Blood Barrios Read online

  More than just another strand of disorder, drug trafficking is the dynamo that sparks all the violence the country suffers. It works like a multinational company generating employment through local subcontracting; a multinational so powerful that it ends up penetrating and corrupting all existing state structures.

  Thanks to cocaine, the border between common delinquency and organized crime has evaporated in recent years. Assassinations, trafficking crimes, and the “settling of accounts” are now carried out by the gangs that used to steal cellphones and rob banks. This shift is taking place, in part, because cartels are paying for smuggling in drugs instead of in dollars. It’s both easier and cheaper for them. In order to maintain control over their workers, owners have long paid them in products or discounts. The result is a low-intensity war between gangs—bands of small-time dealers, extortionists, and security forces that cross back and forth over the thin line between law and criminality.

  In Honduras we have yet to see a war for control of the trafficking routes, as we’ve seen in Mexico between competing cartels. Isolated incidents aside, there aren’t massacres of twelve or more people, or systematic decapitations, or bodies dissolved in acid, as we’ve seen in Mexico. But what we do see in Honduras, just as we see in Mexico, is innocent victims caught in the crossfire between the army, the narcos, gangs and the police.

  7

  MOSQUITO COAST

  1. THE PLACE

  Gracias a Dios (Thank God), the official name of the Mosquito Coast, is a department of Honduras so remote that not even adventure tourists find it. Most of Gracias a Dios is covered in a mixture of mangrove jungle, swamps, and flood plains. There’s only one dirt highway, impossible to navigate for part of the year, connecting the region’s capital, Puerto Lempira, with a few remote farms. The rest of the area is only accessible by plane, helicopter, or motorized canoes, known locally as pipantes, which navigate through rivers turned into fluvial highways.

  The dense La Mosquitia jungle is also a paradise of small runways for planes taking off from Venezuela and Colombia loaded with cocaine. The runways can be cleared and constructed in less than twenty-four hours with the help of men in nearby villages, who earn in a day clearing runways what they would usually earn in a month.

  At dawn on the morning of 11 May 2012, four bodies were discovered near the Paptalaya pier.

  For photographer Rodrigo Abd and me, the Mosquito Coast was hard to get to. Though at first unsure if the reports of human rights abuses we were hearing were credible, if they were propaganda or factual, we were finally convinced these events had indeed taken place, though they’d only been reported on by a few activist bloggers. The fact that the New York Times was en route didn’t hurt, as battles for a first scoop still invigorate this field a little bit. The easy part was buying plane tickets from Tegucigalpa to La Ceiba and renting a plane the size of a Fiat Panda to cruise over that mix of humid forest and swamp dotted with runways. Also a cinch was dealing with Rodrigo, who had to ask the pilot to lean his seat back so he could snap photos—a necessary sacrifice in seeking an edge over his competitors by catching the unique image. Asking about what actually happened was where the difficulties set in.

  II. THE FACTS

  Before dawn on 11 May 2012, Celin Eriksson, seventeen years old, waited on the Paptalaya pier for his family members, due in shortly on a pipante. His family had told Celin that there would be work that night, unloading a plane on a nearby runway, but he’d decided to pass over the hundred dollars he would have made. Some other neighbors, however, did take the job. It’s easy work: unloading drugs from the plane onto a vehicle, getting paid, and then disappearing. The rest is taken care of by the narcos, who are typically Mexican. They’re the ones who then drive the merchandise into town and load it onto a pipante at the same pier where Celin was waiting for his family. That early May morning, when Celin saw a group of forty narcos arriving in a caravan, he decided that the best thing to do was to hide. It wasn’t out of fear—he was used to living with narcos—but simple prudence.

  At the same time Celin was waiting for his family, American Drug Enforcement Agency officers, along with Honduran police, were searching the Paptalaya area by helicopter. The agents observed a group of men carrying bundles of drugs on the pier and they decided to intervene: a few masked commandos descending by rope from the helicopter and securing the area without firing their weapons. Before fleeing, however, the narcos had pushed the boat off the pier, hoping to recover it later.

