Blood Barrios Read online

  On the list are the radio correspondents of tiny inland towns, hacked to death by their machete-wielding neighbors, variety show presenters who’d gone around town with an entourage of guards, a traffic police spokesman, a sports anchor shot to death next to her boyfriend, an evangelist broadcaster, and the chairman of an agrarian union: people who, despite topping a list of murdered communicators, hardly did any investigative journalism or reporting. When it comes to indictment, once more the burden of proof falls on us. Did they kill them for being journalists, for talking, because of personal problems, or did these people get swept up in the wave of generalized violence washing over the entire country? Only one thing is clear: in Honduras it’s impossible to investigate, and without an investigation it’s impossible to get answers.

  * * *

  Here’s a stab at summarizing the situation of journalism in Honduras: insults, racism, machismo, homophobia, extreme politicization, politician-journalists, journalist-politicians, people hoping to become politicians, ministry politicians, owners of television stations who are politicians and choose to diversify their businesses (from brothels to drug trafficking), owners of newspapers who provide the state with supplies and who open and close ministries under the newsroom’s roof, along with justifications of extrajudicial killings, sourceless news, and articles riddled with lies, errors, and spelling mistakes. A press that thinks it a good and worthy use of a front page to list the names of eighteen family members, all of them murdered and torched in a town where neither the police nor the press have ever set foot. When they, in fact, are still alive. The two newspapers with highest circulation in the country, El Heraldo and La Prensa, are part of a group called OPSA, whose largest stockholder is a businessman by the name of Jorge Canahuati, who is also the owner of one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the country, supplier of the government and, at the same time, the executive director of the Inter American Press Association. The next two largest newspapers, La Tribuna and Tiempo, are owned, respectively, by Carlos Flores (ex-president of Honduras and president of the central committee of the Liberal Party) and Yani Rosenthal (former Minister of the presidency of Honduras and speaker of the Liberal Party, accused in the United Sates of narco money laundry). Two of the largest television channels are owned by the two closest confidants of former President Zelaya; one of them is even his right-hand man in Congress. Two other politician-journalists, both writing in opposition to the coup d’état, are little gems I’ll buff for the reader shortly: Edgardo Castro, the homophobe, and Jose Luis Galdamez, the man with the twitchy trigger finger who resolves taxi arguments by killing the driver—while enjoying the protection of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Public service journalism in this country is really just a marketing banner with the following tagline: “Call 2422 with the facts of your disappeared loved one and we will help you find him.” Price of message: two dollars.

  But perhaps the biggest problem facing journalism in Honduras is the generalized financial corruption. “They offered me money, I got up from the table and I told them that I’d call them, and they’re still waiting for my call today,” Danilo Izaguirre affirmed, with a mixture of both anger and pride. Izaguirre is the director of a radio program, and, with forty years of experience in journalism, he’s found a way to work in journalism while also working as head of public relations for the Supreme Court and as a congressional representative for the majority National Party. Izaguirre insists on his impeccable service. He’s proud of being able to take on various positions that in any other country in the world would make it impossible for him to be respected as a journalist. “The law allows it, which means I can do it.” He doesn’t get it, even after it’s been explained to him. He is, he insists, “impeccable,” even as I show him papers related to payments made by the government to several journalists in exchange for publicity where his name appears prominently and with high figures. He raises his voice in an attempt to threaten me for challenging him.

  The president of the Association of Journalists, Juan Ramón Mairena, thinks journalism has turned into big business for those who are not professional journalists. A dirty business. The state gets most of its publicity from the media. That’s why there are journalists who denigrate themselves and let their silence be bought. Many aren’t journalists, but mere professional delinquents. And there’s proof.

