Blood Barrios

by Alberto Arce

  Back home, still trembling, Wilfredo copied the photos onto a USB and then erased them from his camera. He was scared that someone would come into his house at night and steal the camera. He already had the bullet casings, and now he had photographs of a vehicle that matched the witness description, as well as the location of a checkpoint that accorded with events he still couldn’t bear to play out in his head. That Monday, just eight days after his son’s murder, Wilfredo went to the Human Rights Division and presented all the evidence he’d uncovered.

  Afterwards, Wilfredo wasn’t ready to sit at home and wait—he knew he might very well wait forever. Instead, following advice, he went to the office of Chief Prosecutor German Enamorado, and he told him that he was in a hurry and needed information. And he insisted. All day, three days in a row, he insisted. Enamorado later told me he was impressed by Wilfredo’s persistence. If it was true that a group of soldiers had murdered a young kid, then they had a horrific crime on their hands. For a man so accustomed to dealing with the abuse of authority, and the political impossibility of pursuing certain crimes, he barely had enough tools to actually do his job. Though, of course, he still had to put on enough of a show to make it seem as if he was following leads. He assigned an officer and a prosecutor to the case. But they didn’t even have a vehicle to begin their investigation. The Prosecutor’s Office is a place so inundated by files that officers are nearly drowning in paperwork. About 600 open cases for each officer overwhelms even the best intentions. On top of all the cases, a half-dozen prosecutors share just a single vehicle, with a meager stipend for gas. That Wilfredo offered to act as chauffeur, day after day, without complaint, along with his pleasant attitude and treating prosecutors to coffee, won their respect and was key to advancing the case. He generated empathy in the office, which he saw as going above and beyond what was expected in a country where all factors push officials towards shirking responsibility. Without the initiative, the capacity, the time, and the well-organized resources that Wilfredo brought to the office—where a full tank of gas was considered a luxury—the investigators would not have been able to do a thing.

  Days later Wilfredo got a call from one of the prosecutors asking for a ride to start following some leads. With Wilfredo at the wheel, the first stop was the military barracks where, they assumed, they would find paperwork related to the night in question. Instead, they hit a wall. They had to cross the city multiple times, from one station to another, until finally someone told them that any request for paperwork needed to be written out and addressed to the proper authority. With persistence, much difficulty, and an order signed by a lead prosecutor, they finally got the document they were looking for. Signed by the official running the checkpoint on the night Ebed was assassinated, the document described a motorcyclist shooting at soldiers manning the checkpoint. It went on to say that the soldiers chased after him, but that the motorcyclist was able to get away. This was only the first of the military’s lies. A lie that sounded a lot like other lies; lies that had come before and would come later. But there was also an unexpected lead—the kind of detail that makes a particular story gain popular interest, a few gunshots calling into question an entire political stance. The soldiers that chased and killed Ebed were part of the Army’s First Battalion of Special Forces. The battalion had received training from the United States, and had permission to run joint operations with the US military. In other words, they were the most highly trained and elite soldiers in Honduras, they had foreign assistance, and Wilfredo was convinced that they were the ones who’d killed his son.

  The more details he uncovered, the more furious he became. Although I never saw him more than rightfully indignant, humble, and thankful to each person he asked for help, he was simmering beneath the surface. Without expressing it physically, or even through his words, and despite his earnest face and learned mannerisms, his eyeglasses and ironed shirts, he was driven by rage. His fury didn’t express itself physically, but in the persistence and clarity of his ideas. For Wilfredo, the laws are firm, and should hold up to people’s demands. History books, reports from international nonprofits, and even journalists use ready-made catchphrases and generalizations that allow us to feel that we can understand the situation of Honduras and other Central American countries in a thousand words. We write of the arrival of democracy in the region, of civil government, of the Army’s loss of influence. Of the passage of constitutions, of codes of conduct that bring to an end, theoretically, prior codes of conduct. Of foreign military assistance that doesn’t kill, but stops the killing and establishes the rule of law. And some citizens believe this to be true. Wilfredo knows, because the prosecutor explained it to him, after consulting the Army’s code of conduct, that soldiers cannot fire their weapons unless they are confronted with a direct and lethal threat. That there are protocols: stop, identify, warn, detain—a whole series of steps that should be taken before firing, unless it is in self-defense. That is how democracy is supposed to work. Any other course of action, outside of the protocol, is illegal. His son was armed with nothing but a cellphone. Now that Wilfredo had spotlighted high-profile players, the case flooded the press, and powerful figures started to elaborate the lies. Democracy was failing him—day by day, lie by lie—as it had failed so many other victims and their families.

