by Iain Overton
I had arranged to meet Orlin because he was a local journalist here and I had been told – out of everyone – he was the first to get to San Pedro’s murder scenes. The one reporter the police would call whenever there was a shooting, his life was defined by gun killings. And I wanted to know what that could do to a man – to be a constant witness to the tortured secrets of this city, to have a career marked so powerfully by the gun’s ultimate legacy.
It was late when we met outside the chipped and long-shut-down hairdresser on a darkened corner of a crossroads. We shook hands, and then, casually, Orlin pulled open his car door and showed me his guns: a 12mm shotgun and a 9mm Beretta pistol.
‘Have you used them?’ I asked him in the half-light.
‘Yes,’ Orlin said. I wasn’t used to journalists packing heat, less so firing them. One time, he said, he drove into a gunfight by accident. He had to put down his microphone and pull out his pistol and start shooting, because the gangs, in the confusion, had begun to shoot at him. Even so, he refuses to wear a bulletproof vest because the gangs might think he’s a cop and then they’d be sure to kill him.
He had worked for the past eleven years for a national Honduran news channel, Canal 6, and had seen things on these eternal, yellow-lit night streets that you should not see. A six-month-old killed in the middle of a gunfight; whole families executed in their homes. He looked at me, his head tilted slightly, and flipped around the screen of his white Blackberry phone. On it was the decapitated body of a woman, her vagina on display. His thumb flicked, and another image appeared. Three day-old dead men lay in cornfields, the heat causing their eyes to pop out of their heads. He laughed, his eyes twinkling, and he showed me another woman, semi-naked in death. His phone was filled with corpses. Young men from the 18 gang slumped in awkward positions, as if asleep. Before and after shots of the living and the dead, from smiling to something else.
When he does not work, he gets bored, he said. There’s so much drama in what he does. The closer he gets to death, the more alive he feels. This, he told me, was real journalism. I began to fear this little man’s love for the tenebrous corners of this city.
There’s much that he cannot report – if he did he’d be killed. Some murder scenes he just has to stay away from: he knows things would get too complicated with the gangs if he reported on certain killings. He feels he’s walking on an edge. ‘On the one side there is deep, dark water, on the other side there is fire. Here you don’t know who is who. In a war you take sides. You know who an army is – they are in green. But here . . . you have no idea,’ he said.
A call came in. There had been a shooting in the Barrio Rivera Hernandez, and Orlin’s face changed. We jumped into his car and we were off, pushing through the down-lit streets to the murder scene. In this light the street took on the colour of jaundice, the plaster on the low-slung houses hanging like pockmarked skin, the grill-lined windows the shade of mustard gas.
The body lay still under the ash-blond glare. The policemen were placing small fluorescent triangle markers out under the shadowed light, tracing where the spent rounds had fallen. The body lay awkwardly, his legs twisted, the shoulders tucked underneath. The dead man was wearing an orange polo shirt, which looked almost white now, and you could glimpse tartan boxer shorts poking above his stained blue jeans. When the cameraman turned on his light, you could see the blood still seeping gently from the man’s back.
The police took out a tape measure and began to measure the ballistic range, but you felt they were doing this because the television crew was nearby. The police spoke to no one, and the street’s occupants stood back in the shadows. All the neighbours had come out to look and to talk in quiet voices. A fat baby sat on the sidewalk, gurgling; a girl, about three years old, in a pink frilly dress with small pierced ears, asked her mother for a hug; to her side a man laughed and swung his son between his legs. And in front of these children, the police flipped the body, and the man’s destroyed face stared up into the deep black sky.
Orlin, his face caught in the camera’s brightness, stood before the body and delivered his lines, repeated a thousand times before. And the image on the video screen showed him, the whiteness of the light hard contrasting with the sulphur-tinted streets, like a broken angel. Luminescent. Then the camera’s light went out, and Orlin turned and took one more photo with his phone, and another crumpled face of death was captured.
When they finally put the dead man into a long, rustling black bag, the crowd grew bored and drifted away: the show was over. And the police tipped the body into the back of the forensic truck and then they too left; and all that remained were patches of sticky, coagulating blood, thick on the ground.
Orlin walked back to his vehicle. I caught a glimpse of his face lit in the reflection of his phone. He was looking to see if any more murders had been called in that night. And so it goes, I thought. The endless hunger for death in these streets never sated – one that totally consumed this slight, sad-faced man. I climbed back into the car and we drove away.
The low barbed-wire-rimmed walls of the district flickered beyond the window. And the silent homes of the people of San Pedro, with their contained patches of blue electricity, began to thin out, until all that was left were the spotlights of the car and the silence, and the yellow streets in the rear window diminished into the night.
The coffins attached to the wall are the pricier ones, Daisy Quinteros explained to me the next day, pointing to the far end of the funeral parlour shop.
‘The most expensive is 54,000 lempiras,’ she said, smiling – just shy of $3,000. She was a good saleswoman and dressed appropriately for this sad room: motherly. Her hair was flecked with lines of white, and her trousers a smart grey that strained slightly around her hips. She wore a tastefully embroidered white shirt. The look clearly worked – she sold about three coffins a week, getting a commission from each. She once earned over a thousand US dollars in just one month, she said.
