SAN
PEDRO SULA, Honduras — The pastor came one afternoon to survey his
church, or what was left of it: remnants of a “welcome” sign and a strip
of Christmas garland still tacked to the wall.
The
gang took the chairs. They took the light fixtures. They took the
doors. They had given his family 24 hours to get out and so they did,
abandoning their home and the small evangelical church he led.
“There was no other way,” Pastor Jorge Rivas said
the other day, on the porch of a house in another part of this violent
city, where the family has taken refuge. “We would die there.”
When
he moved there 20 years ago, Mr. Rivas commanded respect, even among
the gang members. The neighborhood, Chamelecón, was not yet the most
dangerous in one of the most dangerous cities in the hemisphere.
He
would fish the calm, cooling waters of the Río Chamelecón, long before
bullet-pocked bodies turned up along the shore and the sugar cane fields
abutting it.
His
six children would kick soccer balls along Chamelecón’s dusty streets
and dash to the neighborhood bodega for ice cream, long before stray
bullets shot down a neighbor in front of the store across the street.
BELIZE
Caribbean Sea
100 miles
GUATEMALA
San Pedro Sula
Chamelecón
HONDURAS
EL
SALVADOR
NICARAGUA
Pacific Ocean
COSTA RICA
He
watched Chamelecón decay, mirroring the deterioration of Honduras as a
whole over the past two decades. Buffeted by a succession of natural and
man-made disasters, it has become one of the poorest countries in the
hemisphere and now a flash point for the child migrant crisis as many of
its young people flee to the United States, sometimes alone, often in
the company of family members or neighbors.
A
devastating hurricane in 1998 swelled the river and flooded many
houses. Economic free fall followed. People could not find work and
delinquents, always present in the working-class neighborhood, hardened
and grew powerful, driving away even the police.
The
clothing factories nearby that sustained so many families shifted many
jobs to neighboring Nicaragua. The government collapsed in a coup in
2009, and though order was eventually restored, the better days promised
still seem a distant dream.
The
gangs moved from house to house demanding “rent” or a “war tax,” or the
property itself. Night after night, families fled in terror to other
parts of Honduras, to Mexico, to the United States, many of them part of
the wave of child and family migrants overwhelming American detention
centers in the Southwest.
Left behind are rows of hollowed-out houses, stripped of furniture, windows, even bathroom fixtures.
Still, the pastor hung on, because he believed in God and hope. Then gang members pointed a pistol at his 15-year-old son.
“Lift up your shirt,” they demanded, inspecting his body for rival tattoos.
“I could not speak,” the boy recalled of the terror.
And, finally, the gang came to the house. They wanted it. And the church.
The pastor gave up on hope and the neighborhood.
“But not God,” he said. “He will find a way.”
It has been nearly two years since he left.
A Rise Amid Dysfunction
The Chamelecón district is a warren of modest cement-block houses painted in now chipped and fading pastels.
Two
of Honduras’s most powerful gangs, Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18, and
their myriad factions battle for turf, with the borderlines of their
territory the most lethal. The most spectacular crime occurred a decade
ago, when 28 people on a bus passing through the neighborhood were
killed by gang members upset at plans to restore the death penalty.
But it is the everyday grind of murder and mayhem that gnaws most of all at people here.
Oscar
Ramón, 20, who helps his father farm a patch of land along the river,
said at least 20 bodies had been dumped in the river and cane fields in
the past year. He lost count.
“I
think here is not for me,” he said in the broken English he learned at
an orphanage school his father sent him to in the capital, to be safe.
Many young people agree and have left, but many more have stayed, living locked in their homes and harboring dreams of escape.
Although
Honduras was spared the civil wars of its neighbors in the 1980s and
1990s, the regional instability set the stage for a surge of migration
that rapidly accelerated after Hurricane Mitch devastated the country in
1998. The storm killed thousands of people in Honduras, left one
million homeless and destroyed what was left of a declining Banana
industry, once the country’s lifeblood, as well as other vital crops.
