Blood Barrios

by Alberto Arce

  We never did get to work on our sand-sifting story. We got sucked, once again, into the crime beat.

  * * *

  In a city that lacks organized public transportation and is built over steep and rugged slopes, many of the seventy-two legal taxi stations work with fixed routes and collective pick-up systems. Taxis—parked on the streets and waiting in line until they fill up with four passengers—offer the only mode of transportation for those who can’t afford their own car. Passengers typically pay ten lempiras (less than fifty cents) for the trip. A taxi driver considers himself lucky if he’s made 500 lempiras in a day (twenty-one dollars) after paying for gas, and, in most cases, a daily car rental, which is usually about twenty dollars a day. This is how drivers make a living, and this is how folks in the capital get to where they need to go.

  In Tegucigalpa in 2012, thirty-three taxi drivers were murdered. That translates into a murdered cabbie every eleven days in a city half the size of Barcelona. Forty-one were murdered in 2013, and in 2014 the figure rose to sixty. This story isn’t new. In fact, it’s common: it’s the story I know best, the story that gets told again and again. It has become an anecdote. And this time—because it’s what Mairena demanded of us—we were the ones who had to tell the story.

  As night began falling over the shattered city, the taxi drivers’ first reaction that evening was—spontaneously, and without clear objective—to block traffic with their cars. “Stop!” screamed one driver. “Drop your passengers off. Let them walk home.” No one answered. They didn’t argue, they didn’t object. Neither the drivers nor their passengers got upset. It was a process of collective healing. Everyone understood each other, everyone was in agreement. Everybody wants to go home at the end of the day. And yet no one knew what it meant for traffic to stop there, what the point was. Some followed directions and joined the improvised assembly without knowing what to say, or how to go beyond offering a general condolence. An assembly of losers without a leader, without speeches to applaud. Without asking for permission, and without going through any agenda items, they simply dispersed. This time, after acknowledging what had happened, everyone kept on working, kept their mouths shut, and not a single complaint was heard, not even from those at the front of the march. In reality, everyone knew that the passengers couldn’t protest all the way home. Not at night. It would be too dangerous. They all shared the fear of extortion, they were all exhausted, and they all—filled with dismay and jumbled emotions—had their own personal problems. They were all in the same situation. No one offered a solution. There wasn’t even anyone to confront.

  Drivers watch out for each other as best they can. There are other ways to react when someone is killed, and they know them well. Mairena confesses that they’ve been through this before. All of them know of taxi drivers who, sick of paying up, decided they could only pay their extortionists with a taste of their own medicine. An unpaid bill can kill you in such a lawless city. If someone charges you 50,000 lempiras (about $2,100) to work, promising to kill you if you don’t pay, you can solve the problem by finding someone to kill that person for 30,000 lempiras—as countless people have explained to me. But that won’t work this time. It takes more than guts. These workers prefer not to descend into savagery.

  Every Saturday for six years this taxi guild puts 5,500 lempiras (about $230) in an envelope and gives it to a child without so much as saying a word. Every taxi driver adds 150 lempiras to the envelope. Two weeks ago, a telephone call came through: a voice demanding 20,000 lempiras as a Christmas bonus. They didn’t pay up. They said they couldn’t. “They’re playing with the hunger of our families,” the bravest driver of the group told me. “I made a report,” he added, “I testified with my face covered in a hood so that no one would recognize me.” Now he feels guilty because he thinks his report may be responsible for his co-worker’s murder. They had been warned. “On Thursday, that same kid came to the taxi station and put a gun to another driver’s temple. He froze, and the kid didn’t shoot. The driver locked himself in his house, turned off his cellphone, and said he wouldn’t talk to anyone.” His biggest weakness was his routine. “They get kids to study the numbers of each cab, the frequency of their trips, their schedules, where we live. With that, we can’t escape. We’re trapped. We’re easy prey. Don Mincho was murdered because he was first in line. They weren’t against him in particular. They were targeting the collective, not the person. If we go back, another one of us will fall tomorrow.”

