Blood Barrios Read online

  This is the moment when they shine the lights again, when heads in the crowd turn to see: the unsavory moment when the attendants from the morgue have to pull the bodies out of the minivans and stuff them into plastic bags. For a crime photographer, these moments are like a landscape painter’s sunset. We’re sick. All of us. Those of us who think that our presence is justified because we’re working; those who bring their kids to see the spectacle as if they were in their own living rooms watching a cheap movie. The bodies thunk out of their seats; the attendants heave them up again, trying not to drag them across the ground. I’ll never understand why bodies always lose one or both shoes. The photographer catches a fresh portrait. Arms hanging like dead weight, a drooping head nodding goodbye, a puddle of blood seeping off the seat, advancing slowly towards the ground. News in this town lasts as long as the blood stays wet. Details harden quickly. What, when, how, and who turn into ends in themselves. The four basic questions of journalism gobbling up the fifth. The repetition blanks the why. There’s talk, sure, but not about anything important.

  * * *

  As soon as they arrive, I spot them. On the street corner, a few steps removed from the circus surrounding the vans. They’re not spectators. About a dozen men, a few women. They hug. Cry. Make phone calls. No cops or local journalists approach. Even if they did, they wouldn’t want to talk to them. They’re the victims. Those who know what happened. The people who can answer the why that nobody’s asking.

  I don’t know where I find the will to overcome my shame, but I walk up to them. A few words of condolence and a short introduction identify me as a foreigner. The friends and family of the murdered drivers, angry and scared, want to step away and ask not to be identified before offering me any comment that might ease their rage. They’re willing to talk only because I’m a foreigner. They think that whatever I write won’t be read by anyone in town. But with the internet, that’s unlikely.

  Nobody provides their name. They have faces, clothes, stories, and fear, but they’re missing names, which means what they tell me cannot be part of the story. They aren’t the anonymous sources that will let an editor, in some office thousands of miles away, believe that through them the world can understand pain and truth. They can’t help with my work; but they can help me.

  They talk so that they won’t be forgotten. But they don’t denounce or accuse, nor do they provide details that could lead to the killers—and they know exactly who the killers are. They’re not heroes; they don’t want recognition, or fame. They don’t even want to talk to me for longer than it takes to smoke a cigarette. They don’t want to be known for running their tongues, only to have them cut out.

  They start with the basic facts.

  As they finished their last route of the day, the two drivers parked their vans next to each other to chat as their passengers disembarked. A group of men wielding pistols, their faces uncovered, stormed onto the scene and screamed at the passengers to hurry. The commuters ran, didn’t look back, and the men executed the drivers.

  Next comes the motive.

  Each driver pays a fixed extortion fee of ten dollars per vehicle per week. People, including kids, are stationed throughout the city, notebooks in hand, to keep track of the busses, routes, fares, and average number of passengers. Occasionally, depending on how much business the drivers have, the gangs will increase their extortion fee. The collectors, who are always the same, collect openly from the drivers, even in the light of day.

  The gangs select a driver responsible for putting the money in an envelope and waiting for a call to be given directions to the drop-off. Then the collector comes, on foot, motorcycle, or in a luxury truck, shakes the driver’s hand, asks how business is going, and accepts payment.

  But that morning, after following the payment ritual, somebody showed up to collect a second time. Explaining that they’d already paid, the driver realized that the first collector wasn’t from the usual gang. The driver asked to talk to whoever was in charge to explain that somebody was robbing them, and he knew who.

  But the collector didn’t want to hear it—a thug who listens to reason won’t incite fear. He told the driver that he was the one lying, and that someone would have to pay the price and be killed.

  The driver started calling other drivers, warning anyone he saw back at the station, and doing what he could to avoid the inevitable. Those who got the warning burned through their contacts. Stop driving. Get out of your vans. They’re going to kill. It’s them. It’s real. Urgent. Two of the drivers, used to this kind of thing, didn’t pay much attention, and kept on driving. Losing a day’s wages was more than they could afford. Now, they’re dead.

  The other drivers try to console themselves. It could have been worse. If they hadn’t found those two, they might have gone to the bus station, where there were twenty of us.