  Geovanny Dominguez, the Editor of Diaro Tiempo, the third newspaper in the country, admits that, throughout his fifteen years in the profession, he’s been offered tempting trips to Asia and envelopes of cash: “No one can deny that journalists get bribes, and you only have to read the news to catch the preferential bent of one media outlet or another. When you accept a bribe you turn into the defender of the person paying you, and it’s possible that the murder of journalists in Honduras have something to do with those bribes. I never accepted one of those envelopes; my face would go slack with embarrassment.” Dominguez rattled off this energetic condemnation before explaining that some under-the-table sources pay even more than the media companies. “For a media professional, a salary of $700 a month is very little. Media company owners give their employees some advertisement spots so that they can make more money, and that’s when the journalist becomes an advertiser and stops being on the side of facts.” That’s the case with Danilo Izaguirre, the journalist-politician and Supreme Court spokesman who, as part of his contract with the radio chain HRN, sells two or three ads on his own that afford him “some $5,000 a month,” as he himself explained it to me. “The fruit of many years of work and hard-won respect.” Mr. Izaguirre sees no problem with that form of “respect.”

  One day I got access to a list from the Ministry of Health entitled, “Friendly Relationships.” In it were the names of sixty-four Honduran informants who received hundreds or even thousands of dollars from August 2010 to September 2011, when Arturo Bendaña was the minister of health. Records indicate that the list’s author was Moisés Torres, managing director of the Ministry of Health during the Bendaña administration. Danilo Izaguirre, just like Geovanny Dominguez, denied having any relationship to that list or to Bendaña. And yet both names appeared on the document. The same year Izaguirre allegedly received $15,500, Dominguez pulled in, allegedly, half as much—$7,250. “It’s not the first time I’ve been told that my name’s on a list like that,” Dominguez says, doubtfully. The Ministry of Health is only one of thirty ministries in the country, each one with its own list.

  Dominguez’s hands shake as he scans the names on the list I’ve given him. An uncomfortable silence falls over us. The journalist has been sidelined. The minutes tick on until he manages to regain composure. “I haven’t received any money from Moisés Torres or the Ministry of Health,” he defends himself. But he also recognizes that this type of payment is normal among Honduran journalists; some of his colleagues take on campaigns against officials or politicians with their only goal being to make money in exchange for keeping silent.

  “My name isn’t on the list,” Izaguirre says before contemptuously tossing it to me. After I insist that his name is in fact on the list (“Read it carefully, please”) he puts his glasses back on and rereads it. He catches his name and panics. “I’m no longer speaking to you as a journalist, but as an attorney. You’ll need to have a document with my signature that affirms that I’ve received money from the Ministry of Health. My word is worth more than my signature, because the latter can be falsified. Paper trails speak … This is ridiculous.” Izaguirre and Dominguez will both end up admitting that the document “could” be real, but they do so while stressing that their names are listed for some duplicitous reason.

  Privately, media personalities share sordid details with each other. From spreadsheets displaying fixed payments through bank transfers, to the gift of cars, laptops, or trips to foreign countries—or so one of Honduras’ most veteran journalists told me (though he also asked me to omit his name in any articles I wrote). Christmas dinners in which the public relations team of a ministry
goes from table to table handing out envelopes of cash on behalf of members of Congress who’ve just finished an interview or press conference. I spent two years drinking beers with these people, listening to the most sordid details come out of the mouths of colleagues who wanted to tell each other what they’d been through in the last week, without first noticing that what was normal to them perhaps wasn’t so normal for me. Of course, they ended up falling silent whenever I started listening.

  The purchase of opinions through extortion, bribes, and kickbacks has been a fundamental part of Honduran journalism throughout at least the past four presidential administrations. The list of sixty-five purchased journalists is only one example of a practice that many other Honduran journalists believe is commonplace; a practice that, from within, few are ready to denounce. Raising their voice could mean banishment, their expulsion from the collective. Many friends told me, between fits of laughter, that Zelaya was the most extorted president in history, that journalists would walk up to him after press conferences to ask him for money, and that the president would jot down a figure on a napkin, always far more than what they’d asked for, even signing it so that the journalist could then go and cash it in.

