Blood Barrios Read online

  In December 2013, two years after the murder of Castellanos’ son and his friend, the implicated police officers were convicted. Their sentence was read on a Monday, and the Saturday before, as if to communicate some grim message about police overhauls, the events repeated themselves: the same house, the same group of friends, another birthday. A dozen university students got together to celebrate behind walls and barbed wire what in any other place would be celebrated at bars and nightclubs. It was the same house the son of Castellanos and his friend left the day they were murdered. A twenty-year-old kid—a friend of the boys murdered two years before—left the house and soon came upon a police checkpoint. He ignored the officers’ demands to stop, and they responded by shooting. The kid ended up with two bullets to the back. He survived, out of pure luck, having sped up just enough to avoid getting shot again and making it to his friend’s house before succumbing to his wounds. The police were scared to shoot at a group of kids hovering at the door of an expensive house. The story hit the news without much attention. No one seemed to ask any questions.

  15

  EL TIGRE BONILLA, A CULTURE OF SIMULACRUM

  I was standing in front of the man I’d spent months accusing of running an assassination program through his own police force. All that time I’d dreamed of looking him in the eye and questioning him. Now all I wanted was to disappear. I don’t know if he’s the strongest or just the most brash of the Honduran police generals, but what I did realize, standing face to face with him, was that interviews are a combat sport, and you either win them or you lose them.

  “Sorry for not having time to run home and change into civilian clothes before our interview.”

  This was the first sentence that El Tigre Bonilla, the director general of the Honduran police smiling ear to ear, spat out at me. At the same time he was crushing my hand in his grip and, like a hurricane, tearing into the reserved room of a discreet and modest restaurant where, awaiting his late arrival, I had had the time to drink four limeades. That cold and rainy 20 September 2013 marked sixteen months since I’d first requested an interview with him. In that time I’d published six articles in which I denounced his possible connection to various murders.

  Bonilla doesn’t like to talk with journalists, though each time he does, he seems to climb the ranks. He’s only done two full interviews. In the first, which he conceded to Óscar Martínez, writing for the El Salvadoran newspaper El Faro, Martínez described him as having an “Olmec head.” Writing for The New York Times, Martínez later insisted that it was Bonilla’s coarseness that catapulted him up from an irrelevant bureaucrat to his position as director general. Bonilla ditched what was going to be his second public interview, by telephone, with Renato Álvarez on one of the most watched television programs in Honduras. On that occasion, Bonilla abruptly ended the interview by hanging up the phone.

  “He asked me a question and I answered him,” Bonilla explained to me. “And then when he started asking the question again, I didn’t think it was worth my trouble. I don’t like bias, or when journalists ask leading questions.”

  The second full interview, casually given to a foreign journalist—me—was right before either another ascent up the ladder of power or, finally, a definitive fall. For some time Bonilla had been hinting that he wouldn’t finish his term, and that his destiny depended on the results of the November 2013 elections. If the opposition won, he’d be finished. If the governing party won, he’d be moving on up.

  El Tigre Bonilla was comfortable steering through the theatrics of the interview. He knew when to be ambiguous and how to perpetuate rumors through lying politicians or the press. He knew how to cultivate and take advantage of any uncertainty brewing between his allies and his enemies. For the year and a half he was in power, he enjoyed enormous popularity both in the streets and among his immediate superiors, but he was also cause for anxiety in the corridors of both Washington and the Honduran capital. He let me understand that he knew more than he should, and the only way to make that okay was to be promoted to higher office.

  “A five-star general acting as director general of the police can opt for a different sort of diplomatic post. An attaché, say, in Chile or Spain, to retire and spend time reading and writing.”

  “Writing about what?”

  “The use of security for political purposes, or my time as police director of Honduras.”

  “Do you take notes, General?”

  “No, it’s all in my memory.”

  Two months after our interview, he was named military attaché to the Honduran embassy in Colombia. He left without saying goodbye or even opening his mouth. The joke on the streets in Tegucigalpa was that he was sent to Colombia to take charge of the Honduras-bound cocaine shipments he was already facilitating. The official version was that he was coordinating the political security measures the two countries were collaborating on: the narco-flights. In any case, the strategy was “boot it forward” (“patadón parriba”—a football term signifying a desperate attempt to kick the ball out of your defensive zone). They converted the policeman into a diplomat, sending him far enough away that they could enjoy the quiet left in his wake.

  * * *

  Our meeting, which was supposed to be a quick meal—an eight-ounce fillet steak—in a discreet restaurant in Tegucigalpa, turned into more than eight hours of conversation, which, in large part, was impossible to transcribe: ellipses, hard looks, clichés, silent acknowledgments, and no functioning recorder. The iPhone that I put on the table between us somehow corrupted the file, and I had to spend a sleepless night trying to remember our conversation based on my occasional notebook scribblings. Bonilla never complained about what I claimed he’d said, which is the highest praise you can offer to a reporter’s short-term memory. Or maybe total indifference—the worst criticism.

  Bonilla cuts an imposing figure: tall, with an athletic profile, a shaved head to mask advanced baldness, and a prominent nose on a square face scarred by smallpox. His voice is like a storm rising out of the depths of a cave, first slowly, then gaining in force and trampling any unfortunate bystanders.

