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  Willmer López Irías was the prison director during the fire. He’d been transferred from Gracias Prison after a group of inmates were discovered constructing a tunnel. With the help of a prosecutor, I found that the director used inmate labor to make money for himself. He’d been profiting before the fire and he was likely going to continue profiting in his new post after the fire. He was never convicted of graft or for letting men under his care burn alive.

  None of the guards who fled faced any charges either. “If the fire spread in seven minutes, acting with due diligence wouldn’t have changed a thing,” the prosecutor in charge of the case told me in an exculpatory tone. He defended the guards on the basis of “insuperable fear,” exempting them of all responsibility. At the end of the day, you can’t demand that any one person be a hero.

  The ombudsman has another explanation for the lack of charges: “Authorities who commit crimes are protected by other authorities in a powerful network so sophisticated that it guarantees impunity—through a continued, studied, and professional negligence—to anybody in uniform.”

  * * *

  The media didn’t pay much attention to the intricacies of the investigation, nor did they spend time grilling officials in charge. They preferred to concentrate their efforts on fulfilling readers’ desires and printing juicy headlines based on the rumors floating around. It’s more exciting to whip up conspiratorial intrigue than to lose yourself in the aridity of judicial process, which, at any rate, could never compete with the demand of dramatic coverage.

  A few days after the fire, two men who preferred to stay anonymous called a television station and made the following claim: the fire was started by the enemies of a Spanish businessman who was serving time in prison and beset by debt and problems with women. Someone had paid to make the fire look like an accident and get him off their hands. The story spread like a plague in both the Honduran and international press. It’s not always necessary to verify facts when every outlet is competing for the same story, when something new needs to be added every day to make sure the story keeps its legs. The logical antidote to the conspiracy theory was deceptively simple: if somebody wanted to kill an inmate, the easiest and tidiest way to do so would have been to hire somebody. A shiv to the throat instead of a fire with hundreds of victims.

  A year later I was part of a workshop with other Honduran journalists. In asking them what happened in the Comayagua prison, the most commonly cited explanation for the fire was a settling of accounts.

  * * *

  To understand the failures in the Honduran penitentiary system I needed to see a prison for myself. Without obtaining official permission, I was able to land an interview with the deputy director, Captain Polanco, of the San Pedro Sula prison. It’s not that the interview was possible because of my insistence; it was due, rather, to the authorities’ lack of interest. Upon receiving us, Captain Polanco was more preoccupied with the inmates washing his car in the prison courtyard than in the questions coming from any journalist.

  On the day I visited, the San Pedro prison—built to house 800 inmates—had a total population of 2,137. Prison guards only provide external security in San Pedro. Starting at the “line of death” (a yellow line marked on the floor a few meters inside the entrance), it’s the inmates who run the operation. The guards have only one security protocol in case of a riot—and they’ve had a number of opportunities to implement this protocol: to back away, grab their weapons, open the doors, and take aim at the interior.

  “They know that if they cross the line, we’ll kill them,” Polanco told me as he chuckled and dug into a box of two dozen Dunkin Donuts (which—like a bad joke told too many times—I always find in police and guard stations). Polanco reminded me of a sad clown on a soapbox: spontaneously and without euphemisms rattling off tragic story after tragic story. The complete lack of consequences Honduran officials face is so deeply institutionalized that many public officials don’t hesitate to speak openly about the filth and corruption clogging the system: the pornography of dysfunction laid bare for the enjoyment of the journalist.

  In San Pedro, through a huge rusted metal door that you could probably knock down with a few kicks, you enter into a small, boisterous, and practically autonomous city. This is where an inmate-elected coordinator bestows privileges on the population through a payment system known as “the snake.” The worst bunks cost about 1,000 lempiras (fifty dollars); sleeping in a cleaner, safer cell can cost as much as 15,000 lempiras ($750). Those who can’t pay have to sleep on the floor and do the worst jobs, typically cleaning. Everything has a price: AC repair, beer (which costs three times what it costs on the street), spending a night with a woman, a few lines of cocaine, a joint, a 3G iPhone, or a bottle of rum. Everything has a price and generates some benefit that is proportionally shared between those offering the service, the owners of the business, and, of course, the prison officials, who, as Polanco told me, “contribute their earnings to maintenance and better food.”