  To witness these scenes you only have to go to the “press conferences,” and, as one Honduran reporter explained, see in action “groups of five or six people who assault an official with the excuse of wanting an interview, even with their recorders turned off, asking him for a hundred to two hundred Lempiras” (between five and ten dollars). Among themselves they’ve given each other names like “The Daredevils,” or “The Joans.” A final comical touch is added when these officials flee the scene of the crime, running down the hall.

  Minister of Defense Marlon Pasque was forced to interrupt an interview with me to insist to a radio journalist that no, he would not be giving a contribution to his daughter’s wedding. But I also saw the deputy trade minister take out his notebook and jot down the account number of someone who’d just interviewed him, without an ounce of shame. One of the radio journalists assigned to the congressional beat came to ask me how much I, a Spanish journalist, charged for an interview with the king. He repeated, unable to understand my non-response: “More than any minister or president I imagine. It must really pay off to have a king.”

  17

  THE POLITICIANS

  Soltero maduro, culero seguro. Old and single, faggot for sure.

  That phrase marked my initiation into caliche, Honduran street slang. I didn’t hear it from two drunk macho men insulting a transvestite working the streets of San Rafael outside the strip of touristy hotels; I didn’t hear it from a military officer cracking down on a protest, or a taxi driver spitting on gay couples in Parque Central. The phrase didn’t come from the three laborers I caught repulsively, invasively, running their eyes over the body of a girl selling hotdogs in front of the Spanish Cultural Center.

  No, I heard the words “old and single, faggot for sure,” straight from the mouth of one of the figureheads of Honduras’ leftwing political party. It was at an official event of the Liberty and Refoundation Party (known as the Libre Party) in early March 2012, in front of the Supreme Electoral Court in Tegucigalpa. I hadn’t been in the country two weeks when Libre introduced itself to the nation as the ultimate leftwing party, the party of social democracy, the party that would lead the country down the path of a social revolution and look to Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution for inspiration. Libre coalesced the various oppositional forces to the 2009 coup d’état that ousted Manuel Zelaya. These groups of “resistance,” were later baptized as groups of “insistence,” as their eternal protests grew tired—always supposed to start at dawn, but always delayed for hours.

  Edgardo Castro, one of the leaders of this new party, got up on stage, grabbed a microphone, and singled out Salvador Nasralla, founder of the Anticorruption Party, which would soon become the fourth largest political party in Congress. In that pre-electoral moment, Nasralla was the face of the left’s enemy. On the offensive, Castro called Nasralla a faggot, and founder of the “tutti frutti” party.

  It was about twelve, midday, a time to be wide-awake and lucid, when I heard Edgardo Castro say “old and single, faggot for sure.” It hit me like a punch to the face, like leaving a bar at five in the morning when the cold of dawn literally takes your breath away. The phrase robbed me of my romantic vision of Central American political ideology (a product spawned from the Central American heat—“the iron sun”) and that romantic nostalgia radiating off the Zelaya sympathizers waving their black and red flags, wearing their Che Guevara shirts, and playing their folksy Joan Manuel Serrat and Quilapayun music. We Europeans in the Americas have no antidote to this. I let myself be deceived by the red imagery, seeing the citizenry marching down the electoral road to power, because, as was explained to me, “This time it’s not just about choosing a president …” I interviewed a mother who spoke to me about her kids’ meals. A construction worker on strike who believed in the end of exploitation. Bandaged students coughing from tear gas, marching in protests dispersed by firearms, and discussing pushing back against the coup government. And all of a sudden, when it was least expected, the rhetoric of one of their leaders punched me in the face.

