Blood Barrios Read online

  “After they killed him, I went to Tegucigalpa and saw the room where he used to live. A terrible box, too cold and too hot, where everyone sleeps together, with the door open, without any privacy. They bathe in a barrel of water. They don’t even get food. Everyone says that police steal and kill. But police who steal and kill don’t live in a wooden box or get home by thumbing for rides. Most of them are dying of hunger, and are harmless. One does something bad, and everyone has to pay for it. If you haven’t seen the reality of a police officer, you have no right to judge.”

  Only Joaquín, who stopped going to school to help his family by selling paintings (and earning about five dollars a day) has seen the video of his father’s murder. “It was good for me to see it. My dad was a hero. Now I know. My dad was a good policeman. He was an honest policeman. At school they told me my dad was killed because he tried to extort people. I had to beat the kid who said that.” Despite what he’s seen, or perhaps because of what he’s seen, Joaquín wants to be a police officer. “My dad always told me that I should be a police chief or a general.”

  On our way to her house from the hotel, and without her kids around her, Suyapa told me stories of Arita. Just like Joaquín and her other children, she called him “Dad.”

  “I’m not losing a husband. I’m losing a father,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “He picked me up off the street when I was eleven years old and he raised me like he was my dad. He raised me like his own daughter, both me and the kids he gave me. I loved him like a father. I didn’t like giving him children very much, but he took good care of me.”

  * * *

  In the juvenile detention center of Tegucigalpa, Edwin is awaiting trial. Sitting on a chair in the prison courtyard, he seems more like a lost child than a murderer who coldly shot the father of a family. But the video doesn’t lie. He was the one who fired the lethal shots.

  “I didn’t finish fifth grade. I left school last November, a year ago. My dad left us for another woman five years ago, and we never saw him again or knew where he went. My mom has eleven kids. Only one of them, who works in construction, sometimes brings something home for us. I used to get out of school at noon. My mom’s business is making tortillas, which I would deliver to people’s houses. My mom can make 300 lempiras a day, and after paying for the wood and corn, she’s left with 100 a day to feed the six of us who still live with her. I’m the youngest. I left school because the tortillas had to be delivered by noon, for lunch, and if I kept on studying I couldn’t deliver them on time. It was tight, we didn’t want to lose clients. I only met the other kid two months ago. He’s from the neighborhood. He was always standing at the corner, and started talking to me since he saw me out selling tortillas. He started saying I should go with him to steal. We were thieves. But it was only the second time I’d gone out with him to steal.”

  “Why did you kill the police?”

  “We stole the motorcycle and were going to drop it off. The police took the keys from us. Everything happened so fast. I didn’t run off because I was with him (the other kid) and because I didn’t know where we were. I’d never been there, I never left my neighborhood, the Sinaí, not even to la Joya which is next door. I’d never been to the center of Tegucigalpa. I don’t know anything, I didn’t know where to go. There’s police in front, in back, and I didn’t have a license and was on a stolen motorcycle. I was trapped. That’s why my friend fought back. I didn’t know what to do. The gun was his, not mine. Shooting a revolver is easy, it’s like magic, it shoots and that’s that, it’s not like a pistol, which is harder. With the tortilla work you make enough to eat rice, beans, and tortillas three times a day, but not enough to buy a cellphone, shoes, or a pair of pants. I regret it. Of course I regret it. Now they tell me I need to do eight years. When my mom comes she makes me cry. Though she hardly comes to see me because if she does she can’t sell tortillas that day and makes no money and so no one can eat at home and no one has enough to pay for the transportation or to even bring me anything. I’m not a murderer, I was a thief, and I’d only been a thief for two days. Two motorcycles. I never smoked pot, or crack, or did coke in my life, not even alcohol. I was just starting. I got caught up just ’cause I was a kid.”

  If sentenced, Edwin will be in jail for eight years. Someone like him is lucky if he can make it that long. He was sent back to the hospital in September soon after detained. The police beat him again in the juvenile detention center of San Pedro Sula. When I saw him the first time he could hardly walk. One of the guards said that someone who kills a police officer in Honduras is “carrying four boards strapped to his back.” He’s the walking dead who’s already sealed his fate (closing his own coffin lid) in the cycle of violence plaguing the city. Maybe that was why Edwin escaped the juvenile detention center a year later, along with 14 other members of his gang.

  Joaquín, the son of the policeman, had told me, “I want to be a policeman so I can kill gangsters.” But somewhere along the way, I imagine out of sadness, he turned Emo, and grew angry at me for publishing that line. He was probably right to be angry. Suyapa and Joaquín went to Tegucigalpa many times. First the government and the police paid homage to his dad during a national celebration in Honduras. Afterward, Congress gave them a certificate that deemed their father a hero. Lawmakers promised them help, housing, scholarships for the kids. But then months passed. Suyapa contacted me regularly to explain that she couldn’t process her pension because she and Arita hadn’t been legally married. Officially, she wasn’t a widow. In reality, she didn’t matter to anyone. Four months after the murder, the day before the elections, I asked the ruling party’s candidate, the president of the National Congress, Juan Orlando Hernández, about Suyapa. He made a show of ordering his campaign manager to resolve the matter immediately. He won the elections, and today he is president of Honduras. His campaign manager is now the president of the National Congress. Nothing was ever done for Suyapa.