  The next day, the doors to a church—a half-built shed—opened to a crowd of neighbors waiting in silence. While the drivers laid the coffin in a car bound for the cemetery, the National Party distributed discount cards from a small tent to the residents of the La Cachureca neighborhood. The presidential candidate Juan Orlando Hernández, defender of iron-fist policies, the one who peered down from his campaign poster as Don Mincho was shot, was giving away free t-shirts and registering voters. At least he had the decency to turn off the music that he usually blares throughout the neighborhood while he campaigns.

  After the religious ceremony, someone opened the coffin and, standing in line to view, hug, and kiss the body, the drivers wept—all of them—sharing stories of the last time they’d been with their colleague and friend. Moisés, the photographer, had the tact not to take any pictures, not wanting to identify any of the drivers with an image and caption that could blast through the internet. It’d be even worse if that face were followed by an article critiquing the police force or a gang. On the drive back home while trying to make a plan for tomorrow, one of the drivers explained: “There are only two options: pay the war tax or migrate to the US.”

  * * *

  The day after the murder, as night fell once again, the taxi station Los Dolores-El Bosque sat empty; the drivers, after losing a day of work, had to ask each other for loans. Two, three days later, the situation grew worse. Some of them, overtaken by a temporary feeling of intimacy as they recounted their problems to me, so that I could do my job—as Mairena had exhorted me to do—asked me for money, because they couldn’t go back to their jobs before paying off the extortion fee they owed. It seemed a reasonable exchange. Days passed with more of the same. I’d ask them questions, and they would explain to me different possible solutions, complaining of how fragmented they felt and recounting their arguments with each other until, finally, they were able to scrape together the 20,000 lempiras their extortionists demanded, and were finally able to get back to work. How did they manage it, in the end? Someone gave them a loan at a forty percent interest rate so that they’d be able to pay up, so that they’d be able to go back to their salary of 160 lempiras a day.

  Among the drivers once again putting their necks on the line was Mincho’s grandson, Daniel, who now sat behind the same wheel his grandfather had turned. Now he was responsible for scraping together the money for the same prescription medicine that had forced his grandfather to work beyond retirement. After seeing the new generation take the reins, and the cycle completed, my relationship to the story gradually faded. I limited myself to greeting Daniel with only two honks of the horn and a wave out the window of Mairena’s taxi whenever we crossed paths. In a week’s time, I stopped asking questions, sick of hearing answers that would never lead anywhere.

  Two months later there was news. The treasurer of the taxi guild of Los Dolores, the one who was in charge of collecting money every week from his co-workers and putting it in an envelope for the extortionists, the same who had worked with the taxi guild for years, and who everyone knew since he was a kid and who had cried as much as anyone else at Mincho’s funeral, was arrested by the newly created National Anti-extortion Force while carrying an inexplicably large amount of money. He was the one who had extorted his colleagues. No one was surprised. It was hardly news. The world learning that Henry—a taxi driver under the constant threat of death—had begun extorting his colleagues would do nothing to fix the situation, and would do nothing to help Mairena, and nothing at all to he
lp Mincho’s grandson.

  5

  FOUR BOARDS STRAPPED TO THE BACK

  Edwin Mejía didn’t want to work that morning. The seventy-five dollars he’d landed the day before by stealing a motorcycle with his friend was a fortune compared to the four dollars a day he typically pulled in selling his mother’s tortillas door to door. The teenager, just turned fifteen, was still lingering in his wooden one-room house, stretched out on the bed he shared with his brothers, when he told his partner-in-crime, Eduardo Aguilar, who’d come looking for him to go hit the streets, that he just wasn’t in the mood. “Come on, let’s go, we gotta go,” insisted Eduardo, who’d also just turned fifteen. Eduardo was planning to buy a phone with yesterday’s money. If he was as lucky today, he’d be able to buy himself a pair of white Nikes—a must-have for members of the Barrio 18 (18th Street) gang. Edwin caved. They drank a coffee before leaving the wooden hilltop house and heading to Tegucigalpa. It was almost lunchtime. They decided to stick to the same plan as yesterday: when they found their victim Eduardo would threaten him, and then together they would ride off on the stolen motorcycle. It would be a cinch: Edwin driving, with Eduardo riding on the back.

