by Levison Wood
‘What is this place?’ said Alberto, as we walked past the footballers and into the black doorway of the house. There was broken glass all over the floor and smashed tiles and bits of burnt wood were everywhere. Weeds grew in the cracks of the bricks and the whole interior smelled of piss.
‘It’s a Casa Loca,’ whispered Daniel. ‘A crazy house.’
My heart sank. Surely not. After all that, was Daniel about to unleash the fury of the gangs on us and string us up by our wrists and clobber us around our testicles until we died?
He clearly noted the shudder down my spine and chuckled.
‘Don’t worry, I just want to show you the place so you don’t think I’m making it up. It is important people know how terrible the situation here is so that the government will do something about it. With education and help, these kids wouldn’t need to join a gang. Go inside and have a look.’
I took a step and heard the crunch of glass underfoot. I shone the light from my phone against the walls. There was Barrio 18 graffiti all over them. Spiders’ webs filled the corridors and there was an overwhelming smell of urine. I followed the warren of empty rooms that were linked in the pitch black. There was no electricity in here, only dangling wires from the sockets.
‘Lev,’ whispered Alberto, in the dark, ‘look at this.’
I walked over to where I could hear his voice and shined my light against the wall. It was pockmarked with bullet holes.
‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ he said. But as we turned a corner, trying to find a way out of this house of horrors, I felt Alberto recoil with terror. There was the sudden and overwhelming stench of death. I’ve smelt it before, I knew it could be nothing else. I lifted my phone as quick as I could and there, in the corner of a room, was a rope dangling from the ceiling. I lowered the phone light and to my disgust saw the figure of a dead dog hanging by its neck.
Alberto put his hand to his nose, trying not to vomit.
‘What the fuck?’
Behind it was a message to the Mara not to mess with Barrio 18.
You will die like dogs.
I felt sick. ‘Let’s go,’ I said again to Alberto.
Daniel was waiting outside and a pick-up truck had appeared. It was Daniel’s and it was time for him to get back to his side of the border. It was dusk now, and this was no place to be hanging around. I thanked Daniel for helping us though Rivera Hernandez and we shook hands before he got into the car. I noticed that the driver’s door had a bullet hole in it.
‘It’s a nine millimetre,’ said Alberto. ‘Who shot you?’
Daniel, still smiling, shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know.’ ‘It’s a dangerous business being a pastor round here,’ was all I could reply.
I wished him luck in his crusade against the gang wars and we left the Barrios behind, glad to have made it out of the place safe and in one piece.
13
The Ascent
The next morning we made our way past a great swathe of sugarcane plantations that filled the flat expanse of the San Pedro Sula valley south of the city for as far as the eye could see. We walked along the main highway towards El Progreso, and then south along a smaller road passing by a village called San Manuel.
‘Yesterday was pretty intense,’ said Alberto, wiping the sweat from his brow as we plodded along a country lane. Fields rolled away on either side and we both felt glad to be back in the countryside.
‘You’re not wrong,’ I replied. ‘I’m just glad that we were in Daniel’s safe hands. I feel like he showed us just enough to scare us, but not quite the whole story.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Alberto.
‘I mean, since we warned off the gang bosses that we were coming, it felt a bit sterilised, like we didn’t get the big picture. I don’t know, it was just a hunch.’
Perhaps I’d spent too much time in war zones, but having walked through San Pedro Sula, supposedly one of the most dangerous cities in the world, and to have come out without having seen a shot fired, well, it came as a relief, but also left the nagging feeling that we’d only scratched the surface. A masochistic part of me wanted to stay and talk with more gangsters and find out what life was really like.