  All of those twenty drivers pay the owner a daily rate for use of the vehicles. Whether they find passengers or not. On top of that is the extortion fee. Thus, the fee that goes to the gang comes out of the drivers’ pockets, not the business. The drivers don’t want to talk to the police. They don’t want to talk to the owner. It’s their problem and they have to deal with it. What’s the point of complaining and asking for help if nobody responds?

  The owner’s only concern when he shows up at the crime scene is for the other drivers to pull the bodies out of the vans, recover the collected fares, and do whatever they can to stop the police from taking the vehicles away as evidence. The drivers refuse.

  As the owner approaches, the drivers lower their voices, and then go silent. As if in a play, the actors leave the stage, making room for the next act.

  The owner, with his arms crossed over his chest, speaks loudly enough—he’s nearly screaming—for everybody at the scene to hear. The same way the drivers talk about the gang, he talks about the authorities. Nobody is going to investigate, because whoever investigates is going to close down their little goldmine. These are his words. Some of the cops are in business with the gangs, and some of them have even left the force to start their own cells. It’s true that none of the cops at the scene are asking any questions, or looking for witnesses, or conducting any sort of investigation. The officer closest to me stares ahead, without even blinking.

  The night wears on. The victims’ families have arrived, and I watch from afar. I feel like the old lady who watches you climb the staircase through a crack in her door. I keep on watching, but unlike the local journalists who snap and flash photos, I let the scene unfold in front of me without taking part.

  A woman jumps out of a taxi. Like a well-rehearsed scene—everybody knowing their cue—the crowd stares at her idly. It’s the wife of one of the drivers. She yells his name. The crowd, still gathered around the yellow tape, moves to give her space. The police officers know she’s coming straight for the body. They should stop her. But they let her through, let her zip open the bag, let her hold and kiss the man’s face one more time before, delicately, they pull her away, her face stained with blood. Two other women—sisters, or cousins, or maybe neighbors—take over from there. Now the widow will fall to the ground, cry out, and the women will pull her to her feet, console her, fanning her in front of the cameras and the crowds. It always goes like this, they tell me. And yet I still have trouble believing it.

  A boy is behind the cluster of women. Nobody pays attention to him, and he’s not crying. It’s the dead man’s son. In a matter of seconds he has grown up. I, however, do cry. I step away. Gain some distance. Turn my back. I let the dramatic tension drain away. I light a cigarette. Take a sip of juice. And I wait for the crowd to leave. It takes a long time.

  Distancing myself from the crowd, however, has made me an easy target.

  A group of teenage girls in tight t-shirts and short shorts detect a solitary, exotic foreigner who has infiltrated their world; they attack him with an arsenal of stares. I fail to understand their slang. They whisper and cackle to each other. One of them, full of en
ergy and aplomb—also gorgeous—comes to ask me for a cigarette to verify the speculations, and to begin the questioning, the coyness, the seduction. I have no doubt that she’s a minor. She asks for my number, the address of my hotel, and then tells me that we can go there as soon as I want. I don’t give it to her. In Honduras, they call them prepaid women, or escort girls. I glance behind me, wondering if some overbearing cousin might be controlling things from across the street. I’m scared. I don’t want to be the next corpse of the night, and in San Pedro Sula the nights are long.

  The photographer and the taxi driver wouldn’t let me forget, from my first until my last day as a correspondent in Honduras, about being taunted by the prepaid girl and her friends.

  3

  NIGHT OF THE CHEPOS

  In Tegucigalpa there’s nothing at all that could convince a responsible teenage boy to ditch his parents’ home and brave the dangers of the night. Nothing at all except, of course, chasing a girl. Ebed Yanes, a studious middle-class fifteen-year-old, had been chatting with a girl on Facebook, and now he wanted to meet her in person. He ate dinner, helped his mom with some chores, said goodnight, and then went up to his room. “My parents are still awake,” Ebed wrote to the girl that night from his bedroom. “I’ve got keys to the motorcycle. I’ll shower and wait for them to go to sleep.” Ebed never got to meet the girl.

  Nobody else in the house realized that, around midnight, Ebed snuck down the stairs, got on his father’s red motorcycle, and disappeared into the darkness. He took a few wrong turns, got lost, and then started getting scared. “I don’t know what kind of hole you live in,” he texted the girl. “I’ve been looking for you for forty-five minutes. I should probably get back home before I get caught by the chepos.” Chepos, a Honduran slang word for soldiers, was the last word he would write in his life. By 1:30 in the morning, in a dark and narrow alleyway, Ebed was lying dead on top of his dad’s motorcycle, one bullet through his neck, two bullets in his back.

