by Alberto Arce
The next Monday I had time to go back to the city’s chief of police to demand an explanation for standing me up. The PR liaison, Ana Velásquez, defended the office with a classically irrefutable argument: “Scheduling problems.” And she got rid of me, directing me to the office of Deputy Chief of Police Miguel Martinez Madrid. “He can help you, he has a TV show. I don’t know if you’ve seen ‘Cops’ on TV. He really understands the needs of the press.”
The public relations agent had a point. Martinez Madrid is the perfect example of someone a journalist would consider a good source. Young, elegant, educated, conceited, he’s like a clean-cut cop from the 1950s, but his office looks like that of a high-class lawyer or doctor, not that of a policeman. His societal diagnosis seems more focused than that of his superiors. His comportment is typical of second-tier public employees, those who participate in the system without changing one comma in its narrative. I don’t think they’re any more honest than their bosses, though they might be less hypocritical. At least they don’t dodge questions or try to hide the truth.
In Martinez Madrid’s reality, despite the grave displacements of people, no one—not the police, nor the Public Ministry, nor the United Nations Office in Honduras—is capable of giving exact numbers. The number of houses occupied by the gangs is on the rise in Tegucigalpa, but that’s not the case for the number of reported incidents. “Though we have Intelligence information on the areas where a problem has been detected, we can’t clear out houses if we don’t have complaints,” Martinez Madrid admits.
The victims have become invisible refugees without any campaigns to support them, surviving without the solidarity of European NGOs. Not even the victims themselves see themselves as refugees. For that to happen, someone would have to acknowledge that the country is at war.
The same night I spoke with Martinez Madrid, eighty-two-year-old Oscon Armando Ochoa didn’t get the chance to run from his extortionists. They shot him seven times, point blank, inside his own home.
* * *
Francisco Moncada lives in the center of Tegucigalpa, a few blocks from the Parque Central. Every night he gets together with some neighbors to talk and smoke cigarettes or to take their dogs out for a walk. For many years he hasn’t been able to do this without carrying a gun. He has one of the prettiest houses in the neighborhood, built in the 1940s, and he says he won’t dare paint it for fear that gangs would notice his socioeconomic status and start extorting him, which is exactly what happened to a neighboring business. The gang demanded 20,000 lempiras (about $1,000), and the business paid it. “This was once a pretty area, where one could sit or stroll, now it’s full of ruins and trash. Tegucigalpa is a dead city.”
Moncada got so scared when he saw my published article that he decided to write me this message: “I remember having that conversation in our neighborhood, in front of my house, but, to be frank, you never asked me for an interview, nor did you ask for my permission to publish what we talked about. I think exposing my case just to get a few more lines for your story was dangerous and reckless, I gave you the trust fit for a foreigner, I opened the doors to my house, I never gave you an interview. If I shared my worries about painting or not painting my house, it was only so that you see our reality, not for you to expose me. If you were at risk, you’d book a flight out of here. If I start getting extorted, I would have to save for an entire year to get out of here. Think about what you did.”
As a journalist, my conscious is clear. I followed the rules in identifying myself, explaining that I was looking for impressions about door-to-door extortions, and I spent a good amount of time with him taking notes, notebook in hand, asking him for details of his situation and biography. But as a person, of course, my conscience is not clear. If something were to happen to him, I’d blame myself. His fear is mine.
9
ONE COFFIN, ONE VOTE
I was looking for information about a murder, but instead I found coffins.
I’d gone to the Tegucigalpa municipal morgue, one of those daily journalistic pilgrimages one makes to compile reactions, check quotes, or look for sources to explain what’s happening. It’s the central hub for the two biggest commodities of Honduras: poverty and death.
At the morgue, I found myself with Luis Membreño, crying uncontrollably for his nineteen-year-old brother Marvin, who was murdered with three shots to the head a few hours previously in a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. Next to him were relatives of Marco Almendárez, a fifty-two-year-old security guard, and the family of José Jamaca, twenty-nine years old; both were murder victims.
In that sad group of people one person stood out. Her name is Carla Majano and, though she appeared to be visibly grieving, she was not a relative, or a neighbor of one of the families, but a politician. Working for the city’s Office of the Environment, she goes to the morgue to act as a “liaison” for the poorest families, helping those who would otherwise be forced to bury their loved ones in a sheet to obtain access to free coffins and candles. Carrying a stack of folders and two cellphones, she explained that in less than half a year she’s put forty-five families in contact with the “Mortuary of the People.”
In other countries, politicians trying to win the votes of the most humble populations will give away new shoes or aluminum sheets to build roofs for shacks; in Honduras they give away coffins and fund funerals. Honduras—a funeral home with its own flag and constitution.
The program didn’t grow out of the crime wave washing over Honduras, but as part of the political campaign of Ricardo Alvarez, the mayor of Tegucigalpa. The Mortuary of the People works out of a rundown office, dusty and invaded by the streetside traffic roar, a few steps from the capital’s historic center. It’s full of coffins of every type and size (grey for adults, white for kids), boxes of candles, and packaged snacks. The budget is 150,000 lempiras a month (some $7,600). The coffin for the Membreño family is the 701st coffin that the funeral home has given away this year; since it was established, in 2006, the funeral home has given away almost 5,000 coffins.