  The truth is that Nasralla, who bore the brunt of those words, never seemed to me a particularly serious politician. I would never be the one to defend him as the future of any country. He launched his presidential campaign by creating a political party called the Anticorruption Party. And he introduced himself to Honduras with marathon TV programming lasting an entire Sunday, in which he appeared, at one point, sporting a thong while wading in a pool surrounded by girls in bikinis, and, in another spot, playing a sort of wheel of fortune game with viewers. When he wasn’t entertaining poolside, he was commenting on Honduran soccer teams. In the middle of the electoral campaign, before acting as a sports announcer at one of the national soccer games, he sauntered through farmland soliciting the cheers of the masses—those who would later land him thirteen seats in Congress. At any rate, his method of wooing the popular vote wasn’t so different from the tactics of the leftwing politician that morning: the ousted ex-president, with his thick mustache, his formal white guayabera shirt, and his cowboy boots, singing Rancheras alongside his ex-cabinet members—even daring to belt out various songs by Silvio Rodriguez.

  Edgardo Castro isn’t merely one of those journalists celebrated by international NGOs for bravely working in a country where the free press only exists in theory. Aside from being a homophobe, he’s also a representative of the self-proclaimed leftwing caucus of Congress, which promotes a constituent assembly and the refounding of the country. Also, in mid-2014, he was alleged to have been named as an accomplice in a murder. Traveling with another politician-journalist from the coup opposition, the famous (in Honduras) Jose Luis Galdámez, barreling down the street at high speed, the vehicle the two men were riding in crashed into a taxi. In the argument that ensued, Galdámez took out his gun and murdered the taxi driver. Afterward, Castro decided it was his duty to change the future of the country.

  Honduras is a country where even politicians on the left use the word ‘faggot’ as an insult, where fifty-eight members of the LGBT community have been murdered in the past two years. Perhaps the epithet, so casually launched from the stage, helped push the knife into the fifty-ninth victim. It was horrifying to come to the understanding that the left also represented that hate. But leftwing homophobia wasn’t all that surprised me that day. The president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, magistrate Enrique Ortez Sequeira, got up on stage and hugged ex-president Zelaya, and said, “We did it.” Minutes after his shower of proletariat love, he recommended that I take “some classes in law” in order to understand that his presence there was in no way a conflict of interest.

  The first time someone proposed I go to Honduras I thought I would arrive in a place resembling Chile or Argentina in the 1970s. I saw the country in black and white. I thought I
’d be a journalist tiptoeing around a fierce military dictatorship, and that I’d turn brave oppositional forces, journalists, heroic defenders of human rights into my best sources. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Yes, there were episodes of political repression after the coup d’état: the Truth Commission—formed by ex-judges, a Nobel Laureate, an independent journalist, a priest, and a member of the Association of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo—documented twenty people murdered in a wave of repression in the year after Zelaya was ousted. The symbol of resistance was nineteen-year-old Isis Obed Murillo, murdered with a shot to the head while he waited, alongside thousands of people, for Zelaya to arrive at the airport in Toncontín. Murillo was the visible face of all the people who died at the hands of the military, those who responded to peaceful protests with bullets.

  Those stories are real and dramatic, but the propagandists of the opposition also made up stories. To the detriment of political credibility, they decided to exploit martyrdom. Every day, for two years, I received emails like this one: “Urgent: Resistance Leader is Persecuted”; “Act: The Popular Fight has been Criminalized”; “Mobilize: Fight Against Dictatorship”; and, best of all, “Constituent National Assembly to Remake the Country.” Every day, for years, I turned over stones for evidence that would allow me to report on all these grandiloquent proclamations. But I couldn’t find a thing, despite my interest and despite the bombardment of press releases from Honduran, European, and North American NGOs. I examined every case, but I could never find enough elements to turn them into articles. Sometimes I was heckled for not indulging the discourse of the nonprofit community: Sold-out journalist! For refusing to repeat the homilies of a charismatic leader who, just a couple of hours after the polls were closed, and with only 2.8 percent of the votes counted, urged journalists to declare his wife president and denounce the “massive and disgusting electoral fraud.” At the end of my time in the country, ex-president Zelaya, the face of resistance, along with his fractured party, was publicly banding together with the same liberal politicians who had expelled him from their party and had subjected him to the coup d’état.