Blood Barrios Read online

  After the massacre in Ahuas and the suspension of Operation Anvil, Honduras dusted off an old “pragmatic” idea that the Army and the political class had long been interested in: shoot down the narco planes. It is illegal according to international law, so as a consequence of the strategic shift, the US also canceled its radar technology program, which it had been sharing with Honduran intelligence. The results were disastrous: in 2011 Honduran Army and police forces decommissioned about twenty tons of cocaine; the number dropped to six tons in 2012, and only two tons in 2013.

  The Honduran government not only refused to back down from its strategy of shooting down planes, they actually turned it into a law. In 2014 Parliament legally sanctioned the shooting down of unapproved non-military aircraft flying in La Mosquitia by night. “Honduras maintains the right to defend its sovereignty, and it is Honduran law that should apply, not US law,” the president and his security ministers explained to me one morning. Assuming that the moment they actually do shoot down a plane the US would refuse, once again, to share radar information with Honduras, the government decided to spend $25 million to purchase new radar equipment from Israel.

  Gabriel García Márquez, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “The Solitude of Latin America,” said: “The immeasurable violence and pain in our history are the result of long-simmering injustices and untold bitterness, not a conspiracy plotted 3,000 leagues from our home.”

  PART III

  HOUSES, COFFINS, AND GRAFFITI

  8

  REFUGEE CAMP

  Alejandro Durón is not a taxi driver, he isn’t a jungle-dwelling indigenous man, or a maquila assembly-line worker in the conflict-ridden suburbs of San Pedro Sula. He’s a thirty-four-year-old systems analyst with whom I often go to happy hour after an outing at Tegucigalpa’s Spanish Cultural Center. Over drinks one afternoon, Alejandro told me how he’d recently come home to find an envelope stuck under his door. It demanded a payment of 50,000 lempiras (about $2,500). In the note, the extortionists described Alejandro’s routines. They’d been watching him. “If you don’t pay, they can kill you,” Alejandro said without hesitation. If you pay once, they’ll never leave you in peace.

  The day he found the envelope, Alejandro and his partner, Helen, decided they wouldn’t go home. They slept elsewhere and asked a neighbor to feed their dog. They didn’t return to their home for a week, and then only for a few hours, to pick up their things. Then they left behind their house—the invested savings, the mortgage, the plans, the room for the baby they didn’t yet have, the room where they kept their movie and book collections, their work and the memories of a lifetime together—for the rental home they’ve lived in ever since. Of course, they never reported the incident. “Why should we?,” Helen asked herself. “To risk bumping into our extortionist at the police station?”

  Alejandro and Helen’s situation is not exceptional. When I started to ask around, I discovered that many people knew someone who had gone through something similar.

  Cecilia, who works for an international organization in Tegucigalpa, told me that in the space of less than a month she’d received a phone call at work and two more calls at her house demanding money. They knew the ins and outs of her morning and evening routines. She changed her phone numbers and tried to forget about the problem. Nothing happened to her. But for many months she walked around the city full of anxiety. A Spanish neighbor decided to go back to his home after getting one such call. A pharmacist friend asked an NGO for help in dealing with an extortionist gang member. She had to pay her extortion in favors: she’d been a police officer in the past and still had a lot of connections with the police—connections that helped her get an inmate gang member released. Some pay in blood. Others flee.

  We’re all potential victims in a country where victimization is the rule instead of the exception. Telephonic extortion in the capital with the highest homicide rate in the world is something almost no one can escape; the folded piece of paper under the door is all the more terrifying because it implies physical proximity. Sometimes it’s a jailed gang member that commits these extortions. One only needs to look through the phone book and call at random. The method of trial and error works—a matter of probability. There’s always someone who will get scared and pay. The extortionists can also be neighbors, co-workers, offended friends, all of them with valuable information about the victim. Those who’ve recently inherited or sold property, those with a family member abroad who sends remittances, those who work for an international organization and get paid in dollars—all are potential prey to a gangster trying to score an easy buck. To the list of possible extortionists we should add the police. If an inmate can extort from jail, what couldn’t a police officer do—an armed officer with access to valuable information?

  Helen and Alejandro are political activists, hardened by their resistance to the coup d’état, and, as such, they’re used to threats and tension. Unlike the great majority of Hondurans who remain silent, they decided to tell their story on the record. They speak in order to resist. Every year there are fewer people who remember the Tegucigalpa from before the Reign of Hell. Remembering “the good times” is important to them. Alejandro remembers how eight years ago, when he needed to make a decision about something important, he’d go out for a walk or get on a bus and meander through the city for an entire afternoon. Now he doesn’t walk. It’s been eight years since he’s walked about the city or has intermingled beyond what he calls his “circle of confidence.” In Honduras the concept of community no longer exists, not beyond certain circles that are very private, familial, or work-centered, in which everyone knows each other. This dynamic exacerbates a societal alienation and fragmentation where social groups are increasingly shrinking, paranoid, and irremediably disconnected from one another. In Honduras your words, attitudes and answers are weighed against the fear that someone else may see or hear you. Because of a reckless celebration at a café, a loud toast over someone’s promotion, or a secret told to a co-worker, life can unfold into a nightmare.