  Several kilometers away, in the center of Tegucigalpa, traffic officer Santos Arita started his twelve-hour workday. At forty-two years old, he’d spent most of his life regulating traffic in the towns and villages of northern Honduras. Arita had been relocated to Tegucigalpa two months before, and he anxiously awaited a change in luck that would let him go home. He missed his family. He wasn’t happy where they’d stationed him, in the capital. Three armed teenagers had already assaulted him once on a bus. He was afraid of working the streets in a city where people were willing to kill for anything. He’d told all this to his wife and kids; but no one had asked him if he was in the mood to work that day.

  According to a law meant to lower the murder rate, it’s illegal for two men to ride a motorcycle together. Crime is easy in this country, and a motorcycle makes for a fast escape. That’s why, in theory, and only in theory, motorcycles are kept under close watch. The boys, who were well aware of this law, couldn’t care less as they made their way downtown. They were also aware that virtually no one was ever caught. It was strange how in one of the poorest and most chaotic cities in the continent, where the law is seldom followed, what fated these two fledgling gang members to cross paths with a poor traffic officer was the fact that they had heeded a red light.

  Shortly after stealing the motorcycle, they stopped at a traffic light in front of one of the largest banks in Honduras. They didn’t see that just behind them Officer Arita was helping a woman, who held a parasol to protect her from the sun, cross the street. No one would have guessed that this would be his only and last good deed of the day. The very last of his life. No one trusts the police in Honduras, or thinks anything good of them. Officer Arita could have done what most officers do, could have pretended not to see, could have looked the other way, and let the boys go. But Arita wanted to do his job.

  What happened that afternoon at the traffic light was recorded on a security camera. When Arita saw the two boys on the bike, he left the woman with the parasol and ran after them. He grabbed the keys of the motorcycle and began to struggle with Eduardo, who reached for his gun and fired two times, missing his target. Edwin lurked just above the fight, trying to help his partner. In the confusion, he came away with the gun. That was when Arita lost his balance and fell to the ground. As he tried to get back on his feet, Edwin shot him, at close range, twice in the head. He died instantly. Calmly, Eduardo picked up the keys from the ground, waited for Eduardo to get back on the motorcycle, and sped away. The whole drama lasted only forty-two seconds.

  The passing drivers kept driving, trying to outrun their fear. No one intervened.

  The teenagers fled the scene on their motorcycle before abandoning it and continuing on foot down the middle of a five-lane avenue. They passed in front of the Clarion hotel, a Burger King, and a McDonald’s. They tried to take over a running bus, aiming their gun at the driver, who sped off. A pair of armed kids in plain daylight wasn’t something that surprised people in the center of Tegucigalpa. We’ve all seen it. To stay out of trouble, you only have to lock your car doors, hit the gas and pass the scene without gawking. Typically, they would have escaped. But they had killed a police officer and this time other officers took action. A police murderer shouldn’t go unpunished, not if it can be helped. Two officers gave chase, arrested the boys, and brought them to a station parking lot next to the Marriot Hotel, which is on the same block as the Presidential Palace, one of the most well-guarded buildings in the country. From that moment on, the police gave no further explanations. They didn’t let anyone view the security camera footage of the arrest, though footage of the murder was leaked to the press.

  * * *

  “They started beating us on our arms and feet. They would hit my head with the barrel of a gun, and they kept saying they were going to kills us,” Edwin told me a few weeks later as he was sitting in the jail’s courtyard. Several patrol officers and even a group of soldiers joined in the beating. When the police noticed that too many people were watching, they took the kids, now badly injured, to Tegucigalpa’s central police transit center. There, in an open-air parking lot, the beating continued for three hours. “One guy showed up who would grab me by the hair and pin me down so that another one could kick and punch me,” Edwin remembers. They’d laugh, insult, and threaten the boys while other agents took pictures with their phones.

  Eduardo was taken to Hospital Escuela, where he died four hours later. The autopsy showed that the cause of death was more than twenty hits to the base of the cranium with a blunt object, probably a gun. Edwin survived by pure accident, a mistake. They were after him. He was the one who’d fired the mortal shots.

