by W. E. Gutman
“Are you saying that the welfare of children is not a priority?”
“You’re putting words in my mouth and trying to embarrass Honduras by making unfair inferences.”
“Madam Vice President, you’re embarrassing yourself and your government by disregarding your own laws. A year ago, President Reina issued a decree banning the jailing of kids with adults, but judges have stubbornly ignored the ban. Why? Three separate articles in the Honduran Constitution specifically prohibit the incarceration of minors with adults, yet the two are routinely confined in the same small, crowded cells. Why?”
“You forget that Honduras is a very poor country,” pleaded the vice president, who had come to the reception in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz limousine and sported several pieces of diamond jewelry.
“Honduras is not a poor country,” I retorted. “It has great natural resources. You receive millions upon millions of dollars in foreign aid and yet you continue to extend the hand of beggary. Where does all that money go? It surely doesn’t seem to reach the people.”
“Look, this is the wrong time to discuss our problems.” Ms. Jerezano reached for a glass of wine, took a long sip, nodded her head and bid me a frosty good evening.
A foreign diplomat who’d witnessed the exchange chided me for my lack of tact.
“I’m not running for office. Freedom,” I responded, quoting George Orwell, “is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.”
When the stories I write give me nightmares or insomnia, it’s time to wake up and invade the cozy sleep of the unaware or the unmindful.
FRANCISCO’S NEW SHOES
Francisco's new shoes are scuffed, caked with prison slime. They're the relics of freedom divested, pride reviled, the symbols of impermanence, the vestiges of a modest reward granted him for exposing evil with an unassuming eloquence that would come back to haunt him.
Francisco knows this odious place, the turf, the vile smells, the hideous faces of human jackals who prey on the weak, the lonely. He's mastered the survival schemes, the tricks, the scams. He's faced fear, hopelessness, and the immutability of time. Staying alive at the San Pedro Sula penitentiary is no small feat. It's not so much the unbearable heat, the overcrowding, the biting insects, the vile food, the bedlam, the unspoken rage, the shrieks of despair in the dead of night. It’s the fear of going mad. Like the vultures circling overhead in satanic formation, psychosis waits its turn as other malignant emotions sap confidence and exhaust the very will to live.
Two years ago, accused of petty theft but never charged, Francisco and his twin brother -- they were 16 -- were jailed, illegally, for more than 18 months in a compound occupied by hardened adult felons. Corrections officers and older inmates alike took turns bullying and beating them. They also witnessed the rape of young prisoners by guards and trustees, an indiscretion they paid for by spending two weeks in a five foot square torture cell, along with a several other prisoners.
When Francisco and his brother were returned to the prison’s general population they discovered that the key to their locker had been stolen. They confronted a fellow prisoner. High on drugs, the prisoner lunged at Francisco with a knife, wounding him and killing his brother instantly.
In October 1997, following months of charges and counter-charges between him and Honduran authorities, Bruce Harris, Casa Alianza's Executive Director, presented this latest case in a long series of abuses to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission in Washington. Called to testify, Harris presented evidence of endemic atrocities committed against minors in the country's 24 penal institutions. He called for swift punishment of the perpetrators.
Accompanying Harris to Washington were various dignitaries, including the Honduran representative to the Organization of American States, Honduran Ambassador Marlene de Talbot, and Honduran Public Defender, Linda Rivera. Undoubtedly, the most important member of the delegation was Francisco himself. In riveting testimony to the Commission, Francisco described in detail his experiences as the San Pedro Sula prison. He spoke of the abuse, physical and sexual, that adult prisoners inflict on minors and he sketched a stark image of the terrible living conditions they are forced to endure. He told his galvanized audience about the torture chamber in which he and fellow inmates were herded and where they slept standing up in the intense heat; about the plastic bags in which some foul meal was served once a day and into which prisoners were forced to relieve themselves. Choking back the tears, he recounted how guards would come by at night, throw buckets of water into the cell then attach live electric wires on the metal grating against which the exhausted men were leaning.
“The guards were amused. They enjoyed the spectacle of sweating, hungry, tired, humiliated men squirming in pain every time they sent another jolt of current....”