We were overlooking a street lined with funeral homes. The kerbs were filled with solemn cars, and beside them pine trees cast spots of shadow onto the baked pavement. One of the funeral-home owners had planted white, almost translucent, orchids in pots leading up one stairway; and all around the entrances and pavements were swept clean. Unlike other parts of the city, this area was free of graffiti. This street looked the richest of them all.
I had come here to see one more community impacted by the gun – to look at the art of the undertaker. In San Pedro you did not have to travel far to meet one.
Daisy beckoned me to sit down at the glass table in the centre of the showroom. Unusually around here, she had not lost anyone personally to the violence. That was not to say that it had not affected her; the suddenness, the shock of death coming unexpectedly, these were the things that still disconcerted her.
‘You can see it in the eyes of the family members,’ she said, and leaned forwards and touched my arm; 90 per cent of her clients had died violently.
‘It’s not all bad, though. The other day we buried this old man. He was 102. No one lives that long here.’ And she smiled a thin smile, because she knew this wasn’t what I was here to write about.
I asked her if earning a living from the violence bothered her.
‘Well, we’ve been here twenty-one years. We provide a service – we are a necessity. I don’t think our business is taking advantage at all. What would they do without us?’ She talked quickly and without pause, her moving hands covered in gold rings. ‘Everyone is going to need this service some day.’ She pushed a folder towards me. It was filled with images of coffins and garlands, plaques and headstones: a catalogue of death.
‘So – how would you like to be buried?’ I asked, and through the tinted windows you could see a chain of cars pass slowly outside. Another cortège. Another profit line reached.
‘I’d like a mid-range coffin. I’ve already bought it.’ She flicked though the laminated sheets and pointed to the one she had in mind. It was modes
t, and beside it was a list of measurements. People are getting fatter, she said, now you have coffins in XXXL. But they only come in a set height, so with a 6ft 2in. man like me they would have to do something to reduce my leg size. She didn’t elaborate, and I imagined someone shortening me with a hacksaw on a metal gurney.
Daisy seemed the happiest of all the people I had met so far in this city. Perhaps her job was meaningful in a way others were not. She still had contact with the living – even if they were suffused with grief. Other professionals I had met in San Pedro, like Orlin, had jobs that focused on the bodies delivered by the carnage. But Daisy dealt with those with breath still in their lungs. She had to be professional and sympathetic, not least to help families navigate their way through the layered choices presented to them in her laminated folders.
Later, I sat down with Daisy’s hidden counterparts: three embalmers who were brothers. They were in their fifties and had the same triangular and light-brown features. One had lived in the US for many years, and the good living had bloated him to twice the size of the others, but they all had the same eyes. Eyes that had seen things get steadily worse over the last five years: ‘Once we buried five people from the same family, all dead from guns,’ one said. ‘We prepare far too many teenagers for the ground,’ his brother added, and the three nodded in unison, like priests. ‘Many are just fourteen years old,’ the third said.
Their skill stretched back to their grandfather, ninety years before. It wasn’t like it was now, not back then. But theirs was the oldest outfit in Honduras, and they were still working hard; on average they prepared thirty bodies a week. The preparation took place out in the back, away from the light of the shop front.
They led the way. Past a line of neat walnut-coloured coffins, through heavy swinging doors and out to a room that looked like a cheap operating theatre with a metal trolley at its centre. But here there were no machines to monitor life: just things to mimic it.
To the side was a kitchen tray bearing lines of mascara, rouge, lipstick in neat, ordered rows. In this Catholic country, the casket was often left open at the funeral. People wanted to file past to bid farewell; death was so often sudden and unexpected many things left unsaid had still to be said. So these brothers worked to make sure that the bodies looked peaceful. They erased the look of terror imprinted on lifeless faces. They brought back the illusion of serenity – peaceful resurrection with a make-up bag.
The eldest, Arnold Mena, a softly spoken man in a crisp white shirt and a lined jacket, was so good at what he did that it wasn’t an issue if you’d been shot in the face. ‘One shot, two shots, three shots – as long as the bullets don’t destroy the face – you can just stitch up the entry hole and cover it with foundation.’
‘Here they use smaller-calibre guns, and that doesn’t break the face so much,’ Arnold said. ‘But if the skull is totally destroyed . . . we have to use a small football to keep the shape.’
He explained how they use small prosthetic eyeballs too, but then they have to keep the eyelids closed and fix small pins to keep it all in place.
‘The real challenge,’ he told me, ‘was when we do not have a photo and do not know what the victim looked like. Then you have to be a little creative.’
They did other things here, too. In that stark room, beside a metal table with an ugly drainage hole for the dripping fluids, stood rows of formaldehyde from ‘The Embalmer’s Supply Company’. Twenty-four bottles cost $180 here, and that was enough for twelve bodies. ‘It will keep a body for a week, even without refrigeration,’ they said, even in this Central American heat.
Beside the bottles were small plastic bags. They put the intestines inside these. The bags were then sent elsewhere to be burned, and they packed your body with ‘pulverised hardening compound’ instead.