  The helicopter landed in front of Sandra Madrid’s house, the biggest building near the Paptalaya pier, which functioned as a sundry shop and ticket office for passengers looking for pipante rides up or down the river. Six agents kicked through the door, pushed Sandra’s husband to the floor, and kept a gun against his head for two hours as they demanded to know if he was “El Renco,” or if he worked for “El Renco,” or if the drugs were “El Renco’s.” Two Honduran police officers and one DEA agent boarded a pipante, finding a motor and gas in Madrid’s house, and took off down the river. The rest of the agents went on to interrogate the neighbors.

  Celin had witnessed the masked men dangling down from the helicopters. He was scared that if they saw him hiding they would mistake him for a narco and shoot, so the best thing, he figured, was to make himself conspicuous. The soldiers detained him and repeated the scene they’d rehearsed in Madrid’s house: they pointed a gun at his head, threatened to kill him, and asked him about “El Renco.” After his interrogation, the masked men forced him to walk along the shore of the river to look for the drug boat, in case it had run aground. After walking about a kilometer, the agents received a radio order to stop their search. They left Celin handcuffed in the dark and told him not to move.

  As Celin was sitting with his hands cuffed along the bank of the river, another pipante approached the pier. It was full of stacks of plastic chairs, vegetables to be sold in the market, and locals dozing in their seats. Among the passengers were Tom Brooks and his mother, Clara Woods, who Celin had been planning to welcome at the pier and accompany to their house. At the same time, the police officers who’d stormed Sandra Madrid’s house were nervously motoring around, barely able to steer their pipante, and looking in vain through the darkness for the boat that the narcos had pushed adrift. Then, suddenly, in front of them, appeared a boat full of packages. They were scared. They knew that the narcos were close and were willing to defend their cargo. They radioed to the helicopter to ask for aerial backup. And then the shooting began. First from the helicopter. Then from the police in the pipante, emptying their cartridges in the direction of the plastic chairs, the market vegetables, and the dozing passengers. Four of them were killed.

  Sitting handcuffed along the bank of the river, Celin could hear the gunshots.

  III. THE DEAD

  Hilda Lezama, the owner of the boat that came under attack (twelve meters long, with seating for twenty-five), recalls the event in a hospital bed in the Morava mission in Ahuas, a nearby town. In her right leg she has a bullet hole big enough to put a fist through. “War wounds like I saw in Iraq,” the American missionary doctor working at the hospital said to me. Lezama had been dozing, like most of the other passengers. Then the sound of a helicopter woke her seconds before the shooting began. She says that the first burst of gunfire came from the air, and then the helicopter took two turns before firing two more bursts. When survivors started swimming for the shore, the helicopter shot a flare to be able to see and find them again. Why didn’t they shoot the flare before firing? Lucio Nelson, who suffered various wounds to the back and arms, and Wilmer Lucas, who lost a hand in the attack, told me the same story from their hospital beds in La Ceiba. Darkness, noise, gunfire from the air, and then: light and water. Hilda, Lucio, and Wilmer had more luck than Tom Brooks, Celin’s cousin. Tom was killed, along with Emerson Martínez, Candelaria Trapp, and Juana Jackson. None of the survivors recall having seen the boat with the agents. The thundering of the helicopter rotors prevented
them from even hearing the gunshots. All of them confirm that nobody in the boat shot towards the helicopter, or was even armed.

  A few days later I went to see the pipante moored to the landing for repairs. I counted twenty bullet holes in the bottom and side walls of the boat. A few of the holes were big enough to fit two or three of my fingers through. Despite the fact that witnesses claimed the shots came from helicopters, according to the autopsies of the four murdered victims, the shots came from a level height, with entry and exit wounds along horizontal lines. According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, it was the American and two Honduran agents who were inside a boat who killed the victims while looking for the drug boat. The crucial question is: was it the Honduran agents or the American agent who fired the shots? American agents are not authorized to fire their weapons, except in a case of legitimate defense. And it seems there was no reason for self-defense in this case.