  Weeks after our meeting, Joaquín contacted me through Facebook to give me a little lecture on covering the crime beat: “If I’m being honest I hope that dog dies! I don’t feel any compassion for him. And I would like to go on talking with you, but with all that’s been published about me I don’t trust any journalist. Good night!” Just when the shame of the journalist who reported a story, and then quickly disengaged, started to dissipate into the past, Joaquín charged at me again. “Hi Alberto. I see that in the end I was right. No one has helped me.”

  PART II

  THE CURSE OF GEOGRAPHY

  6

  A LITTLE KNOWN WAR

  San Pedro Sula hasn’t always been where it is. Centuries ago Spanish colonialists, wanting to protect the city from constant pirate attacks, decided to move it. Today, the city is in the north of the country, about an hour from the Caribbean coast.

  San Pedro Sula is organized in a grid running more horizontal than vertical; like most colonial cities, it has no skyscrapers. Outside of the city center, urbanism grows in concentric circles of poverty and marginalization, neighborhoods divorced from the downtown by highways. According to a mathematician friend of mine, these isolated barrios have levels of violence and homicide that would—if there were the slightest fall in the birthrate—completely depopulate the city in eighty-seven years.

  The three-hour ride from Tegucigalpa to the Sula Valley is best done, for safety reasons, during the day. To get through the drive you have to manage traffic jams, climb over mountains, speed by an American military base, cruise through a few prairies, eat fish at Lake Yojoa, and, in the final stretch, hit a twenty-kilometer straightaway that spits you into a stunning view of the most beautiful and violent city in Honduras.

  * * *

  The mayor of San Pedro Sula, Juan Carlos Zúñiga, a stout and elegant young man with a finely groomed beard, used to be a surgeon. He doesn’t hesitate to recognize that his city is threatened by a violence the authorities are incapable of combating. Moving the entire city again
wouldn’t even work; the violence in Honduras is inescapable.

  My interview with the mayor is brief and formulaic. Zúñiga is tired of hearing the epithet, “most dangerous city in the world,” and tries to focus on details. He does what he can, according to the manual of international cooperation, which urges him to follow certain protocols and take specified actions, but which, so far, hasn’t helped. Surrounded by aides and sitting in his office on an ugly, beat-up sofa (which I read as an attempt to present a welcoming vibe) the mayor, like a broken record, churns out statistics and name-drops public projects so mechanically that once he mentions the second shelter for runaway kids, I zone out and start rereading my notes.

  And my notes, I find, are full of dead bodies:

  •In Honduras there are between eighty-five and ninety-one homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, depending on the local or international count. This is the favorite statistic for journalists who love to define Honduras as “the most dangerous country in the world.”

  •In San Pedro Sula there are 166 homicides a year per 100,000 inhabitants. This is another favorite statistic for journalists who love to define San Pedro Sula as “the most dangerous city in the world.”

  •The World Health Organization defines violence as epidemic if there are more than eight homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. A typical European country, like Spain, doesn’t reach one homicide per 100,000 inhabitants.

  Journalists are pushed to report on the most dangerous cities, the fattest officials, and the last survivor from the trenches of Normandy.

  With these statistics, it makes more sense to visit the hospital than the mayor’s office.

  * * *

  The Mario Catarino Rivas Hospital looks like a war hospital, one of those places that incites both solidarity and indignity at an international level. Honduras is suffering a forgotten and low-intensity war. The tiny old rooms in the hospital are stained with blood nobody has the time to clean up. There aren’t even enough stretchers for incoming patients, and family or friends need to carry patients themselves from cars into the waiting room, or from bed to bed, or from cushion on the floor to cushion on the floor. Family members also have to wash and feed the patients themselves, buy them medicine, bandages, syringes. And to witness all this you just need to walk through the doors. With all the chaos of Honduras, needing to ask for permission is rare. The doctors have too many problems to worry about hiding anything from the press.

  The doctors working in the ER that night were all student residents. Natalia Galdámez was one of them. She looked at her admittance sheet of patients who had arrived since ten that night: nineteen patients with violent injuries, most of them men between fifteen and twenty-five years old, suffering from gunshot or machete wounds. The story is always that a stranger came and, without a word of explanation, shot them—they need to fill the questionnaire box with something.

