by Iain Overton
The US stands out. Americans suffer about 80,000 non-fatal injuries and 30,000 deaths every year involving guns.8 It works out at just over eighty deaths a day. Things get even worse when you travel south. Although home to just 14 per cent of the world’s population, Latin America accounts for 42 per cent of all firearm-homicides worldwide.9
These figures, though, conceal one problem. As Eric Berman told me, there is a fundamental difficulty getting any figures worth a damn. Many countries don’t have proper ways to establish who has died violently, let alone how. Even in relatively developed South Africa, where gun deaths overshadow all other ‘external’ causes of death, only a third of death records are available for analysis.10 The World Health Organization’s mortality database provides figures for just seven sub-Saharan African countries.
From the data that are available, though, we know that, if you look at the rankings of how people are murdered, Puerto Rico tops the table with 95 per cent of homicides there being with a firearm.11 We also know Brazil has the most gun homicides in the world outside a war zone in terms of sheer numbers.12 And, perhaps of surprise to some, the worst place in the world for gun violence per capita is not the US, but the Central American country of Honduras. And there’s one city there that stands out as the world’s epicentre of gun violence: San Pedro Sula – the most violent city on earth not at war.
This fact was new to me. I had been to Latin America before – the story about gun violence in Brazil was just one of a number of things I had reported on in the previous fifteen years. From drug addiction involving the powerful cocaine residue paco to the rise of the left in Latin politics, I’d travelled to many counties there, camera in hand. But I had never been to Honduras as anything but a tourist, and even then the violence that gripped that land was hidden from me.
This time, though, I felt I had to travel straight to that heart of darkness of San Pedro Sula, to record what happened to the dead in this city of corroded wet streets and ivy-curled trees and to see how people coped under the constant presence of gunfire.
The body was out in the cane sugar field, in the shadows. We stumbled through the night and the plantation mud, the shifting light coming from the mobile phones the police officers were using to guide their way. There was only a weak moon in the Central American sky, and there was no budget for flashlights, so the officials had backed up the mortuary truck and let its headlights cast a low glow across the stubble-rich field. Their phones would have to do the rest.
The call had come over the radio as if it was an urgent murder scene, but the body had decomposed long ago. The sugar cane had since grown and pushed up and out, through the man’s jeans. It had pierced his mottled flesh and was now sprouting through his body as if the bones themselves had grown. They looked like lilies in the half-light; you couldn’t tell the difference between the bones and the cane.
‘See, his hands have been tied,’ said one of the forensic examiners in Spanish. He was dressed in a clinical over-suit, but as he was using a garbage bin to put the bones in, it was clear any concern for evidence contamination had long been lost somewhere in the dark corners of countless other crime scenes.
‘Is that a rib bone?’ The mobile phones were held close to the ground.
‘No. That’s a twig,’ a voice in the pitch-black said.
‘I’ve found his skull,’ said another. An animal must have dragged it away, I thought.
‘Looks like they cut it off,’ the first voice said. I was wrong. You could make out in the shifting light the ragged hole where a bullet had struck and you hoped they had shot him before they had cut him. Either way, the bound hands and lonely death in a field made it clear this was a gang murder.
This was what I had come to witness, and it had not taken long. I had only been here for a short while, and this was the eighth body I had seen. Honduras, without a doubt, was a very violent place. In 2012, twenty people were murdered every day on average in this country of 8 million – a murder rate of 90.4 per 100,000 residents.13 In the US it is about 4.7.14 The city of San Pedro Sula, on whose darkened outskirts I was now, was even worse. The murder rate here was 173 per 100,000.15 There were, in 2013, just under six homicides a day in this municipal region alone.