  According to prosecutor Alexis Santos, the investigator for the case, the boys were not legally detained, something to alarm any prosecutor. It wasn’t an arrest, but a public lynching, a torture session. For Santos, the charges against the officers were obvious: illegal detention, torture with the result of death, neglect of an officer’s duties, and criminal cover-up. He thinks Eduardo’s death was part of a policy of “social cleansing” that would not be possible without the collaboration—of either enthusiasm or omission—from the local press. No government official or police officer was asked to comment, defend, or explain themselves, because no journalist asked them to.

  A local newspaper, La Tribuna, published pictures of the kids in police detention. The pictures showed Eduardo on the floor without a shirt, unconscious and covered in blood. Edwin was shown against a wall, handcuffed and also covered in blood, his eyes swollen.

  Publishing these pictures was in no way exceptional. It’s common for images of tortured or killed victims to wind up on the cellphones of local photographers. The photographer who receives this kind of picture knows who sent it, he comments on it through WhatsApp, and even publishes it. But in cases like this, the informant is not acting as a journalist, he doesn’t investigate the actions captured in the photograph, he doesn’t criticize, he doesn’t question, he doesn’t waste time grappling with theories on the protocols of a legal detention. Instead, in a case like this, he turns the published picture into an example.

  Journalists who publish these pictures wouldn’t even think to collaborate with the Public Prosecutor’s Office. They say they’re afraid. But it’s not true, they’re not afraid to collude with their police officer friends. The journalists and cops feed off each other. I’ve gotten to know this breed of journalist: I’m convinced they believe the police are in the right. Their bosses think this way, the big editors of the major Honduran outlets, and even the majority of readers think this way—not only do they approve of this violence, but they actively seek more blood. The epidemic of crimes taking over the country has given rise to a culture that believes in an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. “They’re too dangerous to be allowed to live, people
like that should die,” a reader commented when these pictures were published. “Too bad they didn’t kill the other one, I hope that they kill and rape him in Tamara [Prison],” another commenter hoped. “One less rat on earth,” a third added cheerfully.

  The prosecutor summarized the situation in one sentence: “People ask themselves what more could be investigated when we know he was the one who killed the police officer.” But Santos, unlike the press, does investigate, though he doesn’t think he’ll find the proof necessary to incriminate the police. When he asked for the names of the officers involved in the lynching, he was given a list of all the transit officers working that day, even the ones who worked many kilometers away. More than a hundred names in all. On top of that, not one officer was asked to testify. The prosecutor isn’t given an assistant or a car, not even a motorcycle to use to investigate a case. There’s no one to protect him when he faces the alleged murderers in police uniform. These are the same officers who could even pay him a surprise visit.

  * * *

  After the police murder, one family in Ocotepeque was left broken and impoverished. I met with them in a hotel in the city, some eight hours from the capital, weeks after the murder. Arita’s partner, twenty-eight-year-old Suyapa Pineda, came with her three kids: fourteen-year-old Joaquín, eleven-year-old Jairo, and six-year-old Marjorie. “My dad’s a policeman, but he was assaulted,” Marjorie said—many months later she still believed her dad was away working, and would soon return for a visit. The kids were hungry. Or that’s what they told me. After filling their bellies, they took me to their house. Honduran police officers, often accused of corruption or murder, live in miserable conditions. Not so different from their murderers. When I stepped into their house, I noticed how similar it was to any gangster’s house. Built of clay, with a cement floor, a precarious and leaky tin roof, and with two of its four walls made of wooden planks, you could barely even call it a room. “When you shut the door, the whole house shakes,” said the oldest son, Joaquín. The only furniture is two beds, a rickety couch, a pair of tables, and a lamp. There is no running water, and the kitchen is a wood stove. “The kids pick up in the morning and that’s where I cook,” said Suyapa. “Two days before they killed him, he went to Tegucigalpa with 200 lempiras and leaving 200 more with us. Santos would spend twelve hours without eating or drinking, standing in traffic under the sun, and, when he couldn’t handle it anymore, he’d have to ask someone for a few lempiras so that he could eat a tortilla and have a little water,” Suyapa explained, justifying police officers forced to ask for small bribes in exchange for not giving out a ticket at a traffic stop.