By
2000, the number of Honduran immigrants in the United States, mostly
without proper visas, had doubled from a decade earlier, to 283,000, and
it now stands around 500,000, according to a Migration Policy Institute
report.
They
have come to prop up the economy back home, with the $3.2 billion sent
back last year accounting for 20 percent of the economy, the highest
proportion in Latin America.
After
the Cold War, Honduras strongly embraced capitalism, investing heavily
in the manufacturing for export industry — commonly known as
maquiladoras — and San Pedro Sula’s industrial base boomed, stitching
underwear, T-shirts, jeans and other low-cost products for consumption
in the United States and other countries.
It
emerged as a city of stark inequality, with large malls seemingly
teleported from Miami and gated communities climbing the hills for the
doctors, lawyers and engineers catering to the moneyed class.
But
the 2009 coup, coupled with the worldwide recession, took a toll, and
the economic shock wave was keenly felt in Chamelecón, residents said.
Family
after family told of layoffs and shorter work hours. More and more, it
seemed, one needed to know somebody to get and keep a job.
In June, a job fair for 5,000 openings drew 23,000 people, forcing the police to respond to keep order.
The
economic distress and migration laid the ground for the emergence of
powerful street gangs, and government dysfunction gave them staying
power.
They
have roots in Los Angeles, among Salvadoran refugees who fled there
during the civil war. After the war, gang members were deported and,
taking advantage of weak institutions, re-emerged on their home turf
with little to keep them in check.
Honduras
has long had close social ties with El Salvador, and, at least in the
early wave of migration, many Hondurans established themselves in
Salvadoran communities.
Children Illegally Crossing the Border Alone
The number of unaccompanied minors has surged in the last
three years, mainly driven by a huge influx of children from Honduras,
El Salvador and Guatemala. As of June 15, nearly 40,000 children from
the three countries – about three-quarters of the total – crossed the
U.S. border illegally.
15
From
Honduras
Mexico
10
El
Salvador
5
Guatemala
FY ’09
’10
’11
’12
’13
’14
Crime
analysts say this is why the Honduran gangs bear such a close
resemblance to the Salvadoran gangs, but in Honduras, with the political
instability, deeper poverty and a history of willfully weak judicial
and security forces, the gangs have exploded in power and readily
acquire military-grade weaponry.
To
make matters even more volatile, drug trafficking organizations in
recent years, facing increasing obstacles in the Caribbean, began moving
more cocaine through Central America and forging alliances with the
gangs as foot soldiers. Honduras became a major transshipment point for
cocaine flown from South America, and the cartels, along with corrupt
police officers, may be supplying the gangs with weapons and cheap
cocaine as payment.
The
police remain so unable to take on the gangs and cartels that sometimes
they do not even have gas in their aging vehicles to go on patrol.
“It’s
like sending kindergartners up against an N.B.A. basketball team,” said
Steven S. Dudley, a director of InsightCrime.com, a website tracking
and analyzing Latin American crime trends.
Still,
Col. Germán Alfaro, who leads a combined military-police force in the
San Pedro Sula region, said Honduras had to turn to the military because
it was the country’s most trusted authority. Soldiers regularly patrol
alongside police officers in a show of force that Chamelecón residents
said had brought mixed results. Several said a letup in the gang war,
not the military, had calmed some streets for now.
But
Colonel Alfaro said that there had not been a gang-related shootout in
more than a month and that slowly, the patrols were gaining the
confidence of residents who wished to move back.
“This was not a problem created overnight,” he said, “and it won’t be resolved overnight.”
‘Everybody Is Nervous’
On her bookshelf, she keeps three pebbles, painted ME-XI-CO with
nail polish: a wry souvenir of the journey she took with her
13-year-old son, hopscotching on buses through Honduras, Guatemala and
Mexico until they were finally caught there and sent home in June. She
had hoped to reach a sister’s home in Houston. She did not make it,
despite paying $6,000 to a smuggler, who has disappeared.