  The military now claimed that Ebed must have been “up to something.” The state was giving more credibility to the Army, in charge of protecting the homeland, than one civilian victim. They blasted the possibility that the boy was a gang member—though, given the twenty homicides a day, that was hard to verify. Commander of the Honduran Army, René Osorio, publicly declared that Ebed declined to stop at a military checkpoint and had deserved what happened to him. His exact words: “Logically, when a criminal comes to a checkpoint and does not stop, it’s because he’s doing something illegal.” When the prosecutors questioned the soldiers who rode in the Ford truck that night, none of them claimed to have remembered a motorcycle, or even having driven the truck at all, and they certainly didn’t remember having fired their weapons without lawful reason.

  One of the soldiers, seeing his name in the press and realizing the savagery he was implicated in, took an unexpected turn—as unexpected, perhaps, as someone overcoming their fear after witnessing a shooting through their living-room curtains and then slipping into the street to collect bullet shells, or as unexpected as Wilfredo and his wife going out to spy on the checkpoint. He decided to speak out, to make a dignified exit, or at least to strategize a self-defense that was not in line with his superiors, something that the prosecutors could later latch onto in their investigation.

  Shortly after the interrogation, one of the soldiers called his own mother and told her a different version of what had happened to Ebed. He told her he’d been ordered to lie. His mother then called a lawyer who explained that it was better to be a protected witness to the prosecution than be accused of murder. The soldier talked with other soldiers, and the next day, starting to feel nervous, a few more soldiers presented themselves at the Public Prosecutor’s Office to tell their version of the story. The kid, they said, didn’t stop at the checkpoint. He accelerated and motored right through it. They shot at him. He didn’t stop. They chased him in their beast of a truck, the Ford F350 Super Duty, tearing through the night. The kid didn’t have a chance. Desperate, he turned into a dead-end alleyway. The Ford blocked off the entrance and Second Lieutenant Sierra, who was in charge that night, started firing without even getting down from the truck. Following orders, two other soldiers started shooting. It all happened quickly, in the darkness. The soldiers—practically kids themselves, not one of them older than twenty-two—found themselves looking at a dead body. The kid on the motorcycle was dead, and they couldn’t forget it.

  Despite the rampant impunity that dominates Honduras, the soldiers were scared. Arguments and blame sprouted at the foot of Ebed’s body. The common response (demanded by the hierarchy) was to cover for each other: all were
implicated, so everyone had everyone’s back. First, they swept the crime scene; only then did the second lieutenant report to his boss, Colonel Juan Girón, who ran the checkpoint. According to testimony gathered by the prosecutors, “[Juan Girón] told us what we were supposed to say … that we weren’t supposed to talk, especially not to the police, about what had happened.” Another officer swapped out the guns (an M16, a Beretta, a Remington, and an R15) so that the ballistic tests wouldn’t match up. A prosecutor had to repeatedly ask the minister of defense, Marlon Pascua, to hand over the weapons; Pascua did all he could to block the request.

  Wilfredo was horrified. “They used my son as target practice.” Prosecutor Enamorado explained that the soldiers would have been right to pursue Ebed, try to detain him by forming obstacles in the road, or even shoot into the air. But they absolutely should not have fired at a fleeing suspect who presented no threat. “Their actions were despicable,” he said. “The law is clear on this. Ebed should not be dead.”

  What happened next was a miracle. Seventeen days after opening the case, thanks to Wilfredo’s insistence, as well as the help he offered the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and after the testimonies of some of the conscience-stricken soldiers, the three soldiers who shot at Ebed were arrested. Eliezer Rodríguez, the 22-year-old soldier who fired the fatal shot, was accused of murder and put in jail. The other two, including Second Lieutenant Sierra, who fired the first shots, were only accused of attempted cover-up and of acting in violation of their duties. They were both reassigned and waited for their trials as free men.

  In some respects, Wilfredo had received justice. The crimes were made public, the Public Prosecutor’s Office had brought charges against the man who killed his son, who was now locked up in a military prison. It was more justice than is usually found in Honduras. But, of course, he wasn’t satisfied. He would never be satisfied. In the end, the soldiers were following orders, and Wilfredo wasn’t okay with the fact that a single soldier should take all the blame. And even that was uncertain; Rodriguez could very well be found innocent. In the Army, as we’ve learned from Hollywood movies, there’s always the push to climb the ladder of rank. It’s a ladder shrouded in fog, the top of which is almost impossible to see. Of course there were other guilty parties to Ebed’s murder. Beyond the soldiers who fired the shots, there was Colonel Juan Girón who ordered his subordinates to lie; Colonel Reynel Funes, who swapped out the weapons to muddle the ballistic tests; Colonel Jesús Mármol, in charge of overseeing Operation Lightning, which has kept Tegucigalpa on an Army-imposed lockdown since the 2009 coup d’état, and who said that he’d never been informed of the murder, despite the fact that his subordinates claim otherwise.

  The Army maintains that none of the officers committed misconduct. “All that about the lies and the swapping out of weapons is pure fiction,” I was told by yet another colonel, the Armed Forces spokesperson Jeremías Arévalo. “We’ve cooperated with the prosecutors in everything since day one.” Unsatisfied with the lie, he continued: “For us, the case is closed. We are a responsible branch of the military, and we are against impunity.”