When Francisco returned to Choloma, his north Coast hometown, Casa Alianza bought him two pairs of shoes. It was to be a good luck gift, his send-off on a steadier course, a more auspicious road ahead. But he had become something of a celebrity and, from hereon in, the easy target of an unrepentant and vengeful judiciary.
Predictably, Francisco was re-arrested in November and remanded to the same penitentiary on trumped-up charges, hearsay and circumstantial evidence that would have been summarily dismissed had Honduras' inquisitorial system not prevailed. Months of investigations and dozens of writs of habeas corpus filed by Casa Alianza's Legal Aid Office were routinely ignored. Francisco was still in jail when I last paid him a visit. Casa Alianza's attorney, Gustavo Escoto, Public Defender, Hector Arzu and this writer spent a day poring over Francisco's files at the Third Judicial District in San Pedro Sula. None found any proof of wrongdoing. Worse, Francisco had yet to be charged. Naked revenge by the State for his testimony in Washington and for the ensuing embarrassment Honduras suffered in the court of public opinion could not be discounted. An appeal was filed.
Shy, not given to idle chatter, his eyes and thoughts turned toward Choloma where his mother and young brothers and sisters awaited his return, Francisco spit in his fingers and rubbed the shoes' once lustrous leather face. Some of the former sheen yielded briefly to his gentle strokes but the elements and neglect are unforgiving and the gray dullness soon reappeared, as if to mock him, hastened by the burning sun and the hot swirling dust at his feet.
His selfhood impugned, his faith in human institutions shaken, Francisco waited for justice. In Honduras, in very special cases, innocence alone will not buy freedom or redeem a stained reputation. In his case it cost him his life. His bullet-riddled body was discovered in a vacant lot shortly after his release from prison. Corrections officers are on a short list of suspects. None will ever be prosecuted.
CATCH A FALLING STAR
“Children are like stars. They are lost in the flesh
of the night; but they can be found because they shine.
It is when they become the blackness, that we cannot see them,
that they cease to be children, that they are lost....”
Guillermo Yuscarán -- Son of Esquipula, Points of Light
Chusito’s star is larger than life but its radiance is fading. He will not be reborn from its embers.
“Things could be worse,” he says with an untimely sense of predestination. “Life could be forever.” Such blighted hope is inexplicable in someone so young. Chusito’s cynicism is finely tuned, deeply felt. He’s seen the dark side, endured the vulgarity of survival, faced the demons. He’s 13.
By day Chusito’s world is the carbon copy of a hundred Caribbean seaports: Sweltering heat, sparse touches of grace and opulence on a canvas of squalor and misery. There are unkempt beaches and scum-covered canals in which float, half-submerged, the cadavers of indifference -- trash, human waste, broken-down appliances. Grubby side streets are lined with sleazy bars where locals chug beer and engage garishly painted harlots; darkened pool halls where drug deals are made, and fast-sex bordellos.
La Ceiba, a city of 300,000 continues to spread, fatigued an
d imperiled, without a plan, without a vision. Like a once-pretty woman, it is now compromised by the elements, ravaged by age, neglect, apathy. Many buildings are cracked, teetering on the brink of collapse. A few eventually crumble in heaps of worn brick and mortar, raising storms of acrid dust in their final agony.
An incessant stream of Diesel-fueled vehicles emits lung-crunching fumes and produces a dissonance of intolerable pitch that assaults the ears, grinds nerves. Dodging each other, motorcycles, Lilliputian taxis and overloaded carts pulled by emaciated mules jockey for space on crowded, unregulated thoroughfares. The frenetic pace only heightens the feeling of weariness, the exhaustion that such momentum creates. It’s a city driven by reflex, surviving on hidden reserves of energy akin to frenzy or exasperation.
It’s also a city that begs to be loved, for the people have endearing traits, but it also elicits impatience, annoyance and revulsion. Small parks where young lovers meet to steal kisses are littered with trash. Benches are encrusted with guano. Loitering aimlessly, spitting dejectedly, old men wait for the passage of time, as if time were a destination, not a conveyance. A pervasive smell of decay, excrement and death wafts on the wings of intermittent seaborne breezes.