“There
was a fever here; everybody thought they were going to get documents,”
said the woman, Marta Triminio Guerrero, 44. “Now, we are all coming
back, but to what?”
Her
son, Roberto, pondered the question. He was nervous during the journey
and frustrated when they were caught, but he understood his mother’s
motivation.
Work
is sporadic; she sells trinkets and tamales from the house when she
can. Roberto is back in school, one run by a church-affiliated nonprofit
called Caminando por la Paz — Walking for Peace — that is trying to
keep young people like him from falling prey to gangs.
To
Roberto, his section of Chamelecón has not been entirely pacified; gang
members lurk, and he does his best to steer clear of them. A wall near
his house is full of large bullet holes from high-powered rifles. He
rarely goes outside, except to walk to and from school, so, like other
children, he spends a lot of time inside watching soccer on television.
It
is a monotonous life but, for now, a safer one than venturing too far
out and getting killed as a suspected “halcon,” or lookout for a rival
gang.
“I
would do it again, yes, because I could study up there, up north, and
then work,” he said, referring to his attempt to reach the United
States. “It’s pretty ugly here in the afternoon. You hear the shots and
the fighting sometimes. Everybody is nervous until the daytime.”
Graphic
Children at the Border
The number of children crossing the U.S. border alone
has doubled since last year. Answers to key questions on the crisis.
Hector
Leiva, the coordinator of the school, lamented so many promising young
people who were looking to leave the country, or who already have.
Everybody is struggling, he said, to the point that his plan to extend
the school day by two hours in the afternoon was rejected by parents
demanding their children come home to work.
“How do you argue against that?” he asked.
Fearing a Return Home
Late
one afternoon, Pastor Rivas came to his small, abandoned church to
inspect the damage. Almost all the furnishings were gone.
The
reality is, his family can no longer afford the rent on the house in
another part of the city that a church friend helped them with, so they
may be forced back. But it is just as well, he said: “Our home is in
that neighborhood,” though he worries that he has little means to make
repairs.
Things
in the neighborhood seemed to have settled down. Another neighbor that
afternoon, too, was cleaning up her house with the idea to move back
soon. But with a 12-year-old daughter, she fretted over taking the
chance.
“I
am going to see how things look in the next couple of weeks,” said the
woman, Ana, who was too afraid to give her full name. “If the soldiers
have control, if the gang does not come around for rent, it may be time
to come back.”
Pastor
Rivas said he would leave for the United States if there were a legal
way to do it. But the long wait and cost for a visa makes that idea
impractical, he said. And he does not have the $6,000 or more to pay a
smuggler.
His son Jorge dreams
about life in the United States or even another part of Honduras. He is
torn about the idea of moving back to the neighborhood; he misses
friends but is not even sure how many are still there. He knows roughly
10 have made it to the United States or Mexico.
But he fears a repeat of the worst in the neighborhood.
“We
always had to throw ourselves to the floor and pray one of the bullets
doesn’t get you,” he said. “We were always locked in there. It wasn’t a
lot of fun.”
He paused, searching for a way to make a stranger understand.
“You
go to birthday parties, right?” he said. “There used to be birthday
parties and house parties. Now, there aren’t any because with so many
people there, it gets the gang’s attention, and sometimes they would
kill people.”
The
afternoon dragged on. He watched the end of a soccer game and then
walked out to another room, catching sight of his 7-year-old niece
drawing in a notebook.
She
drew a house, a Halloween orange one. Droplets of bright colors
encircled it. A long walkway cut through sproutings of a green lawn. A
bespectacled, smiling sun gleamed in a corner of the sky.
It was not the house she knew.
“It’s the one,” the girl, Astrid, said, “I wished we lived in.”
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