  IV. THE CONTEXT

  When the Army finds a narco-runway, it sends in the entire team from Tegucigalpa. Soldiers descend from helicopters, set the dynamite, and blow it all up. In response, the narcos return to fill in the holes, or, if the damage is more extensive, build another lane next to the old one. It’s quick and easy: with a simple tractor you can build a runway in less than twenty-four hours.

  In this back-and-forth war, the narcos always win. They have geography on their side, as well as the general poverty of the region. Plus, the police and Army lack basic resources.

  The mayor of Ahuas, Lucio Baquedano, has tried repeatedly to convince villagers not to help build runways close to their land. “But nobody listens to us,” he says, frustrated. “I can’t go against the people. They don’t have other job opportunities.”

  The man who housed and fed us during our stay in Ahuas, Gerald Rivera, said that the people of this area were poor and spent their days sitting around. He himself was poor, and spent his days sitting around. He explained that the little fieldwork available was only enough to keep from going hungry. The only other available job was diving for lobsters—dangerous work that many young people refused to do. There are fewer lobsters these days, and the scarcity requires divers to swim ever deeper. Plus, the lack of proper equipment and the hurry to resurface and pull in more lobsters per day has resulted in more incidents of decompression sickness. Divers are increasingly dying or becoming paralyzed. Understandably, many of them harbor resentment: “With half the price they pay for one of those helicopters, they could build a factory where we could work, and the problems in the villages would be solved.”

  The relation between poverty and falling in with the narcos is so obvious that even high-ranking police officers speak the language of community activism. This is exactly how Police Commissioner Bonilla talks about it. He can point to the problem as easily as the president can, or the colonel, or any village teenager can point to the problem. “There isn’t work, or sanitation, or education. These villagers have been abandoned by the state, which doesn’t have the resources to invest in them. With no state, someone else showed up and invested, offering a minimum wage for runway construction and unloading jobs. The narcos drop into these isolated villages and bring supplies, medicine, electric generators, and solar panels. If the state fulfilled this role, the Miskitos wouldn’t let the narcos in—they know it’s illegal and that sooner or later problems will arise. Plus, though the narcos may seem giving at first, later they resort to pressuring and threatening the villagers. The problem isn’t that they’re building runways. The problem is the narcos themselves, who are not in Moskitia, but in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, in Bogata, Caracas, and Miami. You better believe it.”

  Filiberto Pravia couldn’t stop laughing. He approaches life calmly and with a sense of humor, though the first impression he gives—pulling his shotgun out from underneath his black full-length trench coat—might make you a little nervous. He’s perfected the motion of revealing his shotgun in front of the mirror, studying Clint Eastwood’s movements in some of his old low-budget Westerns. Pravia is as unassuming (despite the gun) as he is caring and welcoming to guests. He was staying in the same hotel as the journalists, though who knows what kind of deal he had with the owner, who wasn’t charging him. He’s the chief of the three police officers who are headquartered in an adobe shack and charged to maintain law and order, armed with nothing but three pistols, one sawn-off shotgun, and thirty bullets. For transportation, they have to rely on rides from the mayor’s office. Pravia explained that nobody could really expect them to confront the groups of up to fifty heavily armed men that often guard a drug shipment. He doesn’t want to get involved in massacres, and when someone lets him know that narcos are passing through, the police simply shut themselves in and wait for the problem to go away. Commissioner Bonilla offers a depressing statistic: in a territory of 16,000 square kilometers with a population of 88,000, there are only sixty police officers, forty of whom are stationed in the state headquarters, in Puerto Lempira, with the other twenty spread out over all of Moskitia, equipped with neither boats nor cars.

  On the night in question, Filiberto heard the helicopters and went to the river to see what was going on. When he arrived, at dawn, he saw some of the villagers setting fire to the houses of people they claimed had organized the drug shipment. “What am I going to do to stop angry villagers armed with machetes and gasoline? I was lucky to escape.” Pravia offered the same Intel that Honduran Army and US DEA agents had—that the narco’s name was Renco.