  But Wilfredo wasn’t satisfied. Months later, he was able to convince the Public Prosecutor’s Office to investigate the role of the officers up the chain of command, and seek to discover what happened with the weapons used in the murder. In order to get their contradictions on record, the prosecutor called the colonels to testify.

  The case even made news in the US, and not just in relation to the fact that the military equipment used to commit the crime came from the US. Reynel Funes, the colonel who supposedly ordered the gun swap, was working under US government approval. Like many high-ranking officers in the Honduran military, Reynel attended California’s Naval Postgraduate School on scholarship in 2006, where he graduated with a Master’s degree in Defense Analysis. He’d also previously studied at the School of the Americas (now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) in Fort Benning, Georgia. It’s not hard to think back to those US-backed Central American counterinsurgent armies of the 1980s, and see that, despite the arrival of democracy, not much has changed. Or that the more the United States meddles, the more it insists on trying to help countries which, just maybe, don’t want to be helped, the more its hands come away bloody.

  As of now, two years later, there haven’t been any other breakthroughs in the case. Ebed’s murder reached the international press. Television crews came. They interviewed Wilfredo and the prosecutors, who repeated the story again and again. The world knows what happened, but the guilty parties have yet to be sentenced. They haven’t even been tried in court. And there’s a good chance they never will be. A low-ranking officer, the one who fired the lethal shot, will stay in jail for a time, but after he’s served his preventive sentence, he will go free. Probably, nobody else will face charges. In Honduras, cases die in their folders. The prosecutors assigned to the case have moved on. In Honduras, the turnover of prosecutors is one of the key reasons so few cases are actually heard at trial. Wilfredo knows it’s difficult to achieve justice, he knows it was always unlikely that the case would actually go to trial, knows that his country wouldn’t be able to shrug off decades of corruption and incompetency, knows that his neighbors still can’t walk the streets at night and not feel afraid, knows that other fathers can’t let their sons go for walks in the park or test the limits of their freedom without fearing for their lives, knows that it’s impossible for Ebed to come back to him; and he also knows that it is possible that, in seeking justice, he himself could be killed.

  4

  DEATH OF A TAXI DRIVER

  Willing to do anything to avoid covering the election, photographer Moisés Castillo and I were even willing to exhume corpses. Fifteen years had passed since Hurricane Mitch flooded the Choluteca River, destroying much of the city’s downtown area. We were waiting for the ever-punctual Mairena to pick us up and drive us around the trash dump that the Choluteca turns into as it rolls through downtown. We thought we could get a feel for the area by spending some time with a group of men who work sifting sand out of the river to sell to construction companies. The rumor in Tegucigalpa is that any pick or shovel digging into the banks of the Choluteca will inevitably turn up human remains: the bones of thousands of people devoured by the river during the 1998 hurricane, which greatly added to the city’s list of disappeared persons. Thousands of bodies that no one had the capacity to count or the will to find. The center of Tegucigalpa is a hulking, unsealed mass grave.

  One of many journalistic vices is to look for metaphors in landscape.

  * * *

  Just as we were complaining about Mairena being late, a friend of his, Benjamín Álvarez Moncada, a sixty-eight-year-old taxi driver known as Don Mincho, sat waiting behind the wheel of a taxi for his turn to pick up the next client. He was parked behind the church on Los Dolores, a bustling market street in the middle of the city that was covered curb to curb in campaign ads for the upcoming November election. Don Mincho sat beneath the gaze of two presidential candidates, Xiomara Castro and Juan Orlando Hernández, both of whom wanted his vote. Maybe Don Mincho momentarily fixed his eyes on the nationalist candidate Juan Orlando Hernández, only to laugh at his campaign motto: “I’ll do whatever it takes to improve law and order.” Maybe campaign ads are rendered invisible to those who have no choice but to work beyond retirement in order to pay for their wife’s prescriptions, the bills, the rent, car maintenance. Maybe campaign ads are an insult to the intelligence and dignity of any Honduran taxi driver.

  Four in the afternoon—white-collar workers heading home, and taxi drivers starting their long evening shift. But the person who slowly inched up the right side of Don Mincho’s car was not a client, but a fifteen-year-old hitman who fired three shots.

  One in the temple.

  Another through the ear.

  The last in the neck.

  That’s why Mairena was late to pick us up. Not because of the traffic, but b
ecause his friend had been murdered.

  When I got a call about the crime, Mairena wanted his journalist friends, just this once, to offer their services to him. He thought the death of Don Mincho had to be told. He thought that, in the end, he could just as easily have been the one murdered. He thought that driving journalists from one side of the city to the other should have some payoff. He thought of that lie (“we work so that the world will know”) we had expounded to him so many times over beers after a day in the field. But this afternoon, to our pretentious proclamation, he countered with a succinct, “They’ve killed Don Mincho. Now go do your job.”