by W. E. Gutman
The prime suspect’s car was then heard speeding toward Corralitos. One witness said he heard gunshots not far from where Cándido’s cadaver was discovered. A spent .22 caliber shell was recovered at the site. The autopsy confirmed three .38 mm bullet wounds. Cándido’s body also bore multiple stab wounds. The medical examiner could not say whether they’d been inflicted before or after he was shot. Cándido, who wore shoulder-length hair, had also been scalped.
Landowners and cattle ranchers took paid ads in several newspapers in support of the prime suspect. The ads asserted without offering a shred of evidence that Cándido had been robbed of a large sum of “foreign aid money” with which he’d been entrusted and then killed. Landowners then allegedly conspired with the police to implicate two common crooks. Drunk when arrested, the pair first confessed to the murder then recanted, claiming they’d been paid hush money. The duo were jailed briefly and released. They were never heard from again. A lawyer representing a group of Copán hoteliers, restaurateurs and tour operators threatened to sue me and the editor of the paper in which my exposés were published. Under Honduras’s inquisitorial system, as it is in other Latin American countries, telling the truth is no defense against a charge of libel.
Cándido’s murder was condemned by Honduras’ indigenous communities. It remains unsolved to date. The Maya, who describe the investigation as “a travesty and a monumental hoax,” have not forgotten and continue to demand justice.
“We want our enemies to know that Cándido’s death has made us stronger and more resolute in our struggle,” Juan said as we parted, his hands on my shoulders, his inscrutable Mayan black eyes burning into mine.
“Make sure they get the message.”
*
The press called Cándido’s death “a contemptible murder,” but stopped short of naming names. Human rights groups also criticized the National Agrarian Institute, arguing that Cándido would still be alive had it provided his people with legal title over lands that were legitimately theirs to claim.
Redoubling their efforts to deflect further scrutiny, Copán landowners went on a counteroffensive, accusing Juan of killing Cándido in a leadership power struggle. The police cleared Juan. This did not prevent Juan from weeping in my arms when we met again a couple of months later by the venerable old tree. He then took a crumpled square of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it slowly and handed it to me. It read, in part:
“Our ancestors took a wrong turn and followed a course so errant that they painted themselves into a cultural dead-end. I will not allow their posterity -- our people -- to be subdued and led to final extinction by today’s conquistadors. I know this will earn me enemies. I know I might die at their hands. If I do, make sure everyone knows the truth....”
Written in Spanish, the note was signed by Cándido and dated April 10, 1997. He would be murdered two days later.
Fifteen years have passed since Cándido’s violent death. Evidence of foul play, incontrovertible and damning, continues to pile up, baffling some, turning others to stony silence. Dozens of Maya activists would be killed over land disputes in recent years. Juan would be next
*
Few, if any, believe that Cándido’s death, as infomercials planted in various dailies soon after the killing implied, was “engineered to fabricate an indigenous martyr,” or was the result “of intra-ethnic disputes,” or the culmination of “insurmountable personal problems.”
“Next, they’ll say that Cándido died of self-inflicted stab and bullet wounds, and that, for dramatic effect, he also scalped himself,” quipped a demonstrator at a human rights rally in Tegucigalpa. Instead, as maturing evidence suggests, Hondurans have quietly concluded that Cándido was eliminated by landowners and cattle ranchers who felt threatened by his firebrand activism.
“Since colonial times,” said Juan, “foreigners have plotted to silence our past and usurp our future. They plundered our resources and deprived us of our hereditary rights. Not only did they snatch and parcel out among themselves the ill-gotten booty -- gold, arable lands, wells, water rights and large stretches of pristine riparian and coastal areas -- they also stole and commercially exploited territories traditionally inhabited by our people.”
Contrary to assertions made in the press, the Maya have only grudgingly endured the “passive role” imposed on them by tourism. Cándido had characterized tourism as “a mercenary commerce controlled by the state and local landed gentry, and ‘sewn up’ by foreign developers assured of government cooperation and afforded significant economic incentives and political leverage.”