After a while I shook their hands, and they told me to stay, to come back soon, but I wanted to leave. I did not want to know more about plastic bags filled with intestines or skulls filled with balloons. And the smell had long ago seeped into my clothes.
I had seen enough of death’s ugly business – I knew all too well what the gun could do. I just wanted to head back to the land of the living. Or, at the least I wanted to see a glimmer of hope in all of this sunless despair; so I left and sought instead to meet those who had managed to survive the gun’s barbed impact.
3. THE WOUNDED
South Africa – a bedside visit – the gun’s hidden impact revealed – a chat with a trauma surgeon – a blood-tinged night in a Johannesburg emergency ward – understanding how science feeds off the gun’s misery – a trip to the BBC to meet a paralysed correspondent
The boy – for he was hardly a man – lay there and watched me. His chest rose and fell, and my eyes drifted from his handsome face to his stomach, where he had been shot.
It was a hellish place to be hit. The bullet had ripped through his intestines, leaving a gaping and ragged hole. Five weeks had passed since the rushed horror and blood-soaked panic of that night, and the wound still refused to heal. The shit from his bowels was re-infecting the coarse edges of torn flesh, and you knew this because of the stench. The doctor spoke to him quietly in Afrikaans. He was eighteen, and there was a chance he would have to carry a colostomy bag for the rest of his life.
Three other South Africans lay in that room. Each shot. Another six lay in the room next door. These men, too, had been shot. And in the room further along another six lay. By this point you had stopped asking the doctor what had happened to them, whether they had been shot, because this was Cape Town, and this hospital was the main medical centre for one of the largest townships in South Africa. And as such it was home to one of the busiest trauma units in the world for gunshot wounds. Which was exactly why I had come here.
The room was empty except for their beds. No flowers, no cards. One man turned in his delirium and moaned; his back was sweated out, and his head was swollen. His breathing came in low gasps.
There were fifty-one beds in this trauma ward, and sometimes it got so bad the overflow spilled into the waxen, squeaking corridors. There were only four nurses on staff, and that was never enough. Last month, three men were brought in. All were in the back seat of a taxi when someone had fired a single high-velocity shot through the car. They were all hit by that same bullet – six legs to be treated, the round clean through. And that story alone filled up three beds just there.
The ones who lay here, sullen now the pain had passed, were young men. More would come. Tonight was a Friday night, and the weekend brought in the bodies. And I looked at the plastic bag that had been taped over the young man’s stomach and wrote something in my notebook that I later was unable to read.
What this scene reminded me, like the dramas played out in thousands of wards in slum-towns and war-zones the world over, was that the majority of people go on to survive being shot.
It works out as a hidden epidemic of pain and violence. In the US, up to 91,000 people were admitted to hospital with non-fatal gunshot injuries in 2011 compared to 8,583 who were killed in shootings.1 In the UK, it is estimated that 777 people were shot and survived in 2012,2 compared with about 150 killed by gunshot the year before.3
Such harm is hard to imagine, but consider this: about 35,000 American children and teens are said to have suffered non-fatal gun injuries in 2008 and 2009 – six times more than those shot and killed. This is the equivalent to 700 school classrooms of twenty-five students each: a number greater than that of US military personnel wounded in action in Iraq and double the number wounded in Afghanistan.4
Admittedly, the exact numbers might be debatable, but what is not challenged is that each injured child experienced the horror of a bullet crashing and crushing through them. Their tissues and bones and muscles were shredded in the bullet’s path. Their insides were horrifically displaced, as if kicked by a mule. Their bone fragments spun off and lacerated and pierced their young bodies.
Ultimately, these children’s chances of survival we
re dependent on a host of factors. The speed of their getting treatment was crucial – the so-called ‘golden hour’. In one study in the US, it was found the likelihood of you dying from a gunshot wound was about 25 per cent higher if you were shot 5 miles or more from a trauma centre, and you could not get there within the hour.5
Also important was the wealth of the country in which they were shot. In the US for every person shot and killed, as many as nine survive. In developing countries the ratio is far smaller; more people who are shot will die – about one in three. The World Health Organization estimates that between 50 and 80 per cent of traumatic deaths in developing nations happen before people get to hospital, in part because, in many areas of the world, ambulances are almost non-existent.6
Your chances of survival also come down to factors far beyond your control. The bullet’s weight, the speed at which it hits you, even the pull of the moon has an effect. It is all about the transference of kinetic energy in a chaotic way; variables that determine the final resting place of the bullet or how badly you are hurt are all unfathomable.
Other things matter. If you’re wearing clothing at the time, there’s a greater risk of damage and infection to your body.7 If you are pregnant there are sometimes significant complications.8 And, in the US at least, whether you have health insurance plays a factor. One study said uninsured trauma patients were more likely to die after being shot than those insured.9
It is not just the immediate trauma of the wound that causes harm. Bullet fragments left in the body can also result in higher blood lead levels.10 Or you can go on to develop related health concerns – as in the case of US President William McKinley, who earned the title of being the first reported case of traumatic gunshot pancreatitis.
