by Ioan Grillo
In the opposite corner, legislators called for children to be given political asylum. The boys sleeping on the concrete floor of the airbase had fled bloodthirsty gangs who forcibly recruited kids into their street armies and displaced entire neighborhoods, they said. Honduras had become the most murderous country on the planet outside a declared war zone. This was not an immigration crisis, but a refugee crisis. Congressmen tried to pronounce “Mara Salvatrucha,” the name of the mysterious gang causing carnage across the region.
Texas Governor Rick Perry waded into the debate by unleashing the National Guard onto the border. A thousand soldiers sat in portable towers watching the gushing Rio Grande. And the children kept coming.
Out on the streets, the debate played out in protests, counter-protests, and lots of shouting. When forty children were taken to a boys’ ranch in Oracle, Arizona, protesters tried to block the buses, claiming they were defending the United States from foreign invasion. On the other side of the road, activists held up placards welcoming the children. One cited the phrase from the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”2
In Murrieta, California, protesters successfully turned away three busloads of migrants. The following July 4 weekend, protesters and counter-protesters returned to the town’s seething streets, pulling, shoving, and yelling. “Go Home,” chanted those battling to stop the children arriving. “Refugees are not illegal,” screamed those fighting to welcome them.3
The visceral responses reflect how the 2014 unaccompanied child crisis strikes at the heart of America’s polarized debate on immigration. But they also get into a question that has been less thrashed out: Should those fleeing the crime wars of Latin America be given political asylum?
The children were clearly not all running from gunshots. They came for a variety of reasons, including wanting to see their parents in the United States and looking for a better life. But in some cases, children showed hard evidence that they risked being murdered if they returned home.
Delegates from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees interviewed 404 children turning up at the southern border. They concluded that in 58 percent of the cases, the children could qualify for international protection under the 1951 convention on refugees.4
Some immigrant control activists cried they didn’t give a rat’s ass what the United Nations said. Either way, the child crisis only raised alarm bells about a problem that had been growing steadily for several years. Less publicized was the fact that the number of adults arriving at the southern border and applying for asylum had shot up sevenfold from 5,369 in 2009 to 36,174 in 2013.5 Seventy percent of these adult applicants were from Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
In most cases, courts reject the claims. Carlos Spector, an immigration lawyer in El Paso, says judges fear unleashing a tidal wave of more applications if they give asylum to Mexicans and Central Americans. To qualify for asylum, applicants also have to prove that the government itself is trying to murder them or that their life is in danger because they belong to a persecuted group. Asylum laws were designed for those fleeing the dictators and ethnic persecution of the twentieth century. But some of the new cases are so strong that judges do approve them.
“People are arriving with such compelling evidence that criminals are working with police or soldiers to try and kill them that judges just can’t turn them down,” Carlos says. “The facts are irrefutable.”
The White House eventually tackled the 2014 child migrant surge from several angles. It asked the Mexican government to detain more Central Americans before they got to the Rio Grande—which they did in massive numbers.6 It got Honduras to use its own armed forces to hold back unaccompanied children in a so-called Operation Rescue Angels. And it opened offices to process asylum applications from Central America, instead of while the children were living in the United States.
The measures slowed the surge by the end the year. But the White House conceded these were short-term fixes. In closed-door meetings with Central American leaders, officials mulled over how they could stop people fleeing in the long term. How, they asked, had Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala become so violent and unstable? And what could be done to stop them collapsing even further?
Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala are collectively known as the Northern Triangle of Central America. While triangle refers to the fact they are three countries, their combined shape is more a jagged trapezoid, covered by mountains, volcanoes, and valleys with a choppy Pacific on one side and a mosquito coast of the Caribbean on the other. They are lumped together not only because they are neighbors but because they share similar problems of violence, all suffering from perilous homicide levels. Going south, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama boast substantially lower murder rates.
The Northern Triangle countries are small and close and their problems spill over each other’s borders. If heat gets too much for gangsters in San Salvador, they can drive five hours east to San Pedro Sula, Honduras, or north to Guatemala, and vice versa. The crime networks are also thick heading north into Mexico. The Zetas and Sinaloa cartels operate in Guatemala and Honduras, while rocket-propelled grenades stolen from Central American military caches turn up at Mexican crime scenes. Wars spread.
Central America is divided into seven small countries because after the Spanish Empire collapsed, competing cliques of plantation owners all wanted their own kingdoms. The brief Federal Republic of Central America fell apart in 1840 into a series of banana republics. The very phrase banana republic was coined in the 1904 book Cabbages and Kings about Honduras, which it parodied as the imaginary Anchuria.
In the constitution of this small, maritime banana republic was a forgotten section that provided for the maintenance of a navy … The champagne was bubbling trickily in the veins of the mercurial statesmen.7
When the poor majority finally challenged the plantation elites, the region erupted into a series of civil wars in the late twentieth century. By the 1980s, these became the fiercest battlegrounds in the Americas, a place where the Cold War turned red hot. Fighting went way beyond the street battles of Jamaica or the counter-insurgency of Brazil; they were full-on civil wars with aerial bombardments, mass graves, and scorched earth campaigns.
