Blood Barrios Page 15
At that time I was documenting police and military murders, and also reporting on crooked newspapers that were engaging in lies and extortion, corrupt politicians giving away free coffins they would purchase with money that wasn’t theirs, and members of Congress who, from the left, spread homophobic bigotry. All of that was going on in Honduras before the coup d’état, during the coup d’état, and after the coup d’état. The coup d’état, I came to understand, was an event that spun sterile and empty storylines about various nonexistent policies. To the entire ideological spectrum in Honduras, you can apply the following phrase written over a century ago by Samuel Zemurray and sent to a banana company headquartered in New York: “In Honduras, it’s easier to buy a politician than a donkey.” That rule can be applied to activists, journalists, and whoever has something to say or keep silent about in exchange for a perk or a threat. This is true of those in government and those in the opposition.
I abandoned Honduras after covering the general elections of November 2013, won by the National Party’s Juan Orlando Hernández, a politician trained in the United States, who served in the Army reserves as a second lieutenant. In defeat stood Xiomara Castro, Zelaya’s wife, the leftwing candidate. The one who opposed abortion in the name of social democracy, the one who opposed the decriminalization of the morning-after pill (punishable with jail in Honduras) in the name of remaking the country.
Hernández took over the presidency with a clear motto and, in a matter of weeks, he’d militarized everything from customs centers to the distribution of medicine in hospitals. “I’ll do what I have to do to regain peace and security in this country,” he said hundreds of times during his electoral campaign. A colleague of mine, who covered those elections for El País, asked the president of Honduras what he meant by “I’ll do what I have to do.” The president smiled and said: “Every Honduran knows what that means.” I hope, after reading these pages, the reader also knows.
18
THOSE WHO IMAGINE
I’ve met people who believed, believe, and will go on believing that Tegucigalpa, and Honduras as a whole, could, can, and will be able to change. These are people who can’t leave. Who don’t want to leave. Who leave only to return with greater strength. Who, whether they’re mistaken or in the right, will save the country with their mere existence.
* * *
One Thursday afternoon at Cafe Paradiso—one of the last, fenced-in strongholds of liberty—three friends of mine who happen to have been friends since childhood before we all met, reunited by happenstance, got together to drink some cold beers: Fabricio, a poet of flowery wordplay and contributor to slam sessions, has no way to leave the country; Oscar, a movie director and committed editor, left and only comes back for vacation; and Gabriela, a feminist who’s spent years fighting for, among other causes, the education of Honduran gynecologists and politicians so that they may one day understand that the morning-after pill is not synonymous with abortion—she is counting down the days before she can leave.
Fabricio, Oscar, and Gabriela are three of the young people who took to the streets after the coup d’état. They continued to organize even when it was made clear that the ousted president had betrayed them, and now they laugh at the lies that come from both the right and the left. Many beers into the night, the three of them step into a time machine, and I don’t know if they’re laughing at themselves or fleeing the peyote trip from hell that is our surroundings; but they surprise me—they don’t even flinch—as they move on to talk about Gramsci and university dialectics.
Fabricio recites verses about disorder, entropy, anything that refuses to be channeled in any constructive way toward any constructive end, about chaos, violence, and the militarization of the country, about generating some type of political activity five years after the coup d’état, about how to relearn the lessons of the unsuccessful banana strike of 1954, about forming a student-led movement that Gabriela would consider successful if there were at least one self-declared feminist. Oscar wants to meet his manuscript deadlines, and I fall asleep thinking of the clouds of dust that swirl around the neighborhood of Canaán, where the dean of a school told me that same morning that ten kids had had to drop out after a gang had extorted their parents, forcing them to flee the neighborhood.
I say goodbye to them with the same affection—cold, formulaic, respectful, and embarrassed—with which I would use at a funeral, and I get back to reporting.
* * *
That Saturday night I bumped into other old friends, Jorge Garcia and Roberto, at a bar. They stood to greet me from a table where ten other people sat wearing ice-blue shirts with the words “Startup Weekend” printed on the front. Jorge designed, and sold to the US, a smartphone app that turns your face into a character from “The Walking Dead.” He was doing well. With Roberto and another friend, Alejandro, he designed another open source app that uses crowdsourcing to recount electoral results in Honduras and assess whether or not there was fraud. They only ever left the country to look for new clients for their source code. They explained to me, optimistically—beer and rum in hand—that India was losing the programming battle, and they were the ones who were winning. They said it was cheaper for “Gringolandia” to outsource jobs to the northern triangle of Central America. They said they needed to join forces and think about opening a workspace where ideas could flow, where they could teach each other. The Silicon Valley catracho (a fried corn tortilla loaded with beans and cheese—colloquially anything of Honduran origin is known as catracho) would make a great story, and they know how to sell it.