Cándido is also quoted as having asked: “What? [tourists] will trudge up the mountain and gawk at the ‘quaint Indians’ and take pictures of our grass huts and womenfolk and children, and commiserate with our elders, perhaps buy a few trinkets? Or they will marvel, for an hour or two, at the tattered vestiges of the ‘mighty Maya’ before retiring to air-conditioned hotels and guest houses -- none of which we own -- and dine in eateries none of us can afford to patronize? We’ve never seen a centavo from the proceeds collected at the Archeological Park or a fraction of the tourist dollars spent in local establishments.”
*
Cándido knew that his rhetoric could cost him his life. He accepted the risks and often publicly declared that he was ready to die for his people. Maya activism, Cándido had warned, would be met with intimidation, threats, illegal arrests and detentions, evictions, arson, calumny, fraudulent lawsuits, even assassinations, all designed to quell legitimate dissent and dismember his people.
His prophecies came true.
*
For the past fifteen years, indigenous groups have demanded that Cándido’s killers be apprehended and tried. The Maya also appealed to five successive chiefs of state to heed “our urgent call for justice and to help us in our struggle to regain our ancestral lands -- two of the causes for which Cándido Amador sacrificed his life.” Their pleas fell on deaf ears.
Juan’s revelations, aired in my articles but without attribution, would inflame passions and reanimate the debate. Juan had wanted more. In addition to the killers, he’d called for “the intellectual authors or abettors of this heinous crime” -- allegedly some members of Honduras’s Congress -- “to be unmasked and brought to justice.” This would prove to be a formidable mission in a nation where politics, bribes and secrecy drive justice, where might, not right, speaks loudest.
*
Tribal counselor, poet, activist, trusted informant and friend, Juan, with whom I’d met a fortnight earlier, wrote me a long note. Entitled, “Letter from Xibalba,” it would be his last communication. Set in pencil in large cursive script on unlined paper, his words lost neither their lyricism nor their chilling premonitory character. Intertwined in Juan’s cadenced discourse, elegy and prophecy merged in a reaffirmation of faith through fatalism, tenacity through despair. I reread it often and grieve.
“We keep meeting, you and I, like thieves or hunted beasts, in the anonymity of an ebbing throng or in some darkened corner, two ghostly shadows merging in the night. Inevitably, our thoughts turn to our fallen brother, Cándido. We mourn him still. The night of 12 April 1997 is a date now branded on the collective memory of our people. It continues to burn our souls. Our lives were shattered, our hopes dashed. Centuries of pain and humiliation surged in our throats, like some foul bile. For all of us had in some way been shot, stabbed, disfigured and dishonored that fateful day and left to rot on the side of the road.
“Everyone wept. Despair and fear and disbelief fed tears and the tears irrigated the parched April soil. Men, women, children, fists clenched, eyes fixed toward the heavens, all cried out: ‘Cándido, you are gone! Cándido, great is our loss. But fear not. We shall rise and cry out: Never again without land, without food, without health, without education. Your spirit and that of our ancestors will shepherd us along the way. We shall prevail.
“Cándido’s executioners are still free. Tell the world that we face extinction, that de
mocracy, the voice and tool of freedom, has betrayed us. Tell the world that indigenous people are being dismembered, that we are rapidly sinking into the abyss.
“The gods are angry. Great is their wrath. We shall emerge from the depths of Xibalba and the wicked shall at last countenance the horror of their ways. And Cándido’s martyrdom shall not have been in vain. Say all that, compañero, over and over so that you and I may one day walk arm-in-arm, our heads held high.”
*
A month after I received Juan’s haunting letter, I learned through a mutual friend that Juan had been killed in an ambush near the mountain village of El Carisalon. His body, riddled with AK-47 bullets, had been dumped in a garbage-strewn ravine. Vultures were feeding on him when he was found.
*
Embargoed until I was safely out of Honduras, an investigative report detailing the circumstances of Cándido’s assassination and including portions of Juan’s letter was published prematurely in the now-defunct Honduras This Week, forcing me to decamp from Copán in great haste.