  Housed together with the inmates, sometimes even inside their cells, are raccoons, dogs, chickens, and pigs, plus huge piles of garbage, creeks of black water, as well as fruit and food stands, and shops to buy drinks, shirts, hammocks, shoes, and carpets—all staffed by inmates and by the twenty-nine private employees who enter into the prison every day to work.

  This small city, with its captive population, generates a substantial economic surplus. In its shadows a group of “small-time businessmen” has cropped up. Jorge Gutiérrez runs one of the restaurants in the prison, which is clean, well-built, and has a menu that compares with any restaurant on the street (“designed,” according to Gutiérrez, “by a friend who knows about that kind of thing”). Like many of his fellow inmates, he has no desire to be transferred to another prison, which would result in him losing all of his privileges. Gutiérrez pays 480 lempiras a month (about twenty-five dollars) as a tax to prison officials, and he employs two inmates as his waiting staff. “Each of them makes 400 lempiras a month, or about twenty dollars … and, besides generating employment, I make enough to maintain my family on the outside.” When he’s released, he can either sell the restaurant to another inmate, or rent it out from his home.

  It’s difficult to feel totally against the current set-up. Without this kind of organizing, the inmates wouldn’t survive. “For food, the state allots thirteen lempiras per inmate per diem (about sixty cents). With so little money they’d die of hunger, so I need to figure out how to supplement their diet,” Hugo Hernández, a prison administrator, tells me. Like Polanco, Hernández feels secure enough in what he’s doing to show us his Excel spreadsheets.

  With an annual budget of $18.5 million for twenty-four prisons with capacity for 8,000 inmates, the Honduran penitentiary system actually holds a population of nearly 12,000 inmates, according to statistics provided by the Security Ministry. There is nothing in the budget for facility maintenance, let alone improvement. The only two objectives seem to be that the exterior walls remain standing and that famine doesn’t get even worse. The assistant secretary of the Security Ministry, Marcela Castañeda, admitted that eighty-two percent of the budget goes to paying the guards’ salary and sixteen percent goes to food. According to Castañeda, “Only two percent is invested in structural improvement.” Hernández, the San Pedro administrator, provides slightly different statistics. He asserts that the only money that goes to facility maintenance comes from the taxes collected from the businesses inmates run inside the prison. Is it corruption or survival? The total amount, which Hernández estimates as “about 120,000 lempiras a month [around $6,000] pays for facility maintenance, gasoline to transfer inmates to the hospital or to court, and extra food.” And, somehow, despite the circumstances, Hugo Hernández makes it work. After he was transferred to a new post at the Finance Ministry, he was called “back to the prison at the inmates’ request, because they know that I treat them right.”

  The whole system hangs in a delicate equilibrium based on a pact of “no
naggression” and respect between guards and inmates—keeping in check the high potential for violence. Odalis Nájera, the director of the prisons’ human rights monitoring body, explains that the last riot in the San Pedro prison just a few weeks after the fire in Comayagua, in which thirteen inmates were killed, was the result of a spike in prices for basic services.

  Noe Betancourt, the inmate coordinator in San Pedro Sula, remembers well what happened on the day of the riot, but he prefers not to recount the details. Surrounded by his bodyguards, he walks in the courtyard holding hands with his girlfriend, who’s decided to stay and live with him inside the prison. One of the bodyguards, less reserved than the others (and rather morbid, or maybe just trying to test how much I can stomach) describes the riot:

  “The last coordinator was too abusive. At first he would beat people with a bull’s penis if they stepped out of line or didn’t pay. By the end, he would leave someone hanging from a roof all night, setting a dog to bite at their feet. On the day of the riot, people got together and chopped his head off with a machete, and then they carved his heart out, cut off his testicles, and gave them to the dog to eat. They put the bodies of the fallen coordinator and his bodyguards into a cell, jammed in a few mattresses, and set it on fire.