The violence was partly down to San Pedro Sula being where it was. Stuck between the drug lords of Colombia and Bolivia to the south and the buyers from the US to the north, it had become a habitat of casual murder and cold pain. Some 80 per cent of the cocaine that reaches US soil was thought to be trafficked via here. And as drugs flowed up, guns came down – from south to north, down from the largest gun-producing country in the world.16
These realities, combined with poverty, corruption and impunity, had turned San Pedro Sula into a city where gangs fought gangs and cartels fought cartels over the immense profits that drugs could bring. The feared Mexican syndicates of the Zetas and Sinaloas had even been lured here, aligning themselves with local gangs such as the MS-13 gang or Calle 18. And death had come in their wake.
A few days before, as my plane banked over San Pedro, the lush hills of El Merendon National Park framing the city to the east, and the sprawl of the district of Choloma drifting far up to the north, I looked at my watch. A scattered cemetery speckled the earth in the rushing green below. It was 3.30 p.m. We dipped down to the surging runway. I write this because a skinny policeman was also to note that time – half past three – with a worn ballpoint pen in a crumbling police hill station close to the cemetery I’d just seen. The time was inscribed next to the names of three women who had been gunned down at that precise moment.
The first was Lesley Lopez-Pena. She was twenty-two, single, unemployed. When she died, the policeman noted, she was wearing blue jeans and grey sandals. On the small of her back she had a tattoo of the sun. The second victim was Miriam Portillo. She died with two bullets in her back and one in her chest. The third was Karen Contreros. The report noted that her underwear was pink and that she had five gun wounds in her chest, one in her stomach, one in her shoulder and one in her forehead.
These three women had been travelling back home from a visit out of town. One of them had a boyfriend, a gang member, in prison, and they had been to see him. They had probably given the young man some weed or pills to help pass the dragging hours and then returned. They were caught laughing as they got down from a converted school bus and fell as one from the assassins’ bullets. Dying, one dropped a child’s Spiderman bike she had bought in the market an hour before.
The policeman did not write down a motive. Murders such as these were just another thread in the endless sorrow of the drug wars.
On the way to the spot where the women had been gunned down, my driver, Frank, had pulled to the edge of the road and put black tape over the telephone number on the side of his taxi. With a deliberate show, he folded a piece of white paper and fixed this over his number plates. He knew the gangs would take these details and he did not want them to visit his home and see that he had a wife and child.
Getting back in, he insisted I lower my window. ‘If they can’t see in, then they will think we are the other gang,’ he said. ‘Then they’ll open fire.’ He was taking no chances.
By the time we reached the crime scene, the light was fast departing, and the coroner’s wagon had taken the bodies away. The blood still stained that sandy road, and there was a small piece of intestine, blown out of one of the girl’s backs, lying obscenely in the middle of the track. I pushed it with my foot and watched it tremble in the electric light. Perhaps the coroner was too busy to clean up. After all, in the last three years there had been over 6,000 homicide autopsies carried out here in San Pedro, compared to just sixty-two natural death autopsies.17
I walked over to a huddle of people sitting back from the road. The mild drama of a Brazilian soap opera was playing out on a square television hanging outside a Portakabin. A fire blazed in an oil drum; the shifting of car headlights illuminated the area and cast dancing shadows. A man in a white England fo
otball shirt turned to me.
‘Three women?’ he said. ‘Yes – I heard fifteen gunshots and saw them fall. They lay there for about fifteen minutes before the police arrived, but by then they had been dead for fifteen minutes.’
His Spanish was fast, and because he repeated the word fifteen I was confused.
‘The journalists were here before the forensics arrived,’ he said, as if that made it clearer, and a fat woman beside him started to scream. I had no idea why.
‘The gangs do this as a sort of theatre,’ the man in the football shirt was saying. ‘They pick where they want the bodies to lie, they leave the gun-shells. They don’t care. We have piles of dead bodies here, and the police say they investigate them, but no one gets caught. No one goes to jail.’
The bullets were 9mm. ‘Claro’. Of course. It’s the gun of choice for the feared Calle 18 gang, who run these streets. And with that, he had nothing more to say and walked back into the shadows by his hut. When I approached others they too edged into the dark. The gangs were always here watching. This was just how it was. The killings had brought powerlessness, despair and, ultimately, silence.