* * *
The group that gets together for hackathons, BarCamps, Ted Talks, and PechaKucha conferences—where the tech savvy develop new ideas in twenty slides of twenty seconds each—specializes in the development of digital apps. They’ve created an app that identifies the phone numbers of extortionists and sends a warning to your entire network of contacts; a pendant in the form of a cross with a GPS system so that family members can always know the exact location of a loved one migrating through Mexico; a cellphone system for migrants in the United States to pay for the water, light, and phone bills of their mothers in Tegucigalpa. All of these apps were created by them. All of them are potential big breaks in the tech world.
* * *
“Don’t ask me for false patriotism. I’m staying because I can do things here. We can develop talent. There are business opportunities.” Jorge has this pronouncement at the ready. He knows what he has to say. But, afterward, like everyone else, he lets go, eases into comfort, and starts talking. He has a love/hate relationship with Tegucigalpa: sadomasochism, Stockholm syndrome. He’s never directly suffered violence, but he knows he’s just been lucky. He tries not to leave his house, keeps a low profile, and remembers the streets of his childhood with less and less clarity. It hurts that his eleven-year-old daughter doesn’t know what it’s like to play in a park, or carelessly walk 500 meters down the street. He’s cut the cable, put away the television, and is wary of any newspapers entering his house. When he sits at a bar the first thing he does is look around to evaluate the scene for potential risks, a very common trait of any Honduran. His co-worker opted to hire guards for a meeting about opening new workspaces.
Like any good systems engineer, he gives me the rational reason as to why nothing is going to change for the moment. The argument he uses is an attempt to save Honduras:
“Criminality is just the best optimization of the country’s available resources. It’s impossible that so many people are bad just for the pleasure of it.”
EPILOGUE
WHAT AM I DOING IN HONDURAS?
If the headlines were from Egypt, Libya, or Syria, from the Arab revolutions and their corresponding springs, where, for years, I had been able to show that I was good at capturing the bang-bang, the human fireworks, then what was I looking for in Honduras, a place no one knows anything about, or, worse, almost no one cares about?
I got to know Tegucigalpa for the first t
ime while crouching inside a “capsule” in the United States Embassy to cover an official meeting with Vice President Joe Biden. That “capsule” was a van that, at six in the morning, picked up a journalist in front of a hotel and left him in the same place twelve hours later, with a press release in hand and a look on his face that revealed he’d wasted the day. We couldn’t get closer than twenty meters from the vice president. We could have written the same report from Kuala Lumpur.
I had three years to make up for that first botched job.
Between early 2012 and mid-2014, I was the only foreign correspondent in Honduras. I had access to sources, time to make decisions, and the patience to wait around with no greater hurry than if I were on vacation. I didn’t need to compete with anyone for the news or for exclusive interviews; my editors approved everything I proposed, and they dedicated considerable time to me. I was deeply privileged. Had it not been for the flexibility and experience of my editors, I would’ve turned into a zombie journalist with one eye on the TV, one ear to the radio, and my fingers busy cutting and pasting press releases.
In Tegucigalpa, when night fell and we spent our time getting drunk and cooking pasta, we’d play a game called Name That Sound. What we heard right outside, were they birthday firecrackers or gunshots? Were they bursts from an AK-47? Tegucigalpa is the most dangerous capital city in the world without a declared war, or, according to international reports, the country with the highest homicide rate per capita. In 2012 and 2013 more people were murdered in Honduras than in Iraq, even though the population of Honduras is three times smaller. The best thing about statistics is that they offer spectacular summaries of the place where you’re deciding to live. They’re flashy, but they don’t really impact anyone, not even you, reader. They’re phrases that work to sell the mythos of the brave reporter more than present any form of reality. I’ll never know if I was able to convey an idea that went beyond the number of homicides per capita; if I was able to locate, however briefly, the Honduran reality on the map of the global media agenda.
What little instinct I had was forged in war zones, extreme and “spectacular” situations of great—though, for me, brief—danger. In Tegucigalpa, I learned that knowing how to live in Gaza or in Libya is irrelevant. No time spent or experiences had in the Middle East are useful when transferred to Central America, with its relatively peaceful veneer; where people don’t take pictures of themselves wearing bullet-proof vests, but where it’s also easier to accidentally get a bullet lodged in your head. There are no snipers here, it doesn’t rain mortar, and yet the sensation of being on the front lines of combat and imminent ambush doesn’t go away. Feeling yourself in danger during the drive between one location and another is something that, in the Honduran night, is better never to lose sight of. The worst thing is not the habit of eyeing the rearview mirrors in a taxi even when you’re going to cover an insubstantial press conference at the Chancellery first thing on a Monday morning, but knowing that your wife and daughter are living in the same place where you’re working. The place where, for the first time, those who you write about also read your work.
No reporter would take their daughter out to a park in Baghdad. Why should I do so in Tegucigalpa? And, at the same time, why should I sentence my daughter to live locked in a house if her dad isn’t a war correspondent? Would a reporter travel to Baghdad and bring his family? Honduras is not Iraq. But there was a time when I experienced it as if it were. It could very well be, if that’s how I decided to tell it, or if the media agenda demanded it. It’s a matter of focus—fluctuating according to the dictates of decisions that aren’t made either in Baghdad or Tegucigalpa.
