Blood Barrios Read online

  “Come see us on Monday at eight in the morning, and don’t even think about publishing before Monday.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  The conversation was easy, flowing.

  “Dear Albert,” as that official liked to call me, “you can do whatever you like with your life, but know that if you quote us they can kill us both. So, please, I ask you to abstain from using our names.”

  “Of course, officer.”

  I constantly watched the rearview mirrors of Mairena’s car to see if some assassin motorcycle was tailing us, which would mean that I’d lost the battle. In the end, I did lose, and I threw in the towel. A year after moving to Tegucigalpa, my wife and daughter left me. It was the right choice. Nothing should happen to them because of me. They left and I was left alone to finish the work I had committed to: to write about Honduras. I lasted another year there without them, in fits and starts, counting down the days, first suffering the transformation of my house into an office, and then my office into a bar, fighting against addictions, sadness, and depression—a fight I believe I won. But only because each morning I counted down days until I could leave.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATORS

  Alberto Arce is a Knight Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan. He joined the Associated Press (AP) in February 2012 as a correspondent in Honduras, where for several years he was the only foreign correspondent to report from Tegucigalpa. He later joined AP’s Mexico City bureau, where he continued to cover Central America before going to The New York Times as an editor. He won the 2012 Rory Peck award for his coverage of the battle for Misrata during the Libyan civil war, and has also reported from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and Syria. This is his second book after “Misrata calling,” Libros del Ko, Spain, 2011.

  John Washington is a journalist, novelist, and translator.

  Daniela Ugaz is a translator and law student at New York University. They have previously translated The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail, by Óscar Martínez

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  Germán Andino was born in San Pedro Sula in 1984. He writes about and draws the street gangs, soccer gangs, the mechanic reminiscing about a bygone era, or other Hondurans who write about the reality. He studied at the National School of Fine Arts and Systems Engineering.

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