That was the hard part of these expeditions: no sooner had you arrived than you must leave again. You meet amazing people and build connections, and then before you’ve even discovered a fraction of their story, you have to carry on. With such a long journey, you simply can’t hang about, otherwise you’d never get there. The journalist and explorer inside me wanted to stay, to better understand the torment and motivation behind these tragic people, and to get to grips with why violence plays such an important part of their lives. The adventurer in me wanted to push the boundaries, and embed myself on the frontline of this unseen war. But then the realistic, sensible part of me said that we should be grateful for what we had got and be glad that we were sufficiently removed to be able to walk away.
‘Be careful what you wish for,’ Alberto raised his eyebrows.
‘I know, I know. We were lucky that nothing bad did happen, let’s keep our fingers crossed it stays that way. I feel like yesterday has prepared us for the rest of the journey. Nowhere else we go can be that bad, surely?’
But of course, things always happen in the places you’re least expecting them. We’d come to the end of the village and found ourselves in a beautiful lane. Cows munched away on the long grass in the meadows and we were looking forward to seeing the positive side of Honduras, when all of a sudden I noticed a crowd up ahead. Figures seemed to be milling around, loitering under trees. Some of the men were smoking cigarettes and the women were hugging children. As we got closer, I noticed that a part of the track had been taped off with yellow police tape.
The crowd ignored us. They were all looking at what lay beyond. There, at the bottom of a wooden fence, lay a dead body.
It was motionless, covered in a bloodstained jacket and swarming with flies. The man was face down, but I could just make out that it was a man by the short curly hair and the size of a foot protruding from a trouser leg.
I’d seen dead bodies before, of course, and it’s never pleasant. They always assume a position that only the dead can manage. It’s the awkward, uncomfortable angles; the terrifying stillness and the smell. But there was something about this one in particular that was altogether more gruesome. Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of a corpse lying against such a panorama of beauty, or simply the knowledge that the man had been murdered, killed in cold blood.
‘Who is he?’ I asked a waiting policeman. He shrugged his shoulders in disinterest. I almost forgot; for him this was nothing new. He probably came across a couple of murders every night. I looked around to see whom I could ask. Most of the crowd were youngsters, apparently unmoved by the sight of the cadaver. Some were even taking photos on their phones. But there was one old lady who did look moved. She stood there, gripping onto an umbrella, just staring at the body.
I asked her name.
‘Maria Teodora Pavon,’ came the reply. She wiped away a tear. She looked ancient, a lady of seventy-six, but could have easily been a hundred.
The body was that of her son.
‘What happened?’ I asked the poor woman.
‘Who knows?’ came her response. ‘He liked to steal.’
‘He was a robber?’ asked Alberto.
‘Yes. He’d broken into this property before, and they’d shot at him. Last time he escaped, but now he is dead. I’m ashamed of him. He deserved it.’
I looked at Alberto as Maria shook her head and closed her eyes. They aren’t the words you’d expect to come from the mouth of a mother.
‘He tried to kill me before.’ She grasped at my arm, and stared at me with piercing eyes. ‘He threw a pan of boiling water at me once. And then he hit me with a machete. No, no. He deserved to die, and I’m not surprised.’
‘What was his name?’ I asked.
She grimaced as if it was painful to say. ‘Alfon
so Pavon.’
I didn’t know what to do except put a hand on her shoulder and offer her my condolences. It seemed a futile gesture. She was angry and bereaved and full of disappointment.
‘I just want his body back so I can bury him and forget it.’
She walked off into the crowd, alone, muttering to herself about what shame he had caused. Alberto stared at the body.
‘This place is full of horror. It’s tough, life here is tough.’
What more could either of us say? Death is so commonplace here as to be almost insignificant. Life is indeed tough, and cheap, too. Just as more police arrived, we left and carried on, leaving the crime scene behind.
The road began to climb up into wild forest as we left the towns and villages behind. The country grew more beautiful by the day, and before long we were following the spectacular ridgelines of the central Honduran highlands. Up here, the landscape was stark and powerful; Caribbean pine trees silhouetted against a brooding sky that warned of forthcoming rains. The only people we’d see were occasional farmers, eking out a living from plantain, and a few old merchants selling weird-looking fruits from the roadsides. We met one character who had attempted a new life in the United States, only to be deported after thirteen years.