Free coffins mean loss of profits for private funeral homes: the cheapest coffin runs at 2,500 lempiras ($125), to which you have to add the cost of transportation, the cost of the burial plot, and the cost of installation. The package deal of a private funeral home, with the funeral service included, can climb upwards of 20,000 lempiras (around $1,000), and the minimum salary in Honduras is fixed at 6,000 lempiras a month ($300). The Mortuary of the People offers the same, but for zero lempiras.
Jose Gutierrez, employee of the Funeral Home of Santa Rita, next door to the municipal morgue, complains that politicians have given his business unfair competition. “We’re salesmen, of course, but we have a heart; when a very poor family can’t pay, we call the free funeral service ourselves.”
But this commercial battle isn’t only between the Mortuary of the People and the private funeral services. The political program is so successful that when an electoral campaign is near, imitators pop up. The funereal politics of businessman and aspiring mayor Tito Asfura are less demanding, and more arbitrary, than those of the current mayor. Asfura successfully circumvented the municipal bureaucracy that weighs down the inner workings of the Mortuary of the People.
“Tito Asfura does it better than Ricardo Alvarez. He doesn’t ask any questions or demand paperwork. He even chips in for gas and, sometimes, food,” explains Felipe Leon, another “friend” who waits at the door of the morgue to receive the body of Jamaca and take it to the cemetery.
The third competitor is the president of the National Congress, Juan Orlando Hernandez (currently the president of Honduras). His program “Coming Back Home” has national reach and covers the cost of transportation from the place of death to the morgue, whether that’s a block away or to the jungle of Mosquitia. This is the model the family of the third victim, Marco Almendarez, chooses. Almendarez was from the city of Comayagua, and didn’t qualify for either of the first two funeral services.
The m
oney comes out of a congressional expense fund (or “reptile fund”), which doesn’t have to be disclosed. Some politicians give away coffins, others pay for the European Master’s degrees of their friends’ kids or the Miami shopping sprees of their neighborhood political operatives.
And, of course, one can always stoop lower.
* * *
At dawn, in front of the morgue, there are three pickups full of bodies wrapped in white plastic bags. The deliverymen want to finish quickly, and aren’t doing much talking. When the caravan gets to the city cemetery, only two journalists are there to observe the officers stacking the bodies on the floor. The teeth of a mechanical shovel tear some of the bags open: an arm falls out, a limb peeks through, and the green liquid of the decomposing bodies spills over the lid of the pit. A priest says a blessing and sprinkles holy water over the bodies. Almost no one wants to watch. No families are present. “It might be that there was a miscommunication, that they haven’t been informed of the death, or that they simply don’t have the money to pay for the cost and they’re embarrassed to show up now. It can also be that they just don’t know, because most of these bodies haven’t been identified,” Marvin Duarte tries to justify himself. This is their third burial in a month. “At the morgue we have the capacity for forty bodies and today we had sixty-five, but in July it was worse—one day we had eighty-five bodies that hadn’t been picked up.”
“It’s not just the fridge that’s full, there’s also no space in the cemetery,” Duarte adds.
Working as the occasional fixer for other foreign journalists wanting to understand and tell the story of Honduras within a week, the common grave at the public cemetery has become a regular stop on my guided tours.
10
HALLUCINATIONS
Light poles are machine guns.
The man with the square sombrero from a Magritte painting doesn’t have an apple in the middle of his face, but a grenade.
The bald campesino in sunglasses and with the weathered face in Grant Wood’s American Gothic has traded in his rake for an M-16.
A half-collapsed wall, a rusted gate, heaps of trash on street corners, an abandoned dog.
A drunk, stumbling in the street, halts, surprised to find Mona Lisa wielding a pink gun. He raises his hands and starts talking with her as he would with a police officer. “I haven’t done anything, I haven’t done anything.”
* * *
The Maeztro hasn’t done so badly. When his graffiti became famous, foreign donors, always on the lookout for new artists, offered him help. He received funds, publicity, support, coverage. But he didn’t sell himself out to the siren calls of political correctness. Not to the left or the right.
The Maeztro makes his own glue, boiling flour and mixing it with water. “It’s the best glue, and also a lot cheaper.” He prints copies at four dollars apiece. His last work was a montage based on the show Battlestar Galactica. Its protagonists were the main presidential candidates of Honduras—among them Romeo Vásquez, the general behind the 2009 coup d’état; Salvador Nasrallah, a well-known sports and television game show host; Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of the National Congress, candidate of the rightwing National Party of Honduras, and current president of the country; as well as the overthrown president, Manuel Zelaya, and his wife, Xioamara Castro. All of them behind Barack Obama and the words, “All eat at the Lord’s table,” and the date of the election: 24 November 2013.
* * *
To avoid getting too close to the hooded guy painting something weird on the wall, drivers make a light movement of the steering wheel, as they do with any minimally different person they bump into.
