Blood Barrios Read online

  “It wounded me so deeply I don’t ever want to forget it.”

  The only personal touch hanging on the walls of his house is a framed and magnified photocopy of a newspaper caricature in which Bonilla appears chasing the Honduran president, the head of Congress, and the minister of security with a polygraph machine in his arms. As he explains: “If anybody is scared of me it’s because they know that there’s no negotiating or influencing possible, that I do no favors, and don’t buckle under political pressure or threats. I don’t bend to anybody.”

  “Sometimes I wake up at four in the morning and sit here to work. At night, when I can’t sleep, or when I need to concentrate, I lock myself in alone with classical music,” he explains as he boots up his computer. With the same pride my daughter exhibits when she shows me her drawings from school, Bonilla reads aloud the last letter he sent to Minister of Security Arturo Corrales. He also reads from a document titled Operation Neptune, which he assures me he wrote himself and in which he makes reference to a police operation that, only twenty-four hours earlier, had allegedly decommissioned property worth $500 million from the Cachiros gang, supposedly the largest narco-trafficking cartel in Honduras.

  “These kinds of jobs are exclusively mine. I coordinate the investigation, I write the report, I do the editing, I supervise and run the operation, and I coordinate with the Embassy of the United Sates,” he says, with a regal hand gesture. “We decommissioned their businesses, we took their money, and they fled the country. We haven’t detained them, but we know where they are, in Guatemala, and it’s just a question of time before they are captured and extradited. It’s the same situation with Chepe Handal [a notorious Honduran narco-trafficker]. We captured his properties and he fled to Guatemala. It’s a question of time. We know where all of them are.”

  Despite the fanfare with which the results of Operation Neptune were announced, a leak from the director of the Office of Seized Property revealed, weeks later, that when the Public Prosecutor’s Office took over the accounts they found them empty. In any other country, the responsible parties would have resigned. In Honduras, no questions were asked, no news was made. Bonilla never responded to my telephone calls again. The US assistant secretary of state for Western Affairs didn’t respond either.

  Bonilla took the office after his predecessor, General Ricardo Ramírez del Cid, resigned amidst polemics and accusations against the police force for the murder of one of the most well-known journalists in the country, Alfredo Villatoro. A few months after getting pushed out of his official position, with Ramírez already focusing on his business interests, his seventeen-year-old son was killed, along with a bodyguard, while they were buying fried chicken in a restaurant. The crime was executed by at least ten armed men wearing bulletproof vests who poured out of two luxury pickup trucks. A few of the men were arrested. They belonged to the Barrio 18 gang. Everything in Honduras is so confused that General Ramírez, ex-chief of police, in an interview in the yard of his house on the day following the murder, mentioned that General Bonilla, his successor, was the principal suspect in his son’s murder. When I asked Bonilla, he didn’t only deny any involvement, but told me that Ramírez del Cid had tried to kill him on two different occasions: the first time in ordering him to act as chauffeur to a police officer who was the cousin of Lucifer, one of the leaders of the Barrio 18 gang, and the second with poisoned coffee.

  These types of accusations are typical in Honduras. It’s easy to find police who accuse other police of murder, of working for the cartels, of torture, extortion, and collaboration with gangs. In the serpent’s nest of the Honduran police force, accusations are followed by promotions and acts of vengeance. There’s a lot of money at stake. The chief of police controls the checkpoints on the highways where ninety percent of US-bound cocaine is trafficked. Same with La Granja station, at the airport exit, where police allegedly rob cars, or other outpost stations where police share profits from drug sales, or profit from the extortion of city bus drivers. All this leads to internal combat and dirty dealing when a high-level position opens up, the whole world waiting to see what the future will bring.

  * * *

  In May 2013, along with Bishop Rómulo Emiliani, Bonilla visited members of the Barrio 18 gang in the San Pedro Sula prison. They were trying to establish a truce between the gangs along the lines of the 2012 truce in El Salvador, which reduced the number of homicides in that country by half. (Translator’s note: The truce has since been rescinded.)

  “They explained their viewpoints, told me they were tired of so much violence. And one of the things they mentioned was that there are gang members married to the sisters of police officers, and police officers married to the sisters of gang members.”

  He said that was the moment he realized how close the personal relationships can be between officers and criminals. A bit naive for a general, that it took him thirty years to grasp this.

  “Our police share prison space with the criminals, share neighborhoods, share family connections. The perfect example is the infiltrator who stops informing and becomes part of the criminal network that he infiltrated. I try to stop this as much as possible. My police don’t use informants. I don’t work like that. If I need information, I pay for it and then protect the person who collaborates with us. I can’t be on top of everything, sometimes things slip by me. I’m human. They can’t try to blame me for everything that happens in an entire police force.”

  And yet it seems that he is indeed on top of everything that happens.

  And that he has answers for all of it.

  The first reporting I did on a case of gang members killed by police involved the youth Teiker and his girlfriend, Yadira. Bonilla knew the story perfectly, and gave his version of events off the record, which now I can print.

