the police. The practice of disappearance was obvious to everybody—an open secret. And it didn’t take long for me to get an earful of advice from friends and colleagues. The problem wasn’t adding up past events or commenting on the most lurid details in private; the problem was publishing those details. It was best, I was told, to leave them be. Every time I tried to expand my list of cases or get a name, date, detail, piece of advice, or lead to follow, someone would say to me, “Listen, man, you gotta drop this, we all know what’s there. Nothing is going to change. For your own good, don’t get involved.” The editor in chief of a newspaper ended up telling me, with complete calm, how the police had threatened to take action if they were to divulge any fact about the origins of that picture of Carranza’s tortured body.
Stubborn, I wanted more. More stories. In the end, unlike the Honduran journalists, I could leave Honduras whenever I pleased. The privileges of the foreigner, however, are also his obligations. People always told me that any Honduran journalist would have died asking the questions I asked, that my passport and company protected me, as well as my ability to escape if things went awry. It was time that I became of some use.
I wanted to complete the circle. I wanted to find more cases. I wanted firm proof that those masked men were police and not members of some other gang. I went to meet with them again. And I made a serious mistake, the mistake of an autodidact with no one to consult, the mistake of someone with no official training in this line of work.
They told me to meet them in the neighborhood. I arrived in a taxi. A kid was waiting to lead me through unpaved alleys until we got to a house where a family sat watching TV. Before entering, I had to let myself be searched by a teenager with a Uzi in hand. I greeted everyone as if all of this were normal, then walked past the living room, making my way to a small patio where I found a dozen shirtless, armed members of the 18s. It was a Saturday morning. They’d been waiting for me. I was protected, in theory, by the fact that I’d written the story about Carranza, but that safeguard felt all too fragile. That phrase in my article that insisted that gang members extort and kill, or any other detail I’d failed to notice, could provoke a change of mood in a matter of seconds. I was uncomfortable. Gang
members had beheaded people, though the hundreds of decapitations hadn’t made headlines outside of Honduras. I didn’t come away with anything that morning. It was a mistake. I didn’t even ask them for their names or their status within the gang. They probably wouldn’t have told me. I put my skin on the line for nothing. Or maybe just to understand that all of the disappeared gang members belonged to the same clique. Any of these guys could have taken advantage of the situation to prove himself with me, gain a few points in the gang. Any of them might have mistrusted me and followed me, pointing his gun at me, deciding to extort me. I didn’t want to see them ever again.
The information was published. Death squads, dates, details, sources. It was all broadcast and reported in the most important media outlets in the world. There was praise, in Honduras, for anyone who killed a gang member, coupled with activism and lobbying in defense of human rights in the United States, the country that finances the Honduran police. None of it did anything for anyone.
14
POLICE REFORM
Police reform came up as a topic every day while I was living in Honduras. Politicians, taxi drivers, ambassadors, friends, deputies, civil servants, advisors, paper pushers, all of them would talk constantly about reforming the unreformable. At the same time competing for consulting funds to write the umpteenth report destined to end in the trash, playing the national sport of talking about the most recent bribe one has been paid. And then during national speeches, in the news, at the morgue, in official reports, and in off-the-record interviews, the whole country talked about the need and the impossibility of reforming something as rotten as the Honduran police: a police force that kills, assaults, steals, and extorts; a police force so opaque that not even the minister of security can tell you how many troops there are.
The supposed purification consisted in hauling away the trash, instead of recycling or incinerating it. But, at some point in the process, I felt some shit splatter on me. In fact, the fear that some police officer had zeroed in on me finally drove me from the country.
That the Honduran police force is little more than a sophisticated criminal organization is even admitted to by government officials: “The next thing we know, we representatives will have to patrol the streets and capture criminals ourselves”; “Police checkpoints share the same corners with delinquents, and they only work to extort the Honduran people”; “The police are the real drug traffickers”; “If planes full of cocaine don’t land in Parque Central of San Pedro Sula it’s only because too many trees are in the way.”
A sophisticated criminal and military organization, the Honduran police was “civilianized,” or disentangled from the military, in 1996. But their hierarchy, methods of operation, and salaries were never modified. In practice, police forces still function like military battalions.
The typical Honduran police officer is a youth who has fled the poverty of the fields to get a fixed income that seldom rises above minimum wage, some 6,000 lempiras a month (approximately $300). A factory worker or teacher makes more than a police officer watching over a country with a homicide rate 100 times that of Europe. Officers work in thirty-six-hour to seventy-two-hour shifts. Most don’t have a car and can’t pay for a bus ticket to the south or western part of the country to visit their homes or reunite with their families, and so are generally forced to live many months at a time at the police station. In Honduras, you don’t see backpackers hitchhiking from city to city. At gas stations and along the roads what you see are police officers looking to hitch rides and spend a few days at home.