  “For three weeks, in an agreement with authorities, inmates maintained complete control of the prison. They didn’t give up their weapons or even let firefighters into the prison to investigate the cause of the fire. Since then, inmates have been given bolt cutters to be able to open their cells in case of another fire. They even have access to keys to open the exterior doors, and they’ve purchased fire extinguishers with their own money. The only reason they don’t leave is because they don’t want to.”

  Fernando Ceguera, the inmate electrician who manages the facilities, shows me one of the twelve transformers that distribute energy throughout the interior of the prison. “It’s been losing oil for days and is completely saturated with twenty lines feeding into the biggest cell. It could blow any minute.” The electrician says that he read in the news that the governor is considering the possibility of constructing a new prison with all-metal cells. “Make sure to write that those cells are meant for animals, and if they transfer us we’re going to set fire to everything and sell the scraps for junk.” The inmates, according to the coordinator, have plans of their own: “We’re already working on the designs and calculating material prices to build new cells in the compound, adding another floor to the church and the eating hall. This way, if we do it ourselves, with just $10,000, we can expand the capacity of the compound by 500 inmates in just three months.”

  Meanwhile, in Comayagua, one year after the tragedy, the prison’s expired fire extinguishers haven’t been replaced. There’s little that the police detective, Dani Rodríguez, who was named new director of the prison the day after the fire, can do. “The state allocated 180,000 lempiras for me [$9,000]. By selling the burned metal we were able to raise another 32,000 [about $1,500]. And organizers of a telethon, in solidarity with inmates, handed over a giant plastic check that they used in a photo-op, but the actual money hasn’t come in yet.”

  PART IV

  THE POLICE

  12

  AN ASSASSIN

  His name is J.E., and he’s forty-one years old. He shows me his ID and his credentials, dated 20 March 2009, from the Anti-Kidnapping Police Unit. Seated in a plastic chair, chain-smoking, he refuses the coffee I offer him. Though no longer young, his arms, chest, and hands have that powerful and hardened look that comes from a childhood working in the fields—so different from strength developed in a gym. He’s evasive, and doesn’t meet my eyes. When he pauses, he doesn’t do so to intimidate, but to think. He speaks very little, and in a soft voice. It’s hard to draw him out, to get him to respond in anything but monosyllables. He says it would take entire days to relate just the smallest piece of what he’s seen and done. He speaks with a certain coldness. He is never, he explains, without his pistol. He shows me the scars of three bullet wounds on his right arm. To keep a low profile, he doesn’t take off his hat. He’s wearing a button-down green-checkered shirt over a blue t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. He isn’t ashamed about, nor does he try to hide, the nature of his work. If he’s decided to tell what he’s seen it’s not in order to clear his conscience, but because he feels that he’s been fooled, used, and mistreated by his superiors. His story is believable, but impossible to verify. Someone had him take a polygraph test and concluded that there were inconsistencies in his story. Which is why they decided not to name the people he is accusing. He wants to leave the country and come out of hiding. And yet here he remains.

  “I joined the police in 1993 after leaving the Army Reserve. At first I was on regular patrol, and then was transferred to Cobra Squadron [a special operations unit], and from there I was assigned to intelligence analysis at the National Criminal Investigation Unit. I did detective work, surveillance, stakeouts, and even took photos. The majority of the investigations were focused on people involved in the drug trade. In 2006 I voluntarily left the police. They didn’t want to sign my release, and they said that I abandoned them. I handed over everything that wasn’t mine: my weapon, badge, and uniform, and I left for good in 2007.