‘I was living in Minnesota,’ said Enrique. ‘That’s where I learnt my English.’
He stood proudly, wielding a large machete that he’d been using to cut vegetation from the roadside.
‘I was there for thirteen years, but I got in trouble and got deported. I was there illegally, I just went over the border when I was younger. They caught me once in 2000 and I went right back. I got married over there to a Native American woman from South Dakota, but now I have to wait ten years before I can return.’
‘Ten years!’ I said. ‘What are you going to do? What about your wife? You’re not going to see her?’
‘I’ve got no choice, so no. I’m not gonna go back there illegally again.’
‘Why not?’ I asked, surprised.
‘It’s too expensive. It costs ten thousand bucks to do it illegally, and for what? I’ll tell the people something. Don’t do it. Don’t go there. You need to pay for everything. Look …’ he pointed up to a tree that he’d been working under, ‘right here we got guayabas. We can eat guayabas in the wild. Over there you have to pay for guayabas.’ He laughed. ‘No, it’s too expensive. My wife can wait.’
We shook his hand and let him get back to the business of honest work.
‘Can you imagine a woman waiting ten years?’ said Alberto, as we carried on along the road. ‘Ha! Not in Mexico, that’s for sure.’
Wherever we went it became a familiar story. From where we had started in Mexico, throughout Belize and Guatemala and now in Honduras, people were chasing the American dream. Thousands of men, women and children were making the perilous journey in the opposite direction, hoping for a chance to make it to the golden streets of the United States. But it was, of course, an illusion, and untold numbers like Enrique had either been deported, given up, or perished along the way.
Having seen the violent ghettos of San Pedro Sula, and the terrible consequences of living amongst the gangs, it occurred to me that no one should be surprised that people are willing to stake it all on the chance of a better life in the States. But I also wondered how many people like that man had come to realise that the proverbial grass wasn’t always greener.
As we skirted the beautiful shorelines of Lake Yojoa, where the grass really could not have been greener, I realised that in spite of the natural splendour we were both beginning to struggle a bit.
‘How do you stop the blisters?’ said Alberto.
‘You’re still getting them?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. I put the tape on like you said, but some days they’re still painful.’
I didn’t know what to suggest. I’d made him strap up his feet with zinc-oxide tape, which stops the rubbing and hardens your feet, but sometimes there’s not a lot else you can do other than grin and bear it, which until now he’d done remarkably well. The past day or two, though, I’d noticed a limp and he’d fallen behind a little.
‘How do you do it?’ he asked.
‘Me? Well, we’re wearing the same boots, so it’s not that. Sometimes you just have to ignore the pain and your feet will stop attention-seeking.’
He smiled and kicked me up the backside.
But the truth was, I’d found myself slowing down, too. It wasn’t blisters, though. Maybe it was the oppressive air and the humidity, or the fact that my mind had been dwelling on the events of the last few days – the horror of San Pedro Sula and the aftermath of the murder we’d stumbled upon. Whatever it was, I’d become sullen and quiet, and I realised, probably terrible company.
‘You haven’t spoken all day, and that’s the best advice you can offer, you bastard?’ said Alberto, mocking.
We’d rejoined the main highway that led to the town of Comayagua and it was all uphill. The mountains seemed to get bigger, the further south we got, and it became impossible to avoid the main road altogether, so eventually we had to resign ourselves to trudging up it. It was a shame, because the beauty of the hills was alluring, with their pine-clad furrows and crashing waterfalls. But the fact remained that the rainy season was looming fast and we still had a long way to go, and if we had any chance of making it through the Darién Gap, we had to get a move on.