  He would prove to be polite, humorous, straight-talking. He would use physical proximity to cultivate empathy, and he’d smile with apparent sincerity throughout our interview, except, in some moments, when he’d lower his voice and spill the kind of secret that “should only be published in a book, and not for years to come.” It’s the type of phrase that men in charge of national security use to avoid answering questions and at the same time let on that they have much more information than they’re actually sharing with you. He would insist, repeatedly, that he didn’t feel accepted. He would insist, repeatedly, that he liked to write. He would insist, repeatedly, that there were secrets. Bonilla wouldn’t avoid any topics, but he’d lead his interviewer into terrain that gave him every advantage—where he could steer the conversation as he pleased. His strategy: to open up, to continually question himself. He knows he’s interesting, and he speaks and quotes with fluency.

  “I haven’t been able to find Stefan Zweig’s Fouché biography,” he griped.

  The French politician and conspirator, Fouché, is one of the paragons of political opportunism. Of humble origin, Fouché survived multiple government regimes, from the revolutionary terror (he voted in favor of executing the nobility) to the restoration of the monarch (he served under Napoleon). He was able to manage it all by running an espionage network. Two weeks after my interview with Bonilla, I obtained Zweig’s biography of Fouché. But by then Bonilla had decided to stop responding to my messages. The book remains on my shelf, waiting to be picked up by its intended owner.

  Like Fouché in 18th century France, Bonilla is one of the most powerful men in the country. Although he maintains that he doesn’t like the caricature of “El Tigre Bonilla,” he himself—violent, rough, and inciting fear—inspires it. And he knows how to turn his reputation to his advantage. Or, perhaps, to the benefit of the powers that be. “The Tiger is no
house cat—it can really bite,” the president would say when journalists asked about Bonilla. After the interview I came to the opinion that Bonilla is most likely nothing more than a useful brute sent in to lead frontal attacks. In any case, inciting fear is part of his personality.

  “I’m indigenous, the son of a farmer and poor fisherman from the south, who rose up to become the director general of the police. I was recruited into the Army when I was only twelve, without anybody asking if that was what I wanted. It was the way it was in a country that hadn’t signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child. I didn’t choose, and I don’t worry about it, or question it. This is life. It pulls you forward. I have sweet memories of that time, because it affected me, and made me who I am today.”

  Besides this one moment, Bonilla didn’t want to discuss any details of his childhood. Between 1981 and 1984 he studied at the Caribineros military school in Chile, and in 1987 he studied at a police academy in Spain. He also took courses in the United States and Israel. He refused to give dates or specify areas of specialization, beyond a Bachelor’s degree in law and a Master’s in security. Enigma is part of his personality.

  “I bother a lot of people,” Bonilla repeats, like a mantra. “Sure, the rich and famous don’t like me.” But his constant harping—instead of meetings with politicians, he prefers to sit down and talk with children, to mingle with people from the poorest neighborhoods, officers from the most remote police outposts—starts to fall a little flat. The false homeliness is part of his personality. But it’s true that he’s not known for meeting with top officials, that he doesn’t appear in photographs at work meetings or public announcements, and can’t be caught chatting with ministers and diplomats. He’s not even seen in photographs with the president, who, however, does like to drop his name

  Bonilla travels with just one bodyguard, who’s also the accomplished driver of an armored car he uses to zip around Tegucigalpa traffic jams as if competing in an off-road race. The car is always equipped with two bulletproof vests, and between the gear-stick and the front passenger seat rests a loaded M-16 rifle. When asked about his relatively meager security outfit in a country where even the son of the secretary of state has more protection than he has, the director general of the Honduran police force offers a phrase that makes sense coming from someone in his position, but could also easily be misinterpreted:

  “Just like I’m not scared of dying, I’m not scared of using weapons and fists to defend myself in case of an attack. If somebody walks through that door, I will jump up on the table with a pistol to defend myself before the rest of you, paralyzed with fear, even realize what’s happening.”

  Bonilla is a tired man. Impatient, impetuous, screaming at the whole world, though I only saw him scream into the telephone, all the while smiling and winking up at me. A man who—with his phones ringing twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—can’t maintain the thread of a conversation, or even finish articulating an idea. A single man who doesn’t take care of himself, doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t rest, doesn’t take days off—only the president can authorize him vacation days, and although he’s asked for them, they’ve never been approved—and a man who has been hospitalized repeatedly, as he explained to me without the slightest shade of embarrassment, for stress. A man who’s been under attack from all fronts since the minute he assumed his position. A man who, as he puts it, is trying to do things right. And even if he doesn’t achieve that—as he acknowledges—it’s because he has enemies inside his own police force, among politicians, and in foreign bankrollers like the United States. A man who—even if for moments he has lost control of his unit—has been able to recover that control. A man who’s twice been publicly confronted by screaming politicians—once by the minister of security, and a second time by the US ambassador, whose funding Bonilla largely depends on, or, at least, his elite police squad and anti-narcotic operations rely on, which are the programs that most matter to him. From those incidents he’s come out even stronger: the president reaffirming his position, and the news filtering out to the public. He’s a man who knows how to build up a persona.