Beside us, up a slope, stood a raised breezeblock hut. The lights spilling from the windows captured those inside in silhouette, and then, suddenly, their voices began to lift. They were evangelical Christians. In all of this, perhaps, God was the only one worth speaking to. Below, a line of tied, tired horses snorted in the night, startled at the noise. The cries of those few believers drifted upwards to the speckled sky. And out there, out in the darkness and in an even greater silence, lay three more bodies in a San Pedro municipal refrigeration unit.
Outside the morgue a man in short sleeves and a pair of stained trousers sat and waited and sucked on a bag of fizzy drink through a bent straw. At this time, the sun was already hard on your face, and it would be hours before the heat lessened. The passing cars kicked up small whirls of dust. No one spoke.
Beside him a coffin was propped open with a stick. It lay empty, but he remained hopeful. A quick burial cost about 2,500 lempiras – $120 – and he looked at the hunched relatives leaving the morgue, with their sallow faces and hurting eyes, and sucked on his straw.
He was from Funeraria San Jose, and was just one of the many morticians who came daily to this, the busiest morgue in the world. It would not be long before he got a customer. His name was Marco Antonio Ramos. At fifty-three, he hadn’t thought he would be doing this, but work is work, and this was good work. He had sold six coffins last month alone.
I asked him why he did it.
‘Money. I found a way through life with these coffins,’ he said, his voice light.
‘Do you prepare the bodies for burial?’
‘So the relatives can open up the lids and say goodbye to their loved ones – those whose faces are still there.’ There are at least ten funeral homes here in San Pedro, and yet business is still good. Just as the lure of death had brought Marco to these gates, so it had brought me – I had come to see how the municipal morgue could cope with so many gun murders.
There was shouting for people from the gate.
‘Is there anyone from Baracoa here?’ the call went out.
A hunched, fat woman went in, her back contorted, the knowledge of what lay on the other side heavy upon her. Here they got as many as thirty bodies a day; most had died violently. I turned and walked towards the visitor’s entrance, the only person to go through those gates that morning with neither tearful nor lifeless eyes.
Inside, Dr Hector Hernandez greeted me. He was the director of this morgue, a tidy man with grey hair and a patient calm, exact and professional. He led me into a large and empty lecture theatre. The walls were peeling, and the place felt like no one had taught here for years. He pointed towards a Formica table and pulled over a decaying chair. Hector’s face seemed melted with tiredness. He has a team of 146, he began. Among them are sixty-eight medics, two dental analysts, four toxicologists, two microbiologists and one psychiatrist.
A psychiatrist? I stopped him.
‘The morgue is not just for the dead,’ he explained. What the gangs do to their victims is sometimes so vicious that their markings on the bodies leave much deeper markings on the minds of those who are left behind. After all, the killers have a method. They almost always end it with a shot to the head – they prefer a 9mm to do this – but they torture their victims first. ‘Violence here is intimate, but the gun sends them to the other side,’ he said.
Hector sighed when I asked him if this daily arrival of bodies had affected his morale. He was resigned to it.
‘In ten years, between 2003 and 2013, we had over 10,000 autopsies; 9,400 of them did not result in an investigation. For me, this is the hardest: this impunity. Nothing has been investigated.’
Right now he had 68 bodies in storage; 48 of them being matched for DNA, the other 20 were unknown. Most had died prematurely and violently.
‘After thirty days if no one claims a body, we bury them anonymously,’ he said. Last year, 120 people were interred in this way, the majority of them men between eighteen and thirty. Then I asked, in the sixteen years he had worked there, what had stayed with him, what memory of all of this violence had struck him the most.
He sucked in a breath. The murder of an entire family is hard, he said, his voice measured and exact. Like the time he saw a dead mother still holding her three children tight in her arms. The gangs had kicked down the bathroom door and killed them as one. Then there are the others. In this city these are the bodies that come packaged – trussed up in grey sacks. They die painfully, he told me, their legs tied up against their backs, their faces bruised, their teeth missing. They once found twenty-six bodies in sacks like this in a field: a grim harvest.