  “That type of behavior is about competing for territory and the illicit activity between organizations like the Barrio 18 gang, the Salvatruchas, and the Chirizos group. We have discovered, on occasion, that criminal groups have police uniforms and equipment. We also know that there are police who have connections with these organizations. You can’t claim that there’s something like a death squad [in those groups] because there isn’t a hierarchy or an order from the top—at all, by any conceivable means—to engage in illicit activity. Yes, Teiker was killed by a group of police. Do you remember that detective who was killed on a Sunday after finishing a game of football with his friends? It was him. He was part of a group of police who worked with the Mara Salvatrucha, and we’re on top of it.”

  Teiker was only the first case. I went on to ask him, one by one, about five other cases of gang members who were disappeared or were killed while in police custody. I told him that I had been given access to a report from the Public Prosecutor’s Office documenting how a man died due to a ruptured liver while in custody under charges of “public scandal.” I showed him dates, addresses, and names. I told him how a gang member was killed in August after being beaten by a group of police a few minutes after he had murdered, with a shot to the head, a traffic cop. To all the stories Bonilla had the same response: “We will investigate.”

  * * *

  Bonilla places a call to the fast-food chain Power Chicken and orders a meal of rice, fried chicken, and soda for himself, the journalist, and two police officers. As we wait for the food to arrive, he takes a seat in a wooden rocking chair and tends to his cellphones. He receives a call from Comayagua informing him that a criminal gang has murdered a police officer. He then makes a few calls and finds an officer who knows how that particular gang functions. The officer is off duty, but Bonilla asks him to join the operation immediately and not to return home until he sticks it to the killers. Next he calls an army officer and asks for reinforcements, lets the local police chief know that he’s already coordinating with the military and, between calls, he makes sure to put in another call to procure a coffin for the family of the fallen officer. He also receives a call from the chief prosecutor in the Atlántida Dep
artment, on the Caribbean coast, asking for a police contingent to protect her as she makes an arrest, and, after joking with her and asking why the request wasn’t made before, asks for her exact coordinates and informs her he’ll contact the department chief of police. “If the chief prosecutor doesn’t have a police escort in place immediately,” he tells the department chief, “you’re coming to Tegucigalpa tomorrow for an inquest. Yes, I know, they should have made arrangements before, and they haven’t, but this is not the time to have that conversation. Get the escort to her right now.”

  Among the responses available to resolve the kidnapping of an ex-magistrate in the city of Trujillo, Bonilla confirms to his telephone contact that, “I’ve already asked for help from the Embassy.” A little bit later I hear him say, “Find me that police crew right now. I want to know where they are at this very moment. Find their phones and get to them. You need to have them ask for support from the Embassy.”

  Ask for support from the Embassy. It wouldn’t be so strange but, thanks to intel gathered from the murder of Teiker, the Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield solemnly confirmed months before this call happened in front of me that the United States would not continue to work in collaboration with El Tigre Bonilla. The US then applied the Leahy Law, which forbids the US from providing assistance to people or foreign military units accused of violating human rights. That’s to say, a plumber in Milwaukee will not be paying taxes to fund helicopters that kill civilians in La Mosquitia, or to fund the military training of police who kill a fifteen-year-old kid who goes out at night to meet a girl. In reality, however, neither party is interested in suspending the collaboration. What is written on paper is contradicted in meetings. In Honduras, nobody cares; in the US, nobody cares. A Democratic senator makes a little noise, but his efforts are trampled by the reality on the ground. A legislative argument about ethics can’t compete with the importance of Syria, Cuba, or Russia.

  “General,” I ask, “do you coordinate with the Embassy?”

  “I’ve answered once and I’ll answer again. There are certain operational demands, and they [officials at the Embassy] are our allies. Both our collaborative work and coordination are having positive results. Brownfield said what he needed to say. I don’t have any relationship with Brownfield or with the US Embassy. Some issues aren’t about politics, and you can only solve them in the field. I’m responsible for the work of the Honduran national police because I’m the director general, and I don’t delegate my responsibility to anyone. Like Truman said: ‘Every man paints his own portrait with the work that he does.’”

  The food arrives.

  “I’ve given the orders I need to give, and now it’s time to eat.”

  Which means that, for a time, he’ll stop answering calls, which means that he can begin a new and uninterrupted monologue. He talks about those who cause the violence, which is an imported problem, foreign to the idiosyncrasies of Honduras. He believes that most of the weapons circulating the country come from the time of that polemical American colonel, Oliver North, who provided arms to the Iranians so they could kill Iraqis, and who inundated the Nicaraguan Contras, through Honduras, with weapons to fight the Sandinista government. Add to this the American deportation of criminals starting in the 1990s, and the disintegration of the Colombian cartels and the subsequent “cockroach effect.”

  “When you crush a cockroach its eggs explode and the babies go everywhere. Only by fumigating them can you actually eliminate them.”

  And the cockroaches came to Honduras, a country with weak institutions and a base where they could install themselves and organize cocaine shipments to the US.

  “A paradise that the narcos turned into an inferno.”