  “Since the whole thing led back to ‘El Renco,’” Pravia said, “family and friends of the people who were murdered went to torch the houses of the narcos who started the whole problem.” But nobody had information about who, exactly, El Renco was. In Honduras, people keep their mouths shut when it comes to narcos. Somebody burned four houses. Who? The villagers. Why? “Because we’re fed up.” The only other answer they give is silence, or the conclusive: “They’ll finish me if I speak to you.” The burned houses will never be rebuilt. The village had asked them not to run shipments so close. But they didn’t listen. And problems arose. Popular justice was the only option. Journalism in narco zones is simple. It’s typically sufficient to cast a quick glance or to conduct an interview, being sure not to ask for too many names. Did the authorities know all this before four innocent civilians were murdered? Of course they did. The whole world knew it. Could they have avoided these deaths if they had a functioning state? Probably, yes.

  V. THE CONSEQUENCES

  The US government opened an internal investigation, but declined to release the helicopter video of the operation. Investigators never informed Honduran officials of the conclusions from the DEA report, or told them what weapons the US agents in the pipante were carrying. The only information journalists received from Washington was the repeated claim of self-defense, which superseded any question of motive: the agents were defending themselves against an aggression, and the DEA did not participate in the shootout. The guilt, of course, lay elsewhere. It was a classic defense.

  There was chatter for a few months. An investigation led by the Honduran Prosecutor’s Office, delegations of American human rights NGOs, press conferences, and articles in American newspapers scrutinizing every detail of that night. And, as always, there was a lot of gossip. The Human Rights groups claimed from the first day that two of the murdered women were pregnant. This added an extra element to the tragedy (not only civilians, but pregnant civilians) though it jeopardized their credibility as they weren’t able to prove that the women were pregnant. They persisted in their claims to the extent that, months later, two prosecutors and a forensic scientist took a US-funded helicopter flight to disinter the cadavers—which were already partially decomposed in the humid soil—to certify that there were no fetuses. That lie, or perhaps that truth that was impossible to verify, was enough for some to doubt the veracity of the entire story. I’ll never know if they were exaggerating or not, if they were lying or if it was true that the women were pregnant, but I have no do
ubt that the activists’ lack of precision, as well-intentioned as they may have been, did nothing to help. And still, the journalist who feels a duty to report only proven fact and to resist speculation becomes, in the eyes of human rights defenders, an agent of empire.

  Honduran prosecutors didn’t come through. Even though they wanted to (or they probably wanted to), they weren’t able to do a thing. Prosecutors asked their American counterparts for the interviews they conducted with the US agents involved in the operation. They never received them. They asked for a list of the weapons used in the shooting so that they could do a ballistic analysis and determine who fired the lethal shots. They never received the list. The prosecutors finally threw in the towel. They weren’t going to confront the governments of both Honduras and the US when officials from neither country were willing to work with them.

  More than delivering justice to the victims, Hondurans were worried about losing the economic and military support of their northern neighbor. The Leahy Law, named after Democratic Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, requires the US State Department to cancel aid packages destined for foreign military or police units if they’ve been shown to commit human rights violations. That’s to say, if US money is being used to kill Honduran civilians boating along a river, the aid should be suspended. This leads to the poor receiving country losing access to helicopters, military advisors, radar systems, and jet fuel.

  After the incident in Ahuas, Senator Leahy’s office asked for details about what had happened, and the Senator was not pleased with the responses. In order to continue with the military aid package it called for a public investigation and made a series of demands, which were never met. The principal demand—the first on the list—as well as the only one that didn’t have to do with an investigation, was to compensate the victims and recognize that they had been killed in error, a demand also made by the Honduran police commission, which had written a report about the incident. And yet: “Honduran authorities don’t want to offer an example or set a precedent,” Tim Rieser, Senator Leahy’s top aide, told me in Washington. Rieser and Leahy decided that Operation Anvil, which put the US advisors on helicopters, would not continue, and that was that. A few DEA agents lost their posts. No helicopter financed by the United States, at least not publicly financed, has participated in drug interdiction operations in La Mosquitia since.