It’s true that for now—and I emphasize, for now—car bombs don’t explode in the markets of Honduras. Every two days, however, people are shot dead by hitmen—a slow demographic drainage that’s unaccounted for, unexplained. Those killed amount to the same number of people, or even more, as would die if bombs exploded in the bushels of bananas on sale next to the National Stadium. The numbers don’t lie. The 7,100 murders of 2012 make for an average of 598 monthly and twenty daily homicides. Eighty-three percent of homicides are committed using firearms—the law allows for the possession of five firearms per person—making young men particularly vulnerable. Seventy-seven percent of those dead are men between the ages of twenty and thirty. If a man is younger than twenty-five, the homicide rate corresponding to his age group is double that of the country as a whole; four times more than that of the second most violent country in the world, neighboring El Salvador. Additionally, twenty-three percent of homicides are committed by hitmen. These are crimes that have been contracted out to settle scores, usually by two men atop a speeding motorcycle. Ninety-one percent of murders reported in the country never proceed to trial.
Three weeks after arriving in the country, I covered a ceremony at the capital. US Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield gave twenty motorcycles to President Porfirio Lobo’s administration in the name of the fight against crime. I tried to do my job and turn an insubstantial press conference into a series of substantive questions. It was impossible. A local leader had told me that the local narcos would bribe some of the police agents so that they’d turn the other way when passing any street corner where cocaine is sold. I asked the officials whether they were worried the motorcycles would fall into the hands of delinquents, whether they thought it obvious that the motorcycles wouldn’t help anybody if they couldn’t control who drove them, if the problem of police corruption continued unaddressed. Not only was there no answer, but, at the end of the conference, one Honduran journalist put an arm around my shoulders and whispered: “We don’t ask those kinds of questions here.” If I wanted to stay alive, he said, I should keep a low profile: “As a friend, I’m telling you to stay quiet, for your own good.” He sold it to me as a piece of advice, but, in reality, it was a threat, and it wasn’t made by a police officer or government official, but by a journalist.
A few months later, I was in a hurry after having paid my phone bill at the mall. I called Mairena, my trusted taxi driver.
“Could you come get me at the mall, Mairena?”
“Well, I’m pretty far. It’ll take me thirty minutes. Wait for me there.”
“No, don’t worry about it. I’ll grab a taxi. I’m in a hurry.”
Fifty meters from the door, someone on a motorcycle got close to my driver’s window and screamed at me: “givemeyourfuckingphoneorI’llkillyou.” He then repeated, “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you.”
I didn’t wait. I opened the door and ran off back in the direction of the mall. Luckily, he didn’t shoot. Putting your life on the line for a phone is one of the dumbest things one can do. When I got back home, I wrote:
“I’ve dreamed of this scene, both while sleeping and awake, for many months now. If I were to die here, it would be on a Tuesday, midmorning, I’d be smoking a Marlboro and sitting next to my driver, with my right arm out the window, waiting for a light to turn green and running late to a pointless press conference. My blood would splatter over the taxi seat, my twisted body would make an image no one would want to remember as mine, and, probably, it would never be known why a hitman got hold of me from behind, emptying his clip before accelerating and losing himself amongst the traffic. Maybe I wouldn’t even be able to catch his face before he finished the job, let alone open the door and run away. The next day a somewhat sizable article—the European is always worth more than the local—would be published, recounting the facts, giving some context to the most dangerous country in the world, without explaining the real motives that led to the violence perpetrated against me; my friends would write two or three columns, talking about me in the past tense and, in various indistinguishable ways, they would dissect the many floating rumors and hypotheses. Had I been investigating something I hadn’t been able to publish, did I have outstanding debts, had they tried to steal my iPhone, or had I acquired some enemies because of some drama with a woman? All of that would be f
alse, and the Honduran police would detain a couple of usual suspects, petty delinquents, and expose them before the press and pin them with murder charges so they could rid themselves of the weight of responsibility riding their backs. Maybe, on some anniversary, someone would ask after the brains behind the crime, but they’d never be identified, and that’d be the end of the story. I don’t think I’ve come here to die. But it’s all the same. I’m more and more scared to die here.”
The problem, in the end, isn’t just that they’ll break me or break someone close to me—my wife or my daughter—because of a mistake, because of a theft, or just because, because they’d been sent to go after me, but the problem is that I’ll infect my sources with more risk than they’ve already assumed on a daily basis simply by helping me out. I’ve learned to understand Facebook messages in which people who’d freely spoken with me, notebook in hand, now retracted everything they’d said, afraid for their lives, afraid that their names would appear in an article. They’d tell me that quoting them put their lives in danger, and they’d blame me for “anything that might happen to them,” which, in 2013, was one of the most common phrases in Honduras.
One day, after four or five long interviews, two officials awoke from a long daydream and realized they were, in effect, telling me that the police uses death squads in a campaign of social cleansing. Shortly after I’d written all the details and was ready for publication, they called me.