On the morrow of its publication, the article, like a trail of blazing gunpowder, ignited the Maya communities around Copán. Led by elders and tribal counselors, hundreds of men and women with babies in tow seized and occupied the Archeological Park for several days, barring access to tourists and costing the Park several thousand dollars in lost revenue. Newspapers ran photos of large clusters of Maya gathered in prayer at the foot of the ancient tabernacles their ancestors had erected. Many were brandishing rolled-up copies of Honduras This Week.
Where you can’t impose your presence, make yourself scarce.
COPÁN: BEHIND THE FAÇADE
There’s nothing like bad news from afar to spoil a well-earned sabbatical and coax a reporter back into the fray. Take the July 10, 1999 slaughter in a Copán pulperia (grocery store) that claimed five lives and scorched the soul of this quaint and somnolent village habituated to intermittent violence and accustomed to looking the other way.
Five people. Was it an accident? Was it vengeance? Were they the victims of mistaken identity? Were they felled in a drunken rapture, as one outlandish report alleged, by giddy outsiders celebrating a soccer victory? Or were they targeted for assassination in a drug deal gone bad? Speculation was rife. When the smoke lifted, dozens of spent AK-47, 40mm- and 9mm-caliber shells lay on the ground, silent witnesses in a drama that began and ended with lightning speed in the rain after dusk. The discarded shells offered few clues. Everyone is armed in these parts.
Nor is there anything like a community that hurriedly mops up the blood, plugs up bullet-riddled walls with cement and seals its collective lips in a terror-driven reflex that blunts one’s sense of well-being. Nothing like a craven and dimwitted constabulary -- the murderers got away and the leads grew cold -- to cast grave doubt on the probity of Copán’s police and resurrect rumors of criminal collusion. Nothing like a timid, controlled press -- mainstream dailies buried the story on their back pages -- to raise doubts about a nation’s health and moral fiber. Nothing like yet another senseless crime in a country long tormented by lawlessness, traumatized by the greed, arrogance and ineptitude of successive regimes, and disgraced by the ceaseless suffering of its people, to explain why visitors are scarce and a vigorous tourist trade is but a distant dream.
*
In 2006, speaking on condition of anonymity, a retired CIA analyst and former faculty member at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International studies with whom I’d worked in the mid-80s (he was until recently a consultant on terrorism and bio-chemical warfare) offered this sobering assessment:
“Unemployment, poverty, violence, human rights abuses and political lethargy all risk taking Honduras to the brink of civil disorder. Only swift and massive reforms can reverse years of corruption, government incompetence and apathy, and decades of elitism and plutocratic dominance.”
Six years later, Honduras would be declared “the most murderous nation on earth.”
Corruption is not the most vexing problem in Honduras; it’s the arrogance and impunity that attend it, inspire it, feed it. Groomed to inherit by political incest, power, prestige and economic sovereignty, tomorrow’s ruling families, like yesterday’s, will contrive dynastic careers and trade favors and divvy up realms of authority and influence and parcel out old and tirelessly replenished wealth while demanding time and patience from a bleeding nation.
Time is a commodity Hondurans do not have. Putting off the reforms the country so desperately needs has resulted in irreversible economic slippage. The potential for discontent and frustration to turn to violence should never be taken lightly. Even the placid, patient, pliant Hondurans have their boiling point. This is a country that can’t reform but evolves in miasmic inertia, like a volcano, until the magma boils over. Meanwhile, as the cauldron of unrest and discontent heats up, Honduras remains a dangerous place for Hondurans and for those like me who were once in search of El Dorado.
*
Understandably, many readers especially those protective of their commercial interests, were outraged by my articles. The truths they bared and the conjectures they occasioned left some positively livid. In an effort to deflect attention from the incident in Copán, or to rationalize it, many people, as if on cue, pointed at the April 1999 Columbine School massacre and other aberrant acts committed by troubled American teens, some of whom had the wisdom to surrender, others the civility to take their own lives. The thugs who sprayed the pulperia with assault rifles were incapable of such gallantry. Worse, the Copán police characteristically ran the other way and the incident was given suspiciously marginal coverage by the local press. This speaks volumes about the integrity of Honduras' criminal justice system and the entrenched cowardice of its media.