In El Salvador, leftist guerrillas led an insurrection reminiscent of the Vietcong that was surprisingly successful in fighting the U.S-backed dictatorship to a draw. To support their campaign, the guerrillas charged businesses in their territory with a “war tax.” The fighting killed seventy thousand and created half a million refugees, many of who went to the United States. In 1989, when Europe celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Salvadoran guerrillas were in the midst of their biggest offensive.
In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas kicked out the Somoza regime and fought off the U.S.-backed Contras in a war that cost forty thousand lives. To stop the Contras getting into the cities, the Sandinistas built an intensive police and informant web with its eyes everywhere. This same network is credited with stopping the encroachment of criminal gangs today—giving Nicaragua a lower murder rate.
Guatemala was home to the most deadly conflict of all. After the CIA organized a coup against the leftist President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, guerrillas dug in for a grueling campaign, winning support in indigenous communities. In the 1980s, generals tried to wipe them out with soldiers and paramilitaries waging a campaign of terror. They decapitated victims in front of villagers and left corpses on public display—techniques that drug cartels later copied.
Honduras was saved from its own civil war by a strong dictatorship and weak opposition. But it was still a battleground. The United States put its biggest force in the region in the Palmerola airbase and used Honduras to train the Contra rebels to fight in neighboring Nicaragua. The Sandinistas responded with an offensive into Honduran territory. Salvadoran rebels also slipped into Honduras to buy supplies and guns.
The White House trained and armed its anti-l
eftist allies, spending four billion dollars on El Salvador alone. The U.S. involvement put Central America at the center of media attention. Veteran foreign correspondents all have their stories—and sometimes wounds—from the conflicts. Their coverage provided a background track in eighties America, sifting into newscasts on the Iran-Contra scandal, into Oliver Stone’s Oscar-nominated movie Salvador, into the lyrics of protest songs.
When the wars ended in the 1990s through a serious of peace accords, cold warriors sang victory, while Central Americans were jubilant a new epoch of peace had dawned. And attention to the region vanished. Media bureaus shut down, war correspondents moved onto Yugoslavia and Iraq, U.S. military aid diverted to Kuwait, Somalia. Stories out of the Northern Triangle shrunk from a wave to a trickle.
Until 2014.
As the child migrant crisis erupted on the Rio Grande, TV crews, photographers, and pen-biting reporters rushed back to Central America for the biggest story since the civil wars. They discovered that in some ways, peace had never emerged at all.
CHAPTER 27
The scattered household items give clues to the residents’ old lives in the Palmira neighborhood, before they fled in fear of gun-toting gangsters. A decaying poster of the Real Madrid soccer team decorates the cracked wall of a teenager’s bedroom. The remains of a hot sauce bottle lie on the floor of a smashed-up kitchen. A pair of women’s slip-on shoes sits neatly by a front door that’s been kicked off its hinges.
But block after block, no people can be seen.
The hundreds of missing residents of Palmira, in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula, were ordered to leave by gang members who fight over the turf, explains Captain Cesar Jhonson, of the Honduran National Police as he shows me the abandoned homes. They murdered those who refused.
“There was an old lady living in this house here with her two teenage grandchildren until two months ago.” Jhonson points to a bungalow on the corner. “She wouldn’t go, so they shot her dead. Nobody knows where the children have gone.”
A few miles through the urban jungle, I find one of the families who fled. Forty-five-year-old Miriam Hernandez describes how half a dozen gunmen arrived at her door and gave her twenty-four hours. She frantically grabbed what she could carry and hit the street with her four-year-old grandson. A local charity has lent her a space, and she lives in a corner of floor that she has marked with scarves and towels.
This forced displacement of neighborhoods reminds me of what I saw in Kingston, Jamaica. The posses there pushed out families on the frontlines of rival garrisons, creating buffer zones. Captain Jhonson says the same motive drives gangs in Honduras, forcing this exodus.
Palmira is on the frontline between the Mara Salvatrucha and its rival the Barrio 18, who mark their territory with graffiti sprayed onto the walls in huge letters. Both gangs are on red alert for rival members storming into their turf. It’s easier to defend your ground if nobody lives in the immediate blocks; there are no civilian residents in the way so you can quickly spot enemy gunmen.
Soon Palmira could look like the older frontlines of Jamaican ghettos. The houses will crumble and plants will grow over, violence shaping spaces. Unless the flood of refugees is stopped.
Forced displacement is another feature of political and ethnic conflicts that has spilled into Latin America’s crime wars. Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia also suffer from the problem. But it has become especially visible in the Northern Triangle. In Honduras, criminal violence has made more than seventeen thousand people flee their homes in recent years, according to refugee monitoring groups.1 Thousands more have fled from criminals in El Salvador and Guatemala, where gangs also fight over every square inch of towns and cities.