  The Yanes family lives in one of the gated, high-security neighborhoods that abound on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa. Ebed’s father, Wilfredo, a successful food distributor, welcomes me to their comfortable, two-story, middle-class home, which is furnished with the kind of banality that highlights an effort to maintain normalcy in the midst of utter chaos. We walk among old sofas, the walls punctuated by framed family portraits and diplomas. On the second floor there’s a small TV room and three bedrooms. Next to the bedroom that will forevermore lie empty, Wilfredo, his wife (a university professor), and his oldest daughter (a medical student) share the few luxuries they allow themselves: a plasma television screen and an exercise machine so they can stay in shape without risking their lives out on the streets.

  The family’s tragedy began on Sunday morning. Wilfredo remembers waking up and finding that the red Toyota, which Ebed was supposed to have cleaned before church, was still dirty. It didn’t worry him, though. His son and wife had gone over homework assignments together until late the night before, and there was nothing abnormal about his son avoiding his household chores. After eating breakfast, and repeatedly yelling that it was time to come down, Ebed’s sister went upstairs to wake him. She found that his bed hadn’t been slept in. Ebed’s phone was off, and, checking the garage again, they realized that the motorcycle Wilfredo had recently bought to cut his commute time was missing. Wilfredo knew that his son was mischievous. He loved girls, and seemed to have a bit of an attention deficit disorder, but he never got into actual trouble; he usually obeyed his parents, he’d never been involved in anything serious, he didn’t go out alone, and he didn’t even know how to navigate the complicated system of collective taxis and busses that make up Honduras’ public transportation system. When he went to his Taekwondo classes, his sister would drive him and wait for him out in the car, poring over her anatomy books. The night that Ebed was murdered in an alleyway was the first and last time in his life that he left the house without one of his family members.

  Although Wilfredo had immediately sensed that something was wrong that morning—Honduran parents, bombarded by the violence surrounding them, panic when their kids get caught up in what is normally typical teenage behavior—he never imagined the worst. He started, naturally, by looking for him. The neighborhood security guard worried he’d be fired if he covered for Ebed, and admitted that the boy had left the neighborhood on a motorcycle after midnight the night before, and hadn’t yet returned. But the guard had no reason to fear; neither Wilfredo nor his wife were vengeful types. They wanted to find their son, not point fingers, and they didn’t think twice about the security guard. Wilfredo began whispering a mantra to himself: “We need to keep calm, but keep looking.” They spent twelve long hours, running between the Criminal Investigation Unit, the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors, and the children’s hospital. They wanted to believe that he’d gotten into a motorcycle accident, or had stayed the night with some girl and that, any minute, he’d be back asking for forgiveness.

  As if delaying news could change its course, it wasn’t until late in the day that Wilfredo decided to go to the police department’s homicide unit. Officials didn’t know anything definitive there, either. They did, however, know of a red motorcycle that had showed up along with the corpse of an unidentified young man, killed by unknown suspects who fled without trace—an explanation repeatedly given by Honduran police to mask their incapacity, and unwillingness, to solve crimes.

  “We have the motorcycle here. Do you want to see it?”

  The family walked to the parking lot and, even from a distance, Wilfredo recognized his red motorcycle. He knew what it meant.

  “Is it him?,” his wife asked.

  “Yes. It’s him,” Wilfredo responded; and then his wife fainted.

  They went to the morgue. In silence the whole way. Wilfredo wanted to go in alone to identify the body. The process was quick and to the point. The morgue, as always at the weekends, was full. Ebed’s body lay on the floor in a plastic bag. A bullet had shattered the jaw he still didn’t have to shave. Wilfredo maintained composure. An official handed him a paper bag with his son’s belongings: a BlackBerry full of text messages, a broken helmet, and a keychain. They were the keys to the house. That same night, during a vigil that lasted until dawn, Wilfredo made a promise to Ebed and a promise to his country. It was grandiloquent. Since his son’s death, that’s how Wilfredo is. And it’s his right. With each word, each gesture, his obsession in keeping all newspaper clippings of his son’s case, his organizing a notebook filled with the appointments made with prosecutors, journalists, and politicians he’s trying to influence. But besides being an orderly person, he’s also a profoundly religious person, and refuses to allow a crime like the one committed against his son to be judged only in heaven, because God, as he told me, will judge you for what you do on earth. That very day of the funeral he decided to start investigating. He promised himself that his son wouldn’t be reduced to yet another statistic. He couldn’t believe what the police had told him. His son—the victim of a random murder in the street? He just didn’t believe it. From the day of the funeral, before he was even buried, he started dealing with his pain by searching for the truth. And he found it.