In journalism, like in “show-biz” one is only as good as one's last offering. Whereas a bad script or a weak performance is eventually forgotten, a journalist earns acclaim -- or calumny -- less for his adherence to form than for his devotion to substance. So long as he steers clear from the truth, or “sanitizes” it, he has nothing to fear, not the ire of some readers, not the long arm of a very corrupt and very ruthless “law.”
Fickle and self-serving, the public entombs what it need not remember and enshrines what it doggedly refuses to forget. Anyone familiar with my work knows that I’d tried hard to temper my polemics. I’d applauded, rhapsodized, commiserated with, and wept for Honduras. In words and photos, I’d once elegized Copán. “The good that men do....”
The drive-by shooting, I’d vainly tried to explain, was symptomatic of the turmoil gripping Central America. The very fact that it had taken place in normally “laid back” Copán was all the more alarming and inadmissible. Notwithstanding the half-truths, innuendoes and outright fabrications dished out in a complaint by several members of Copán’s business community against me, I stood by my article, my sources and my instincts.
*
Site of impressive Maya monuments and a popular transit for Guatemala-bound travelers, Copán, once an essential, if remote destination in Honduras, now ranked, along with San Pedro Sula, Tegucigalpa, the north coast, Olancho and Santa Barbara, as a dangerous locale.
Earned in small and fitful increments, this reputation stiffened with the as-yet unsolved murder of Cándido Amador. To the more astute observer, and for all its undeniable allure, Copán is eerily reminiscent of a theatrical backdrop, an all-too-perfect trompe l'oeil. At first glance its unassuming charm, the kind envisioned by poets and set designers alike, is enthralling. Surrounded by lush highlands of daunting beauty, it nestles, seductive and unruffled, a few square blocks of old Spanish colonial charm seemingly untouched by time. There's the ubiquitous clip-clop of horses’ hooves on cobbled streets, old Padre Roque's whitewashed little church, the village square where vacant-eyed villagers doze off in the noonday sun and peddlers hawk their trinkets. There's the redolence of grilled carnitas wafting from under the parasols of ambulant food vendors; the cooling evening breezes, the grac
eful dawn-and-twilight flights of snow-white egrets over lush, mist-covered uplands; the crisp, starlit nights.
Behind this idyllic setting, unfold dramas unimagined by tourists, ignored or squelched by the press and warily entombed by the locals, some fearing risky entanglement, others eager to protect their business interests against a tide of bad publicity. Less than a kilometer from the legendary temples, sacrificial altars and cryptic monuments, rises a pyramid of deceit, collusion and intimidation under whose shadow villagers live in sham unconcern. Aiding and abetting in a conspiracy of silence and obfuscation are the police, all of whom are said to be deep in the pockets of Copán's landed elite -- better known colloquially as “the local mafia.”
Servile freeloaders or opportunistic bottom-feeders driven by harsh economic reality, Copán’s cops have a history of looking the other way, mishandling, adulterating or destroying evidence, falsifying arrest records and turning against obstinate plaintiffs.
When it comes to bad news, Copanecos react with robotic conformity. Silence being the simplest form of disinformation, they say nothing or change the subject. If pressed, they deny the very events that give them nightmares. It's gossip in reverse. Endowed with a capacity for infinite permutations, this denial-by-justification of indisputable facts becomes a skillfully knitted filigree of extenuation, distortions and absurd rationalizations, all artfully interlaced to befuddle the curious or the inquisitive.
When tenacious probing and astute conjecture meet with stony silence, when doors slam shut, when friendly smiles turn to scowl, the truth, hideous and foul, is surely lurking underfoot like a viper squeezing beneath a rock. Asking too many questions in a hamlet accustomed to pulling in its sidewalks at dusk is as perilous an exercise as it is brazen. Attempts to shed light on the Cándido affair had driven this point home and forced me to make a hasty retreat back to the States. I’d since ventured back into Copán, this time by crossing into Honduras from the Guatemalan border village of Chiquimula, disguised and escorted by two Maya bodyguards. Efforts to pursue leads in that most recent carnage were similarly thwarted by people who would otherwise be the first to benefit from a crime-free Copán.