Painting on the streets is not easy in a country that survived a coup d’état less than three years ago; nor is it, of course, without risk. “There was a time when the police were really after anyone working in the streets.” Now the risk has lessened, but it hasn’t disappeared. In the end, what he does is illegal. There are places he’d like to paint, but can’t. Places of power, the presidential house or political offices. The violence he denounces has also affected him first-hand, but he’s overcome his fear. His anecdotes of violence belong to Honduras and its youth. If you haven’t been through what Maeztro Urbano has been through, you haven’t been on the streets. He remembers a night when he was out tagging and heard the motor of a car slowing down. “I looked behind me just in time to see the window rolling down and a gun peeking out. Without speaking a word, they shot into the air three times. They didn’t get me. I was really lucky.”
11
NIGHT OF THE FIRE
If something goes right in Honduras, it’s usually by luck. And if the country isn’t completely shot at this point, it’s only because citizens know what they can demand from authorities: after being locked up in prison for seventeen years for killing a man who’d been harassing his father, Marco Antonio Bonilla saved the lives of dozens of prisoners and became a hero.
On the night of 14 February 2012, a cigarette butt, or maybe it was a smoldering match, set a mattress on fire in a dorm room in the Comayagua prison farm, about an hour outside of Tegucigalpa. The fire spread quickly through the bartolinas, the Honduran term for the human containers in which hundreds of prisoners are crammed on three-level bunk beds. Within a quarter of an hour 361 people had died. Prison guards started shooting into the air, thinking that a massive prison break was taking place. And then the guards ran. The only reason more men didn’t die was because Marco found a key on the ground and did what the guards should have done: he opened the doors.
In Honduran prisons, inmates turn their bunks into small homes festooned with personal objects. A spark on a mattress can spread not only to clothing, but also to a television or a freezer powered by flammable gas, causing an explosion of flame that could easily reach adjacent bunks, often only a few centimeters away. The ventilation corridors between the cells provide oxygen to further fan the flames.
When the fire began, there were only six guards on duty to maintain control of 860 inmates in a space built for 400. Four of the guards were in the guard towers, while only two patrolled the actual units. The keys to all the cells were in the hands of just a single officer. Half of the inmates, not yet convicted, were still awaiting their trials. A few of the survivors I met had nearly been burned alive for crimes as trivial as selling pirated DVDs at a traffic stop. Others, who I never had the chance to meet, were arrested for being drunk in public on a Saturday night.
* * *
The night of the fire, Marco had been sleeping in the infirmary, the only room in the unit that was not locked with a key. He was in charge of helping patients who might have an emergency in the middle of the night. His relative freedom, won through hard work and good conduct, was what allowed him the chance to save lives.
“I was lying down when I heard some inmates screaming, calling for help. I went to the key-man and told him we needed to help them, that we needed to get those guys out of there before they died. The guard threw the keys on the floor and left … Remembering these details is a little hard for me. It’s sad hearing your friends yell for help. ‘Shorty, shorty,’ they called out to me, ‘don’t let us die. Open the door, shorty.’ It was hard because I couldn’t figure out how to open the door. I could hear them calling me from one place, and then calling from another. I didn’t want anybody to die.”
“How many people did you save?”
“I couldn’t say. A few. A lot.”
“How many?””
“…”
“More or less. An approximate number.”
“About 250, I think.”
Marco keeps his gaze locked to the floor as he weighs his words. Despite his heroics and the promise of a presidential pardon from Lobo, he remains in prison. Which is maybe why he still justifies how the guards acted when they ran and failed to do their duty. “It wasn’t lack of courage. They wanted to save themselves, avoid the risk of getting burned.” Marco doesn’t mention that the guards fired into
the air, or that some of the inmates were able to escape their cells on their own.
I tried, repeatedly, to get in contact with the guards who ran off, but none of them were willing to talk. It’s easy to imagine the weight of the responsibility on their shoulders. Their replacements at the prison spread impossible-to-verify rumors: one guard killed himself; another was sent to be killed by the family members of the inmates who’d burned to death; another had become a drunk.
* * *
On the night of the fire, not a single prison official called the fire department. The first person to make a call was a worker at a nearby gas station. When the fire department called the prison to confirm the incident, nobody picked up the phone.
On the night of the fire, firefighters had to wait ten minutes outside the prison doors. They weren’t afraid of the flames, but of the shooting. It was a question of protocol. The prison standard is that in case of fire, guards should shoot into the air to alert their co-workers. Only when the shooting subsided could the firefighters enter the prison.
On the night of the fire, the chief firefighter, Alberto Turcios, wasn’t taken completely by surprise. In 2006 and 2007, he had written reports informing prison officials about the dangers of what could happen if a fire spread in Comayagua. Reports that nobody read.
* * *
President Porfirio Lobo never signed the pardon he’d promised Marco. The law doesn’t allow pardons for people convicted of murder or sentenced to more than five years in prison; for once in Honduras the law was followed to the letter. In a country that is able to make twenty constitutional modifications in one legislative session, no politician felt any interest in extending a pardon. Marco has fourteen more years behind bars.
The other characters in this story, especially those who bear the most guilt, had better luck.