  In high academic tone, Bonilla explains how those are the principal actors that have penetrated every state structure, ultimately corrupting them all: the narco-traffickers and those who the narcos use for their shipments and assassinations, as well as the gangs, which are now in the business of extortion.

  “We can only beat them if we have the political will to strengthen the police and the Army with methods, structure, and technology that are not currently in place. Honduras is not an ungovernable country. There isn’t widespread social upheaval. This isn’t a failed state. When you decide to get involved, you get involved, there’s still time, we are not a failed state, we are a state with serious issues, but we are not a failed state.”

  Before concluding our meeting, Bonilla asks an assistant to bring him a book from his vehicle’s glovebox. It’s a classic of military strategy, an annotated edition of The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, the Chinese general who lived 2,600 years ago.

  “Do you want to know what I want to end this meeting on?”

  “Of course, general.”

  He opens the book and reads an underlined paragraph from the introduction.

  “We live in a culture of simulacrum, in which nothing is what it appears, and the reigning vision has no relation to the real world.”

  PART V

  STORYTELLERS

  16

  JOURNALISTS

  On 24 June 2013 Anibal Barrow, anchor of the TV news show, “Anibal Barrow y Nada Más” (Anibal Barrow and nothing more), was kidnapped in San Pedro Sula. Within a couple of hours a car turned up with traces of blood and a bullet-shattered window. From the moment Barrow disappeared, rumors proliferated. The local press went into a media frenzy for a couple of days, quoting unidentified police sources that “a powerful businessman from the northern coast had paid around $20,000 to have the journalist executed.” On 9 July Barrow’s body, hacked into pieces, was found inside various plastic bags floating in a lagoon close to where the police had discovered the car. The supposed perpetrators were arrested, and then, as in other cases involving journalists, the authorities kept silent. Had Barrow been killed for being a journalist, or was he killed for some other reason, in this country where people are murdered to settle debt, to avoid extortion, out of boredom, out of jealousy, because of business clashes, or simply due to sadistic madness? As in the case of so many other media personalities, we will never know.

  Ready-made phrases: “We’re never told the reason why a journalist in Honduras has been killed or kidnapped, which is expressly meant to intimidate journalists so that we don’t do our job.” “The murder of Barrow was a clear message to all journalists in Honduras.” “Those who kill a journalist aim to hurt us all.” “Reports of intimidation and continuous death threats make journalists who cover certain beats—especially drug and organized crime beats—afraid to do their job.”

  Facts: According to Journalists without Borders and the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur for the Freedom of Expression, Honduras has the highest rate of murdered journalists per capita: thirty-one journalists were murdered between 2010 and 2013. For two years, people affiliated with PEN, the US Center for the Protection of Journalists, the United Nations, as well as Journalists without Borders would approach me—the only foreign reporter permanently stationed in the country—to ask my opinion. No one ever asked me, however, the questions I ask myself. I’m not aware of anyone having gone around asking these questions, and even if they did, they didn’t seem to get anything worth reporting. Journalism has entry barriers set up for those who go around questioning their own line of work. A double standard emerges. No one looks after—no one wants to look after—the journalist.

  Questions: What did Barrow say on his program, what did he report, what investigative piece against criminal interests did Barrow work on for someone to go to the trouble of hiring a gang of hitmen to cut him into pieces? Does nobody know, or is there someone who knows but remains silent? He who goes looking will, in the end, find nothing. The perpetrators of the crime were detained and charged. They never said why they killed him. When I wrote that the police had disappeared a leader of the Barrio 18 gang, I only had to write my name in Google to find dozens of links to my story. A journalist’s first and last names are often linked to ongoing inv
estigations of a case. When they’re killed, the reason behind their death can be uncovered by a simple click of a search engine.

  Compared to the overall rate of homicides in the country, that of murdered journalists is a drop in the ocean.

  Honduras is a country of generalized death, which makes it hard to focus on subgroups. Journalism is a dangerous profession in Honduras. The reason: because it is generally dangerous to live in Honduras. Taxi drivers and lawyers, for example, are murdered at a much higher rate than journalists. In 2012 alone, eighty-four taxi drivers and sixty-four lawyers were murdered. But neither taxi drivers nor lawyers, nor market vendors, know how to get attention. If, simply by asking around at a crime scene, I can find out why an anonymous taxi driver of Tegucigalpa was murdered, why is it so hard to find the reason behind the murder of a public personality who spent his days speaking in front of cameras?

  It’s impossible to find any report about a network of drug traffickers—or corrupt politicians or corrupt police officers—written by one of the last thirty murdered reporters in Honduras. Nor is it easy to find, beyond vague, anonymous declarations, an example of a journalist who was murdered for his opposition to the 2009 coup d’état.

  The first murdered journalist I was asked to report on was someone who’d hosted a television program guessing lottery numbers. He would finish each shift with a psychic reading. I spoke with co-workers of his who accused him of extorting unwary customers. His case was tallied in NGO statistics of murdered journalists. The last murder I covered before leaving the country was the murder of, according to some, an authentic champion of free speech. He died three years after his last journalism job as a videographer. Shortly after his death, his mother explained that her son had been involved in some strange drug affair.