This is Honduras’ third largest city. Most travelers pass through on their way to the open spaces and cooling zephyrs of the Bay Islands. At night, after the sun’s copper disk has set the sea on fire, La Ceiba turns into a den of Gomorrahan depravity. No lust, however vile, remains unquenched for very long. Here, demand feeds supply. Drugs and human flesh are the commodities of choice, and purveyors abound.
Chusito knows this all too well. Abandoned by his parents when he was six, addicted to the shoe glue Resistol, he succumbed to the vile commerce, to survive, to cheat reality. There is no shame and degradation when hunger beckons and hopelessness warps all reason. But Chusito is paying the ultimate price for clinging so passionately to life. He’s dying of AIDS.
La Ceiba is one of the hubs for child prostitution. Tourists regularly come to Honduras to exploit minors. While there is no organized child prostitution, networks exist that supply children to pedophiles. Many of the girls are well under 16. There is a street for boys, too. Carnivals and other events attract large numbers of visitors who exercise great stealth, pay cash and command the silence of their accomplices.
At least 300 minors live on the streets of La Ceiba. Most are between the ages of 10 and 16. Most are boys. Illiteracy, poverty, alcoholism, irresponsible paternity are all at work. Most families have not a gram of conscience when it comes to procreation. Use of Resistol among the kids is widespread. Produced by H.B. Fuller, the Minnesota-based manufacturer of adhesives, paints and solvents, it’s sold freely throughout Central America. Pimps and sex tourists often pay the children with cans of the deadly glue. It’s a case of turpitude further debased by criminal indifference.
In the shelter where he is being cared for, Chusito drifts between excruciating awareness and merciful stupor. Eternal night waits. He will soon be free. Outside, mumbling incoherently, a madwoman, bedraggled, froth caking the corners of her mouth, exchanges stones and insults with vagrants who taunt her. Hoping to squeeze the last traces of pity from a parade of self-absorbed amblers, a cripple displays his horrible deformities. Crying with a studied constancy and resonance, a beggar exposes a newborn at her naked left breast.
Feral dogs, traumatized by hunger, rejection and loneliness, respond to a friendly whistle or the offer of a caress with sidelong glances filled with sadness, mistrust, fear. Head low, tail tucked between their legs, they have surrendered to forces heretofore unimagined, now braved with stoic resignation. They do not have the energy to bark.
In the distance, standing legs wide apart for maximum balance in the shade of a big old tree, a policeman stares catatonically in the void to stay cool, conserve energy, perhaps to guard against the incongruity that surrounds him.
On the street corner, near the Colonial Hotel where I spent the night, a man beckons. “Anything you want, man: Weed? Coke? Girls? Young kids? Name your pleasure.”
I describe him to a policeman but the officer stares at me blankly, his eyes-half shut. He waves me off. It’s nearly lunch-time. In the noonday heat even duty takes a siesta.
IN XIBALBA’S ENTRAILS
Pleasure is as personal a sensation as pain. No one feels pleasure in quite the same way, or endures pain with the same degree of forbearance, dignity or poise. With irrefutable wisdom, nature has deemed fit to trigger or prolong pain, alerting to the presence of trauma or warning of illness. And with perverse irony, nature has also found it useful to abridge the most intense of all physical pleasures -- orgasm -- to ensure that once discovered, ephemeral ecstasy leads to anticipation, that memory stimulates repetition. It’s all tediously simple: We eat so we can get hungry yet another day. Survival manipulates the palate; procreation drives the sexual urge. Were it not for a fleeting spurt of indescribable bliss, would anyone engage in intercourse? Reduced to its primeval core, life combines the pursuit of pleasure with the conscious avoidance of pain. If pleasure delayed is pleasure enhanced, pain unheeded is pain augmented. Only in the most aberrant cultures, among a small remnant of penitent monks, or to the most unrestrained masochists does pain have any redeeming virtue. Pain does not ennoble. In the best of cases, pain is a distraction; in the worst, it’s an incomprehensible and cruel ordeal.
These were the thoughts, jumbled and ill-defined, that coursed through my mind when I broke a metatarsal bone in my right foot in the picturesque village of Copán Ruinas, Honduras. Losing my balance as a loose slab of concrete disintegrated under me, my foot lurched violently sideways in a split-second mishap that produced instantaneous and searing pain. Feeling stupid and angry at myself, I limped toward the El Sesteo Restaurant, intent on keeping my date with Don Crescencio.