  And the persona he’s built is full of shadow.

  In 2002, Bonilla was accused, by then Police Chief of Internal Affairs María Luisa Borjas, of participation in police-committed assassinations. He was exonerated, but the accusations have periodically resurfaced in public discourse, especially since he was named director general of police in May 2012. The accusation poisoned his relationship, and even the whole of the government’s relationship, with the United States.

  I asked him point-blank: “Have you ever killed anybody, General? You know that I have to ask you that.”

  “That accusation is totally false. I completely deny it. I wasn’t there, and I had nothing to do with those events. It happened in San Pedro Sula at the time I was in Tegucigalpa. The chief of internal affairs put together some testimonies and decided to come after me. I’ll never know why she did it, and I don’t want to keep talking about it for another ten years. They brought charges against me, filed an arrest order. I presented myself [a year after the order], they tried me, absolved me, the prosecutor tried again, and the Supreme Court absolved me again. Not another single case has been brought against me. There’s nothing on me.”

  Arabeska Sánchez, the director of IUDPAS (Academic Institute of Democracy, Peace and Security) of the National University of Honduras, and a professor at the National Police Academy for ten years, knows Bonilla well. “Society sees him as a dangerous person,” she tells me. “And he himself has told me he’s an attack dog that politicians let loose when they see fit. He’s introverted, shy, and not well known. A man without vices, studious, a hard worker, methodical. He works night after night without rest. Even his colleagues look at him with something between fear and respect. He’s in charge now because he’s the least bad option. There was nobody else to pick for head of police who didn’t have known ties to organized crime, and yet it’s not known—and you can’t even openly question this—if he’s been implicated for charges of human rights violations. Bonilla is more military than police. He’s a defender of the Army, seen by many as the man who facilitated the militarization of public security. He’s a man who, when he wants, can be a charismatic public figure, even funny, and yet at the same time, he’s a man nobody would want to meet at night in a dark alleyway. He’s a true survivor, who doesn’t trust anybody. An extremely intelligent man.”

  Two of Bonilla’s colleagues didn’t hesitate to refer to him as an “assassin” when I met them for lunch at the house of a friend. The two policemen openly explained to me how they had personally seen him kill someone and then boast about it later in front of other officers. They also told me of other disturbing episodes, without dates or names, and which are impossible to verify. What I never expected, however, was that Bonilla himself would tell me one of these same stories. In that theatrical tone of betraying a secret, he told me how a woman he was attending a party with suffered a nasty accident, “a fall,” and how his friends helped make sure that the incident wasn’t made public. I never was able to understand the story, however, or decipher why he would want to tell me a story so dark, so confusing, and so full of holes and implications.

  Cultivating confusion is part of his personality.

  * * *

  Bonilla lives middle-class neighborhood close to Tegucigalpa airport, which, like many similar neighborhoods, has recently been protected with metal gates and security guards. His house, newly painted and hidden behind a wall, doesn’t match the prestige of his position. It’s elegant, but small and discreet—fitting for a solitary middle-class professional. From a quick glance it seems that it hasn’t been lived in, that it doesn’t get much use. The cleanliness and immaculate ordering of each of the features, which appear not to have been moved in years, suggests the house has become a place of brief passage for the busy life of the general. Bonilla invites me to sit in a corner of the garden that he describes a
s “a country patio that reminds me of my childhood.” It’s a roofed outdoor space with a large wooden table, a grill, a DVD player with a small plasma screen (“which I almost never turn on”), and a large bar with dozens of bottles of whiskey and wine. All of it is situated under the steady gaze of Pope John Paul II, whose portrait hangs on a wall. Bonilla opens a drawer and shows me dozens of boxes containing a wide variety of cigars. “People give away cigars and liquor, and this is where I store them, since I neither smoke nor drink.” Underneath the glass protecting the wooden table, there is a symmetrically ordered collection of bills from countries he has visited, as well as patches from all the Honduran units he’s been a part of and the international units with which he’s collaborated in joint operations.

  He also shows me his private work space, a small office set off from the rest of the house where he has installed a computer, printer, and telephone, along with a chair and a desk stacked with books. Bonilla is the kind of man who catalogues each of his books by theme, sticking a number on its spine. He marks the important pages with colored sticky notes and underlines paragraphs of interest. In his library you will find exactly what you expect from a general. He is proud to have almost every book published in Latin America about narco-trafficking, from books about Pablo Escobar to Álvaro Uribe, to studies about Los Zetas, chronicles of Central American violence published by El Faro, and classics like Foucault, Fukuyama, Goffmann, as well as many other books about security. He has filed and stored all the notes he has taken throughout his studies. Terrorism and counterintelligence, a manual for special ops, monographs on the history of the world wars, and a biography of Napoleon. In a dresser he has a small collection of pistols and old-fashioned rifles next to a machine gun he declines to discuss. Through another door there is a small loft with hundreds more books. Among all the titles, the one that stands out is a complete copy—bound in leather and placed in the middle of the table—of the report in which he is accused of murder.