Suddenly, as if this was too painful a memory to dwell on, he rose, straightened his tie and beckoned me to follow. We walked through swinging double doors and out into the dissecting room. It was a sudden shift from talking about death to seeing it.
The tiles on the floor were loose and covered in water. The neon lights gave off a sickly glow and buzzed; the walls were smeared and wet. And there, on the left, lay a body placed on its side. It – he – was naked, and his legs were crooked and twisted. He had been shot in the jaw, and flies flickered above him.
The director leaned towards me in the molasses air and said there was no real danger of infection. ‘The dead are healthy. They didn’t die from diseases.’ Later, I walked outside and saw bags of seeping waste left against a wall, frenzied flies thick above the trailing lines of blackened ooze, and was not so sure.
We left and I followed Hector upstairs. A fire had ripped through half of the morgue on a summer’s night a year before and now the upper floor lay derelict: tortured iron railings and marked walls. Such is the state of Honduras’s morgues. As if death had seeped into the very structure of this place and left it rotten and mould-tainted.
Later, he introduced me to his medical colleagues. They shifted in their blue shirts when I shook their hands – they were embarrassed to be asked questions about what they did. Their work was difficult, Hector explained, and I asked what sort of people were drawn to this type of task. He repeated the words of the funeral worker outside: there is not much other employment around. Death creates its own labour.
I offered the coroner team something to eat, and we sat down together. Around the table were Sanchez, Garcia and Rodriguez, two doctors and a forensic photographer. I had bought fried chicken and, despite the sugar stench of death coming from just beyond the door, they ate their lunch. I did not; I had gone to the toilet to wash my hands and found neither soap nor towels.
I asked about the smell. There was a smirk. ‘What smell?’ These men had been busy and were hungry. On the day before they had nine bodies brought in: six homicides. Outside lay two more bodies. I looked at the white chicken meat and fried strips of skin in their hands and focused on writing notes.
‘Look at this. This one has been shot i
n the head,’ said the forensic photographer, glancing at the laptop before him, his mouth full. I shifted across to his screen: it was one of the women who had been killed the day before. There was the child’s Spiderman bike. The doctors looked too but were unmoved. The only thing shocking, they told me, is working with children who’d been tortured. One of them let out a low whistle. ‘It’s really common.’
They described how victims’ hands and feet were often tied together and the rope wrapped around the neck, then lashed to the feet. ‘So, when they tire from struggling, they let themselves go. Their feet drop, and they end up choking to death. The rope just tightens around their throat. If they are lucky, someone shoots them before it gets to this.’
Luck, fate. These were the things they talked about – as if that’s all you could pin your hopes on. ‘Some people are shot twenty times and end up in hospital, still living,’ said Sanchez, a heavy-set man with eyes dark rimmed and deep. ‘Then there are people who are only shot just the once – a small wound – and they end up here.’
‘The beautiful thing about this job,’ said Garcia, wiping his fingers with a napkin to clean off the chicken grease, ‘is seeing up close what a bullet can really do to you.’ And then he picked up another chicken leg.
That night I met Orlin Armando Castro – a local TV journalist with a fixed gaze and an impish laugh. He had a fizzing energy that meant he never stopped moving. Beside him was his cameraman, Osman Castillo, a solid man in ripped jeans and a white shirt. Osman hardly spoke; Orlin was his voice.
On Orlin’s belt was a police radio that buzzed from time to time, and in his hand, always, was a Blackberry phone. He constantly scanned both and replied to his messages with a focus that could have been mistaken for something else. He was constantly awaiting that call – to a murder scene, to another death. On hearing of one, he and Osman would jump into their scraped blue Hyundai Tucson, whose passenger door did not open from the outside, and drive fast to where a body was sure to be lying. There they did what they were paid to do: they filmed murder.