*
Discretion, cunning, stealth are useful commodities even in the best of times. To Don Crescencio, they’re essential virtues, the very tools of survival in a realm where the wrong word, credulity and imprudence will kill.
We huddle at a table, side by side, facing the wall in the darkest corner of the El Sesteo. Throbbing with pain, my foot swells and turns a dark shade of blue. We first talk about this and that like neighbors across a picket fence. Then I mention Xibalba.
Don Crescencio stares at me, unknowing, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. He’s never heard of Xibalba. But the word, the abstraction, the fullness of its Mayan resonance, awaken a strange clairvoyance of time past and kindles intuitive images of teachings now lost, ancestral wisdom submerged under centuries of alien doctrine and hostile rule. His copper features soften.
“Xibalba, you say?”
“Yes.” I draw closer. “It’s a place where misery, suffering, disease and death reign, where tears turn to rivers and the laughter of children is seldom heard. The Spaniards call it infierno. I hear there is such a place not far from here.”
Don Crescencio smiles without pleasure. The abstraction is all too real. He leans into me, speaking in a low, raucous voice, his hand at my back, his lips burning my cheek, his breathing labored from chain smoking, chronic bronchitis, perhaps worse.
Xibalba is a circumstance, not a place. It reaches across a hundred hamlets, a thousand communities; it casts its pall on nearly a million people in these parts. Don Crescencio hopes that the truths he will help me unearth do not fall on deaf ears.
“What your eyes see, your mouth must speak.”
It’s a tall order.
“Hasta mañana, a la diez,” he says. I turn briefly to pay for the soft drinks. Don Crescencio vanishes like an apparition.
*
Don Crescencio is punctual; it’s an oddity in these parts. We have coffee. I sip mine; he gulps his down. He’s anxious to get going. He feels ill at ease and does not like to dawdle in Copán. After all, it is here that his compañero, the charismatic and beloved Maya chieftain, Cándido Amador Recinos, was brutally, senselessly murdered. Don Crescencio swears he
can still smell the blood.
I’m in considerable pain. My foot is tightly bandaged. I fashioned an old broomstick into a makeshift crutch.
“Frontera, frontera! Guatemala, Guatemala!” exhorts a young boy atop a pickup truck, his voice hoarse from a regimen of daily broadcasts to campesinos and backpackers. Don Crescencio flags the vehicle.
“Climb in, sit and be quiet. You don’t know me,” he instructs, looking the other way, his lips barely moving.
“Where do I get off?”
“At the junction, by the schoolhouse, one kilometer before the border.”
“What about you?”
“Just go.”
I comply and straddle a wheel well. There are 13 of us, men, women, patriarchs and small children, two bicycles, an old tire, several rolls of barbed wire, a handful of scrawny chickens that cackle plaintively, and a whimpering suckling pig in a canvas sack. We all huddle in reluctant intimacy, the wind in our hair, dust scouring our faces. It’s about six kilometers to the junction and my coccyx will ache for days but the scenery is stunning and I hang on for dear life as the truck navigates the winding, bumpy road ahead like flotsam on a stormy sea.
*
The truck screeches to a halt. Several riders disembark and scatter. A toothless old man who’d been napping lifts the brim of his sombrero, arches his eyebrows and signals for me to get off. I comply. The truck groans back into gear, gains momentum and hobbles out of sight behind a hairpin turn on its final leg to the Guatemalan border.
I’m alone. An eerie silence prevails. I look for Don Crescencio but all I see is a ribbon of road and the mountains. In the distance, vultures ride the thermals against a blazing sky.
Two young men leap out of the bushes and, with unsettling urgency, beckon me to follow. I hesitate.
“No te preocupe. Don’t worry. Don Crescencio is waiting.” I relax. Meet Paulino and Adám García, my guides. The trail we take is fringed with heavy scrub. Paulino leads, setting a brisk and cadenced stride. Adám takes the rear. It’s about two kilometers to El Carisalon, on foot, mostly up steep, winding inclines and dizzying slopes littered with sharp rocks and gouged with depressions that jar every bone in my body. Panting, bathing in sweat, my foot throbbing, I stop. Paulino points to a tree.