Each step became a chore as the road wound its way through the hills. The Pan-American Highway was some distance away yet – off to the west, and we would join it in Nicaragua – but nevertheless we were still on a main road, filled with dirty lorries, and the road itself could not have been less inspiring. It cut a great tarmac swathe through the hills, with quarried cliffs on either side and piles of rubbish that had been thrown out of passing cars.
‘Why is it that people can’t see the fact that dumping a huge bag of baby’s nappies at the side of the road is a terrible thing? The selfish bastards.’
Alberto laughed. ‘Where else are they going to throw it?’
‘Why do they drive all the way out here to throw away diapers? Why can’t they throw them out at home?’
‘Well for a start, it’s not like in England, where you have the council coming round once a week. It’s not that developed here. Secondly, they’re probably the diapers of an illegitimate kid, so they don’t want people finding out. And thirdly, those things stink like shit, so of course people throw them out.’
‘Well, it’s still damned selfish, and bad for the environment,’ I said, unconvinced.
‘Yes, well so is this road. Look, it cuts this national park in half like an orange. Surely that’s worse than a few dirty rags? Or what about the cities, all the crap that people build and dump? You know, I agree with you on littering. It doesn’t look nice – but poor people don’t think like that.’
The real problem, we both agreed, was quite simply a booming population. Only sixty years ago, the population of Central America was fewer than 40 million people. Now it’s in the region of 175 million.
‘That’s a lot of mouths to feed,’ I suggested.
‘And a lot of diapers,’ Alberto nodded. ‘And a lot of trees chopped down. To give everyone fuel and food.’
‘Well, maybe if people didn’t have so many children, then it wouldn’t be such a problem,’ I said.
Alberto shrugged. ‘What can I say? We Latin Americans like to have sex.’
We arrived in Comayagua to discover an entirely different Honduras. Its colonial splendour was akin to Mérida and it had a completely different feel to the ‘Americanised’ vulgarity of San Pedro Sula. Here there were no chain restaurants or flashy hotels, only cobbled streets and ancient fountains. Like everywhere else in Central America, dodgy wiring hung from the telegraph poles like a tangled spider’s web, but that didn’t spoil the charm of the place.
The cathedral stood as a proud monument to the Spanish legacy. We took the opportunity to climb up a narrow staircase in
to the bell tower, where we were treated to a view over the valley. The red-tiled roofs and the pretty little courtyards had an almost Mediterranean feel, especially against the backdrop of the pine-clad mountains in the distance. I was perhaps not as surprised as I should have been, then, to discover another, even more impressive monument to the past, hidden away in the bell tower.
‘What is that?’ asked Alberto, as we entered a small room with arched windows overlooking the central plaza. There, in the middle of the old room, was a giant glass case. But it was what it contained that was remarkable. There, in the middle of a sixteenth-century church in Central America, sat an enormous brass clock.
It looked like something out of one of Leonardo da Vinci’s sketch books. There were wheels and cogs and brackets everywhere, all moving in perfect unison. Imagine if you ripped the guts out of a grandfather clock and made them all ten times bigger, so that they could fill an entire room – that’s what it looked like. But this was no ordinary clock; this was apparently the oldest clock in the whole of the Americas, and in fact, the second-oldest clock in the world.
‘It was built by the Muslims in 1100,’ said the church caretaker, a burly man with a pistol holstered on a large belt; not your average warden, but he seemed to know a bit of history. ‘It’s nine hundred years old! That’s older than a lot of the Mayan pyramids. It was originally built for the Alhambra in Spain when the Moors ran the place, but when the Spanish retook it, the King gave it to a bishop to celebrate the discovery of the new world, and he brought it here.’
The caretaker showed us the mechanics of the brass dials. ‘This is all done with weights, and it links the bell to the clock face.’ He led us around the safety barrier so that we could sit in the nave of the window with our legs dangling out of the ledge, three storeys high over the square. From there, holding tight, I looked around at the wall where a big clock face was ticking away, as it had done for all those centuries.