In a nearby police base, Captain Jhonson shows me a map of San Pedro Sula with the territory of the gangs marked out in colors. Blue is for the Mara Salvatrucha and yellow for the Barrio 18. (Hondurans will also refer to members of all gangs as Maras.) Some turf is controlled by other smaller gangs, with names such as the Vatos Locos and Tercerenos. But the MS and 18 command most territory, with their turfs—and war—extending through all the Northern Triangle, into Mexico and into swathes of the United States. The Palmira is one of the bloodiest frontlines of this entire conflict, one of the most brutal neighborhoods, in the most murderous city, in the most murderous country on the planet.
So what does being the most homicidal city outside a declared war zone mean on the ground? On one hand, when you visit San Pedro Sula, you may be struck by how normal it appears. The abandoned homes like those of Palmira are only in a fraction of the city. Most of it looks physically like thousands of towns across Latin America. Electricity works most of the time. Hotels, shops, and restaurants function. Soldiers and heavily armed police drive around but there are no tanks, mortar shells, or aerial bombardments.
This is a curious feature of the crime wars. Extreme violence takes place amid normality. The same was true in Ciudad Juárez and Medellín when they were the most murderous cities on the planet. Markets still function and elections take place even while the homicide levels are off the charts.
But underneath the surface, you find how violence haunts people’s lives. Most people in the city know somebody who has been murdered, often a friend or family member. In 2013, there were 1,458 homicides—86 percent of them by the gun—in San Pedro. With a population of 754,000, this means it had a rate of 193 homicides per 100,000.2 This is more than four times that of the United States’ most murderous city that year (Detroit), forty-eight times that of New York, and 175 times that of London.
If a similar rate is sustained over a decade, it means that one in fifty residents of San Pedro will be murdered. Violence disproportionately affects young men, with the murder rate of males aged twenty to twenty-four being four times the average.3 Certain flashpoints have the lion’s share of homicides. So if you are a young male in a bad barrio your chance of being killed over a decade could spin up to one in four.
The killing rate tugs on resources. I visit the San Pedro morgue where the river of corpses is taken. Medical technicians conduct an autopsy on each body, which takes about two hours. It takes longer if the bodies are mutilated or chopped up, as quite a few are. The morgue only has fridge space for twenty-five corpses, so technicians face a constant challenge to complete the autopsies and stop it filling up.
Documenting this bloodshed are a dozen local reporters who cover the crime beat, which they call the nota roja, or “red news.” I follow round Orlin Castro, who reports red news for a local TV station, covering a five P.M. to five A.M. shift. In his late twenties, Orlin has been on the beat since he was at high school. He is about five foot five with the balls of a giant.
While I travel with Orlin, he is watching his back for some gangbangers trying to kill him. The gang is angry because he filmed the capture of some of their members. They had tried to bribe their way out, but once he was there with the camera, the police refused the money. In revenge, the gang sprayed Orlin’s car with gunfire. Orlin survived with a bullet wound in his chest. He is scared they will hit again, so while he reports the crime beat, he carries a mini Uzi and travels with a friend packing a pistol. As we drive along, he passes me the Uzi, and I hold it awkwardly, hoping I am not going to accidentally shoot us all.
Despite this hit, many other gang members know and like Orlin. They watch his crime segments and he has charisma dripping out of him. He grew up in a rough neighborhood so from his childhood he knows crooks, as well as cops; he seems to know every officer on the San Pedro force.
While I am driving with Orlin, he gets a call that there has been a shooting in the center of San Pedro, and he accelerates to the scene. We arrive to see the corpse of a middle-aged man outside a bar. The assassins, or sicarios, drove past on a motorcycle and sprayed him with a Kalashnikov—a common technique here, imported from the Colombians. The AK bullets ripped up the victim’s face and left his contorted body in a red puddle. Passersby glance at the spectacle, but are notably calm; it is
an everyday occurrence.
We drive with Orlin to the most murderous neighborhood of all, the Rivera Hernandez. A few months earlier, a gang kidnapped a thirteen-year-old girl from outside a school here. They accused her of spying because she came from an area controlled by a rival mob, so they took her to a gang house—what they call a casa loca—and killed her. Police arrested them, and residents have made the house a place of mourning, writing orations on the wall.
“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,” says one oration, citing Saint John.
Such stories of tragedy flow like rivers round the San Pedro streets. The gangs here claim more innocent victims than in Brazil or Jamaica, with many children murdered. Back at the police station, fifty-year-old Jose Guadalupe Estevez describes how a gang member liked his teenage niece, but she refused his advances. In revenge, the gang killed her and her mother.
I had been reporting in Honduras since 2007 and saw it noticeably deteriorate each time I visited. Following a 2009 coup, which provoked a boycott and political violence, the murder rate shot up to its epidemic levels. I went back in 2012 to cover a prison fire that killed an astounding 360 inmates. (It was the world’s deadliest prison fire in recorded history.) It struck me how shocked and nervous people had become. But I still struggled to fathom how the gangs here became so brutal.
To try and comprehend the bloodshed, I conducted lengthy interviews with more than twenty gang members in Honduras and neighboring Salvador in 2014 and 2015. Despite their extreme violence, the Mara and 18 members are relatively open to talking to journalists; they are much more accessible than cartel operatives.