  A number of the new patients that night were victims of a shootout in the Choloma pool hall. The son of one of the victims offered to take us to where, according to him, three other bodies were still sprawled on the floor. There are so many shootouts in the city that we were practically guaranteed to find bloodshed. We go. Half an hour later, we got out of the taxi we realized that the police hadn’t even shown up yet, and the only people brave enough to poke their heads through the half-open door of the pool hall were a pair of teenagers with dead family members inside.

  It’s hard to forget the smell of blood poured out on the baize of a pool table, the size of a shotgun wound, the cups of cane liquor spilled next to the bodies, the seeming irrelevance of death, the hours that it takes to collect the bodies, the ease with which one could, if one wanted or felt it was necessary, walk in and collect all the shotgun shells. It’s impossible not to be affected by the way in which evil impregnates the nights of San Pedro Sula. It’s impossible not to become furious when you realize you can’t get the right angle for a good photograph of the bodies. It’s impossible not to be frightened in front of the bodies, the silence, the darkness, the death, the kids in the doorway and the sensation that you’d be dead if the shooters returned. It does happen. They do come back.

  Despite it all, and against all logic, with the hotel an hour away and the nearest gas station a half-hour down the road, the need to piss pushed me to step into a dark corner. I whipped my head in every direction. My ears rang with terror that someone was going to appear from the shadows and catch me in a dead-end alley. I hugged the wall, took a few steps into the shadows to the only spot in which I could pee without straying too far from the others, yet not too close to the bodies that taking a piss would be disrespectful. Lifting my gaze, I spotted a little window covered over in black plastic with a hole in the middle, just big enough to see the dead bodies inside. This was the photograph we were looking for. The perfect angle.

  “Esteban! Come see this!”

  “God dang! That’s it. Come on, move,” he said, sneaking up to the window without looking at me.

  “Should I make the hole wider?,” I asked. “It’s just plastic. I could pull the whole thing off.”

  “Don’t even think about touching it. We can’t move anything to take a photo.”

  Esteban Félix taught me a lot about journalism in the following two years. His photograph of the cadavers seen through the hole in black plastic earned him a World Press Photo award.

  * * *

  Back at the hospital, chatting with the doctor, we witnessed Natalia and her colleagues save the life of a man who’d been nearly scalped by a machete. Next, the residents removed a kidney from an old man shot in the stomach. They put the organ in a plastic bag and gave it to the man’s nephew so he could take it somewhere else for analysis—an expense the hospital can’t afford. Natalia, like many people in San Pedro, was fed up, exhausted. She said that with her experience she’d rather work in a war zone than stay in her own city dressing the wounds of a silent war, a war nobody wants to call a war.

  * * *

  Honduras is a small country cursed by geography—falling directly in the path of drugs heading to the United States; a mule country in service of American cocaine consumers; a territory rented out for the pleasure of others. San Pedro Sula is a rest stop and inn along the supply chain that leads to Manhattan bars and Harvard parties. A gram of cocaine in Honduras costs ten dollars; in Mexico it costs thirty dollars. In New York, the same gram costs a hundred dollars. “If they didn’t do drugs, we wouldn’t be going through what we’re going through,” is the way that most locals explain it. In our moments of nihilism, on long Honduran nights, we remember that every line cut on the table is another death in Honduras.

  San Pedro Sula shares, along with La Ceiba and the Department of Cortés, in the border with Guatemala, a homicide rate twice as high as the national average, and 100 times higher than the average of any European country.

  According to a UN study, thirteen percent of the Honduras GDP is tied to drug trafficking. Though in the past cocaine made it to the US directly from Colombia, in recent years it’s been channeled through Honduras. The trend was especially accentuated after the institutional crisis that followed the 2009 coup d’état.

  In 2009, on the eve of his referendum on a constituent assembly to change the constitution, President Manuel Zelaya was pushed out of bed by the barrel of a gun. His attempt at constitutional change was considered by many to be inspired by Venezuela’s late Hugo Chavez. That was when those in charge of maintaining the law plunged into complete chaos. They focused their efforts on establishing a new government and repressing the opposition instead of stopping the “narco-flights.” The United States and the European Union subsequently suspended their drug trafficking assistance programs. Not a single country in the world recognized the coup government. One of the immediate consequences of the coup was a sort of cocaine gold rush. Planes loaded with the drug took direct flights through Honduras. Since the coup, ninety percent of cocaine entering the United States passes through Central America.

  E
milio Ulloa manages security for Dole, the largest banana company in the world and largest landowner in the Caribbean. With the open sincerity of a witness who feels his hands are tied, he explains how the company’s fumigation plane runways were used as narco-runways at least four times before the coup, between 2006 and 2008. Groups of up to forty heavily armed men came in trucks, overpowered and restrained the single guard, who typically carried nothing but a revolver, and unloaded the merchandise from the plane. “The fight was never fair,” he complained. “The narcos attack and there isn’t even resistance.” It’s asymmetrical warfare. On one side, the poorly outfitted and miserably paid Honduran police; on the other side, well-armed killers guarding multi-million dollar shipments.