  The problems in Honduras are micro and macro, come from the left and the right, attack from afar and nearby, affect the poor and the middle class. In a well-oiled state one is taught to see taxes as a foul-tasting medicine: they make one gag, but they cure the illness. Every month we put money into the communal pot so that, sooner or later, we can pull from it when we need to go to the hospital or college. In Honduras, however, the great collector is not the state, but the extortionist. Violence is born out of the intense competition for that pot of money.

  As usual, following a professional protocol created many years ago and many kilometers away from Tegucigalpa, I went to talk with the police. As if a corrupt and dysfunctional police officer could ever be a credible source.

  * * *

  To get to the public relations office of the police headquarters of Tegucigalpa you need to enter through a door that looks like it will lead you into a corner store. Through the door are willing, smiling, and approachable officers who serve clients with the hospitality that is so abundant in administrative offices in Honduras, and which is so hard to penetrate without compromising your dignity. Public relations liaison Ana Velasquez sat in the building’s lobby amidst an arrangement of family portraits, plastic flowers, and porcelain kittens—all of them perfectly arranged around her. It’s nothing more than a passé, 1970s-style foyer for the department of propaganda. Honduras hasn’t yet upgraded its communication gurus and PR specialists to model 2.0.

  In offices such as these a foreign journalist is like exotic game. A few phrases— “I’m a reporter for …,” or “I’m from …”—are enough for all the doors to open and all the office priorities to realign. For them, the bourgeois foreign journalist is the ideal spokesperson to whitewash their image. They’re anxious to break the isolating seal of antipathy separating them from the society they promise to protect.

  “What can I help you with?”

  “Well, you see, I’m working on an article
about people who have to leave their homes because of gang extortion and I’d like to…”

  “You couldn’t have come at a better time.”

  I’m not even able to finish my sentence. My accent and the mere mention of a foreign publisher have propelled the PR liaison to call her boss, Chief of Police Harold Bonilla, and arrange an interview immediately.

  “The chief is waiting for you, follow me.”

  “But I don’t want to inconvenience anyone, I just want to…”

  Before realizing it, I enter a modest and practical office, the office of a man of order—a military officer. A room with four men sitting, drinking iced tea, and passing the time until they’re interrupted by an unexpected guest. They solicitously stand to welcome me. I feel uneasy. This, I realize, will not be an interview.

  The first thing to come out of the huge mouth of the tiny chief of police is a blue dental retainer that eliminates any remaining aura of gravity. Tegucigalpa’s chief of police, aside from fighting gangs and organized crime, is correcting his bite. I don’t dare ask him if it’s for aesthetics. At his side is the ever simpatico Detective Barahona, head of the community and neighborhood policing program, one of those subordinates who endlessly parrots the words of his boss. Barahona is a morbidly obese man who struggles to get up off the sofa and to whom, of course, I don’t dare say it’s unnecessary to do so.

  Over the next hour Bonilla will repeatedly refer to the other two men in the room as “representatives of the private sector.” And just as many times, he will reiterate that the police, lacking funds, cannot lower the city’s rate of violence without their economic contributions. They work for Lafisse Bank and the private security company SGS. I decide not to ask them their names or exchange cards so as not to discomfit them more than I already have with my impromptu visit.

  Just like his PR liaison, Police Chief Bonilla doesn’t let me explain what I’m looking for. You might call me a captive journalist—temporarily held captive from reality. But, I tell myself, I should be able to glean something useful from the meeting. I know they’re not interested in answering my questions about people abandoning their houses because of gang extortion.

  The chief of police morphs into a true politician, answering all my questions with thorough euphemism: “Violence shouldn’t only be studied through its manifestations, but also in a holistic manner, and this is why we’re trying to change the culture of the country. This is what we want to show you.” I begin to see their true colors: they’re going to use PowerPoint as a shield and refuse to answer any questions. Doubtless pleased with my captivity, Bonilla goes overboard, unlike his visitors, and calls for more drinks, as well as a projector. What was going to be an informal chat with a public official and his financiers has turned into—after a hard-fought battle untangling the computer cables—a long and boring slideshow presentation. There’s no way to escape. I remain trapped until the end of the spectacle.

  For Bonilla, the solution to violence is, as he calls it, “holistic focus”: getting leaders of various neighborhoods to meet with the police in order to break the ice and convince them of the great gains of collaboration and community work. Meetings that, of course, cost money, money that the police force doesn’t have and that the private sector should provide so that security can thrive in Tegucigalpa.