* * *
In October of 2012, Julieta Castellanos, president of the national university, one of the most influential women in the country, announced the arrest of a police officer who had murdered her son and his friend the year before. The officer had spent the year, in hiding, working at a coffee plantation where he was protected by former co-workers who would deliver his monthly paycheck. Castellanos explained that the arrest was the result of a private investigation, and that only some of the facts had been shared with the police to avoid leaks that would allow him to escape again.
If not for the murders in October 2011 of Rafael Alejandro Vargas Castellanos, twenty-two years old, the university president’s son, and his friend Carlos David Pineda Rodriguez, twenty-three, both practically children, and the immediate action of a mother who was also a powerful woman—there may never have been an open public debate about security, police corruption, and impunity in Honduras. Rafael and Carlos were killed on a Saturday night by a five-person patrol squad. The squad stopped the young men, shot at them, chased them, injured one of them, and when they found out that the driver was the son of someone important, instead of letting them go, they handcuffed both kids, took them to the outskirts of the city, and executed them with two shots to the head. In Honduras, killing is standard protocol for leaving no trace.
The crime would have gone unpunished if it weren’t for the fact that the very next morning Castellanos retrieved video footage from every security camera installed between the house the boys had left and the location where their bodies were found. She found not only that the murder had been committed by police—she had suspected so from the beginning—but also that the officers informed and asked their superiors for instructions about what to do once the murders had been committed. In a few days, five officers were detained and, shortly after, given weekend parole, which they took as an opportunity to flee.
Castellanos then started a public media campaign that led to the creation, in 2012, of the Commission on Public Security Reform and a law aimed at cleaning up and overhauling the police force. It’s well known in Honduras that when a problem resists a solution, a commission is created. President Porfirio Lobo said that members of the commission and its recommendations had 300 percent of his support, and that nothing was going to stand in their way. In one of his typical verbal outbursts, he proposed changing his name if public safety hadn’t improved by the end of his term. Of course, American dollars would finance the process, and the support of the Colombian government would lend it a degree of professionalism. As many as 14,500 police officers, they said, should submit themselves to tests of confidence: cleaning up the world’s most corrupt police force would consist in submitting officers to polygraph tests; if they failed to pass, they would be fired from the force.
Colombian agents led the sessions, which were conducted in a luxury hotel room. “They never identified themselves, but they were recognized by their accents,” Police Commissioner Miguel González explained to me at a gas station on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa. The officer had wires taped to his chest and on the tips of three fingers, and, after asking him to refrain from swallowing his spit, he was submitted to a short interrogation of seven questions: “Are you seated? Are you speaking the truth? Have you received money from organized crime groups? Have you badmouthed your commander? Do you consider yourself an honorable man? Have you found yourself involved in major crimes? Have you ever betrayed the confidence of a loved one?” Gonzalez passed the test. Even so, he seemed very unhappy when I spoke to him. “It wasn’t easy to swallow,” he said, nervously.
A year after this charade, only thirty-three agents out of some 14,500, or about a third of the force, were flagged for removal. These agents had either lied during their polygraph or failed their drug test. The numbers I was able to get from the evaluation agencies made no sense. According to a document from the United States embassy in Honduras, in the first 373 polygraph tests, 142 agents were shown to have lied. That’s thirty-eight percent of the total number of officers tested. If we applied this fail rate to the rest of the tests, some 3,800 officers should have been fired. Of course, this didn’t happen
The final numbers were revealed by Minister of Security Pompeyo Bonilla: of 14,500 officers interviewed, seven were fired. Of those seven, four were rehired due to issues with how they were fired. “We didn’t know how to apply the law,” was their only defense. President Porfirio Lobo acknowledged that,
of the 14,500 officers listed in the police census, he’d only been able to find 9,000. Details were jumbled, and, not seeming to understand the numbers, he gave contradictory facts. He wasn’t even able to say how many people were on his payroll. The United States suspended their support of the process. The minister of security was named private secretary to the president, and Chancellor Arturo Corrales was named minister of security. Corrales’ first task was to forbid officers to talk to the press. Since then, there has been silence.
The slow pace, as always, was attributed to a lack of funds. The minister of security had only failed to beg. At its height, funds allotted to the police cleanup rose to only 0.58 percent of the total police budget. Priorities aren’t accomplished with rhetoric, but with money. In the end, the cleanup highlighted the risk that fired officers may succumb to the wave of organized crime. Something like a Honduran version of the Zetas: members of the security forces that, once out of a job, organize their own gang and rent themselves out as hitmen for narcos. The police explained that a counterintelligence group was being formed to follow up on fired officers. And then the group was left without a budget. Aside from the polygraph and drug tests, hundreds of petitions were sent to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Economic Court demanding that the officers’ whereabouts be investigated. None of these cases were heard.