  Wilfredo needed to shower and change before the funeral. He also wanted to be alone to think. But on the way home he realized he couldn’t even wait until his son was in the ground to start his investigation. He made a couple of detours before grabbing that shower and change of clothes. The first stop was a police station a little more than a hundred meters from where his son’s body had turned up. “Yeah, we heard shots,” an officer told him. “But we didn’t go outside. We were scared.” Wilfredo didn’t blame them. He wasn’t very critical of the government, or the police. Realizing they weren’t able to fulfill even their basic duties, he didn’t have anything else to discuss with them. He was looking for information and gained nothing from excuses, deflections, or even condolences. Above all, he was a practical man. His second stop th
at morning was the alleyway where his son had been killed. Maybe somebody had seen or heard something. He realized it was likely nobody would want to talk even if they had seen something, but he needed to try, and he would not be disappointed. It turned out that people can’t resist a father broken by pain; plus, he wasn’t a cop, he was a neighbor. He was one of them, he was relatable, and he was able to discover what a whole army of detectives never could have discovered.

  One neighbor told him she heard what sounded like rifle shots in the middle of the night, but was scared to peek out, but then mentioned some others who might have risked a glance. One neighbor, brave enough to look through the curtains, was also willing to talk: he’d seen a group of seven or eight men in uniform approach a body splayed out on top of a motorcycle, turn the body over with their guns, gather up the shells, and then jump into a double-cabin four-by-four pickup truck. According to the witness, the uniformed men returned to the scene a few minutes later to do another inspection, this time with flashlights, making sure that no evidence had been left behind. But they were too hasty. In every cover-up, if someone looks hard enough, there’s always a trail to be found. The next morning, at dawn, the witness picked up a few shells the men had missed in the darkness and gave them to Wilfredo. Those shells—on which were written the name and number “Aguila 223”—Wilfredo carried with him in a plastic bag to his son’s funeral.

  Wilfredo remembers tossing dirt over his son’s coffin with one hand, while the other gripped the bullet shells in his pocket. He couldn’t get the idea out of his head that it wasn’t some random shooter in the street but the Honduran Army that had senselessly killed his son.

  The Monday after the funeral, Wilfredo sought advice from Julieta Castellanos, the dean of the National Autonomous University of Honduras, whose son was shot dead by police at a checkpoint in 2011, and who has since become a vocal critic of the impunity of the Honduran security forces. Despite the fact that the police who killed her son escaped, Castellanos has stood as an example to parents like Wilfredo to look beyond the meager investigations of impotent state forces. People at the university recommended that Wilfredo wait before bringing charges, that he not speak to the media, that discretion is best, and that he go to the Human Rights Division of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and tell them everything he knows—that the investigators would need all the help they could get. The week of his son’s funeral, on a Thursday, Wilfredo and his wife became detectives. They started spending their insomniac nights exhausting their pain in the streets, searching for an Army pickup truck similar to the one the witness had described. They found nothing. But they looked, and looked, and kept looking. Exactly a week after the murder, the following Saturday at midnight, they drove past a military checkpoint, not far from where their son was murdered. Wilfredo spotted a truck, a Ford F350 Super Duty, which looked almost like a tank. These kinds of trucks are rare in Tegucigalpa. Wilfredo asked his wife to slow down so he could take a picture through the window. The flash, however, alerted the soldiers, and they stopped the car. They surrounded Wilfredo and his wife, took their camera, and began questioning them. Wilfredo told them they were on their way home to eat, and that he liked to take pictures of rare vehicles. It worked. He and the soldiers talked about the size of the motor and the sticker price of the latest model, not of murdered children. The soldiers let them go. They didn’t see any reason to suspect a middle-class married couple on their way home for supper.