  Detective Barahona, far from an expert in the fight against gangs—the police force’s most obscure (and failing) battle on the face of this continent—explains that recovering houses occupied by gang members “is just part of the operation, the easiest part, accomplished by sending a large group of agents to those areas.” They’re called operations of saturation. The police arrive in full force at the scene, wailing their sirens. But they arrive too late, allowing the “Banderas,” the kids who keep a lookout, to flee in every direction and warn their big brothers: “The cops are here. The cops are here.” The agents stay out of trouble by affording the gang members a few minutes to flee. They never catch anybody; at most they’ll seize a token AK-47 to show the press. They bother the neighborhood for a couple of hours, putting all the youngsters against a wall and slapping them around in vain, breaking down a couple of wooden doors, turning over a couple of houses. They’ll call the press over once the scene has been prepped, and then they’re off.

  In any case, the real work, the work that actually brings peace to a neighborhood, happens through collaboration with neighbors, or, in PowerPoint lingo, by making alliances with the community. Bonilla and Barahona say they’re responsible for the fact that, in 2011, the Barrio 18 gang abandoned 400 occupied houses in the neighborhood of Planeta in San Pedro Sula.

  As proof, they show photos, “from a USB we seized from a gangster.” In the photos you can see gang members posing in front of huge murals full of letters and snakes, armed with AK-47s, Galils, and mini Uzis, photos of abandoned houses, shuttered businesses, and of what they call the slaughterhouse: a room full of blood, strewn clothes—where they executed their victims. To underscore this important police success, they show me photos of Barahona posing in the same locations, now liberated, with the ease and relaxed good-naturedness with which he’d pose in front of the Tower of Pisa or the Egyptian pyramids.

  The officers point out the graffiti. The gang had swapped the gothic 18s they would tag everywhere to claim their territory for huge peaceful landscape murals and biblical messages. “It turns out the only murals they won’t destroy are those inspired by the Lord,” they explain. “This always works. They’ll fight the police but don’t dare fight God.” Bonilla attributes everything to the hand of God. A flag of Israel hangs over his office and another waves in the background of his Blackberry screen. He’s part of one of those evangelical sects that have overtaken the area and respond to every situation by urging victims to kneel with their arms reaching up to the heavens, palms up, their faces in a trance as they sing terrible songs. Maybe that’s why they always have that dreamy smile on their faces.

  But the mural that glorifies God and paints the police as His intermediary on Earth, of course, costs money. The food and refreshments offered at the community meeting they’ve called for the following Sunday in the Buenos Aires neighborhood, of course, cost money. Money the police don’t have. That’s why the private sector, which has applauded the presentation, has come to collaborate with the police.

  As people begin to fidget with their iPhones, and WhatsApp messages begin to flash, the presentation spikes to a climax. Ana Velasquez procures a camera from her purse. The chief of police stretches his flag of Israel over the table so that it’s visible, and everyone willingly gets up to pose for a picture. But, of course, not without first catching me in their trap.

  “Mr. Journalist, your presence here is a great opportunity for you to attest to this very important moment. Come closer and give witness,” the chief of police tells me.

  “You know I really shouldn’t, Chief. This is well beyond my job description.”

  “Don’t worry, you’re among men of faith. Everything here is by the book and we work under the name of God. And anyway, you’re already a part of this divine project. You’re now one of us.”

  Embarrassed, lowering my face and covering it with my notebook as much as possible, I pretend I’m writing, though in reality I’m hiding so that no one will identify me in the paper tomorrow. The worst thing is not that the private sector has given a token of support—a bundle of 500-lempira bills, without any receipt or documentation—to the chief of police of Tegucigalpa. Nor that the chief claims, as he sticks the wad of bills in his pocket, that the Church will oversee the proper use of this donation. The worst thing by far is that this picture could wind up all over the Honduran press tomorrow, making me a participant in this shady business.

  Once the private sector has left, I feign ignorance and simply go on with my work. I want to know if they can get me access to a neighborhood where gangs are occupying houses. I try to convince them to let me go to their Sunday meeting; that I’d like to enjoy the sodas
and empanadas they’ll no doubt purchase with those fifteen 500-lempira notes now wedged into the pocket of the chief of police of Tegucigalpa.

  “On Sunday, in the neighborhood of Buenos Aires, we’ll put out an urn in which neighbors can leave anonymous notes telling us what they never dare officially report. And I’ll find you someone willing to talk; there’s always someone, don’t worry. You can count on me.”

  Bonilla and Barahona proceed to “Thank God for the miracle of their new ally.” Bonilla grabs me by the hand, Barahona grabs my other hand, and together we form a celestial triangle. Bonilla improvises a prayer thanking God for a journalist willing to collaborate with him on this project. Every two or three phrases, Barahona lets go of his boss’ hand and elevates it to the sky like a reveler at a gospel concert, whispering, “Help us, Lord.”

  It seems the doors to the police mentality have been opened for me, the only thing is that I’m not sure anyone has turned the lights on.

  Days later, the community meeting—financed in cash by the private sector under the nose of a journalist—has still not taken place. The meeting was to be held at nine on a Sunday morning at the police station of a neighborhood Tegucigalpa. After waiting around a few hours that Sunday, I gave up. The district agents had never heard of any meeting; nor had the neighbors. No one showed.