  “Months later, in early December, 2007, I met a former deputy, now the sub-commissioner of the police, in the restaurant of a hotel. We’d worked together before on a few investigations. We knew each other through work, and also because we were both from the same city. He tells me he needs weapons and men for a crew in San Pedro Sula, since there’s so many kidnappings there, and, from the first day, before starting, he’s already talking to me about a kidnapping in La Ceiba that happened three months before and hasn’t been solved, and he says we’re going to get right into that case.

  “It was up to him to find the jobs, as well as bring together the men who could finish the jobs. In San Pedro Sula, everything’s fucked. They reached out to three of us who, at that time, didn’t have anything to do with the police, but we had the right background. They took me to an office away from the station called ‘Northwest Analysis Group,’ a little-used office in a region where nobody was doing analysis, and there were about twenty of us in there. The office was in the Trejo neighborhood of San Pedro Sula, two blocks down from the City Mall. It was a big house, with nothing to identify it. Nobody was in uniform, no patrol cars, everybody undercover. Three of us were contracted from outside the police force. We weren’t even on their rosters. They gave us unregistered guns and offered $500 a month, plus food and housing. The twenty of us lived together. My nom de guerre was Óscar. We wrote up everybody’s nom de guerre on the chalkboard. The same deputy who reached out to me was the man in charge. After the house in the Trejo they took us to a house in Río de Piedras, and then to another in San José. I can show you these places. You put Luminol on the floors of these places and you’ll find a sea of blood. In some way or another, the people paying us had all suffered from kidnappings. They didn’t know who else to go to.

  “Right away there was a high-profile kidnapping that we started on, but we didn’t charge more than our usual salary because they killed the victim that same month, December 2007. In that first case about ten people involved with the kidnapping were disappeared. In the first months it became clear how it worked: kidnapper taken, kidnapper eliminated. The policy was that we exterminated the kidnappers. If a raid was legal, we presented those arrested, along with evidence, to the Public Ministry, but only about every ten in a hundred cases were legal. Other times we would detain four, eliminate three, and present [to the Public Ministry] one. When we raided for an arrest we went alone, just our crew; we took the subjects and then we called the regular police and the Cobras Squad to make it look legit, but we rarely worked directly with them. We almost always went it alone. Almost nobody was brought to justice. Any prosecutor could have caught us. We asked for raid orders and wiped cellphones. It would have been easy to guess what we were up to, figure out what
was going on when so many bodies kept showing up. Two bright prosecutors caught on to us that first year. There were definitely more raids without an order than with an order, but you only needed to check the names of those showing up dead and the names on the raid requests and you’d figure it all out.

  “About three months in they gave me a contract with the secretary of security. They paid me $300 a month there. Every six months they renewed the contract. We always got a monthly bonus, too, some money to split between all of us, an incentive, I don’t know where it came from.

  “We had to get everything out of that first kidnapper, info about the gang, how many there were, where the others were, and where they kept the money. Everybody talks when they’re tortured, that’s for sure. We improvised, usually starting with the tortoise: arms pulled back, legs pulled back, tied up from behind—that’s how it usually went—roped up to the ceiling so they’re just hanging there. After an hour they can’t move a single muscle. You beat them with what you have, with your fists, with pipes, with chains. People don’t get out of there alive. If you get tied up and tortured, you don’t live. We fed them while they stayed with us, but they didn’t come out alive. At first we shot them, but there was too much blood, and it was too loud. Then we used a bag over the head, cinching the neck with a cord, or without a cord, and in two minutes, just like that, they peed themselves, defecated, and were dead. We didn’t torture them for too long in there. Fifteen days at the most, and then we threw them in the river tied to a block so they would sink. We weren’t careful enough once, and somebody escaped when we were taking them to be executed. He got away and then we made threats for him to retract what he’d said about us. He’d filed a complaint to the Criminal Investigation Unit, but we had infiltrators in that office, and they let us know. We would have up to four of them at once in the same room, but as they were blindfolded and handcuffed, they didn’t know what else was in the room. Four of the houses were in San Pedro Sula. But we didn’t use them all at once, just one at a time, on rotation.