Tegucigalpa --- Shaved heads. White T-shirts. Baggy pants. Tattoos, some gruesome, some menacing. Inviting bullets, they stand on street corners, flashing cryptic hand-signals or daubing walls with intricate graffiti that mark territory or warn of imminent turf wars. Striving to set themselves apart from society, they conform to another set of self-styled conventions that often cost them their lives. It's the "vida loca" at its most nihilistic extreme: Filled with self-loathing, they seek each other out, poised for a kill. It's a form of suicide by proxy. The enemy is a mirror image of what they have become. Death is the ultimate payback. Their last breath, they privately concede, is a final cry of despair that can only be heard from the grave. Abused as children, now feral and aloof, they get even by inspiring terror and hostility in the communities they have occupied. And, with unsettling regularity, they bring upon themselves bloody reprisals by a constabulary that is both exasperated and out of control.
According to the CIA, about 500 gang cells operate in Honduras's main urban centers. The most notorious --- the Mara Salvatrucha and the "18" --- boast a membership exceeding 100,000. Their members wreak economic havoc, to the tune of millions of dollars lost in crimes against property. They sow a climate of fear and bring on social devastation through violence, drug trafficking, addiction, loss of life and family disintegration.
Gangs, or "maras," are not a new phenomenon in Honduras, where gang culture has flourished for decades. For many youths traumatized by poverty, family violence, sexual abuse and early life on the streets, gangs offer a tangible, if deceptive, sense of solidarity and belonging. For many, it is the "home" they never had as children. If need be, they will defend it with their lives.
THE POLITICS OF EXPEDIENCY
Frustrated, short on resources --- shorter yet on imagination --- Honduras has reacted to maras by reviving old counter-insurgency protocols, which define gang members as "terrorists," and reinstating methods widely used during the "dirty war" of the 80s against suspected leftists, namely wholesale assassination.
According to Bruce Harris, director of Casa Alianza, an advocacy group dedicated to the rescue and rehabilitation of street children in Central America and Mexico, "the past seven years have seen an unprecedented increase in the number of murders and extrajudicial executions of children and youths in Honduras. The involvement of members of the security forces and other people acting with the implicit consent of the authorities is no longer rumor but verifiable fact. We have concluded that there is a glaring discrepancy between the words uttered by the government in public, and its deeds."
Casa Alianza, which has routinely accused Honduran security forces and the business sector of collusion, claims that 2,200 children and juveniles under the age of 23 were murdered between January 1998 and February 2004. Most were shot, execution style, in the head. Some were slain because they bore tattoos identifying them as gang members.
Although reports of serious human rights violations by security forces are widespread, the perpetrators are rarely brought to justice. The moral outrage the crisis has elicited has also led to increasing curbs on freedom of the press as authorities try to prevent critics from airing their views. To his credit, such pressures did not prevent distinguished veteran journalist and Tiempo columnist Billy Peña from issuing this exclusive statement:
"President Maduro was elected because he promised our people a 'Zero Tolerance' crime policy --- meaning the eradication of gangs and other criminal elements. Alas, this strategy has failed. The police have misinterpreted the spirit and corrupted the letter of this mandate. Gangs as a whole have not been eradicated but many of their members are being exterminated. Apparently, since there are no rehabilitation centers for delinquent youths, the easiest way to neutralize them is to eliminate them. What is immensely sad, I believe, is that Honduran society has turned a blind eye toward violence. Extrajudicial executions have become as common as bread and butter. Ironically, exterminated or not, the gangs still control the streets and whole neighborhoods in their grip. Nothing has really changed."
THE POLITICS OF COLLUSION
Indeed, almost every day authorities discover the cadavers of youths who were shot, execution style, in the head. Some were summarily killed because they bear tattoos identifying them as gang members.
These recurring purges, no longer denied by the Ministry of Security, assumed a new and disturbing character when Police Commissioner Maria Luisa Borja accused National Police Director, Coralia Rivera de Coca, of tampering with 10 AK-47s allegedly used by police to carry out extrajudicial assassinations. The weapons, it was further revealed, were also used in the abduction and murder of San Pedro Sula businessman Reginald Panting. The mastermind of this assassination, according to Borja, is none other than Police Commissioner Juan Carlos "Tigre" Bonilla. Borjas has repeatedly accused Bonilla of heading a death squad specializing in the targeted execution of presumed delinquents. It was not until Casa Alianza began to exert international pressure that Bonilla appeared before a judge who promptly released him on $1,000 bail. An internal police memo obtained by this writer describes how Bonilla headed a death squad that operated with the knowledge of police authorities. Bonilla is back on police payroll.
Coralia Rivera de Coca eventually appeared before a hastily convened kangaroo court. Despite testimony by an armorer who admitted to corrupting the evidence on her orders (he had cleaned the barrels and changed the firing mechanisms) she was released. It was also learned that the Public Ministry had notified Security Minister Oscar Alvarez 24 hours earlier that the weapons would be sequestered in the hope that he would protect the incriminating evidence, but Alvarez passed the information to Director Rivera de Coca who ordered that the evidence be destroyed.
Borja, who continues to be vilified and threatened with murder, also alleges that the police run "safe houses" around Honduras where "undesirables," among them homeless children and youths are tortured and executed.
THE POLITICS OF DECEIT
No analysis of gangs is complete or fair without a probe into the arcane character of Honduras' judicial system and the lengths to which it will go to cover its tracks.
Sources close to this reporter have suggested that the Ministry of Security may have colluded with President Ricardo Maduro by falsely informing him that policemen accused of extrajudicial killings were being punished when in fact they had acted with total impunity and been accorded unconditional protection by police top brass. The president then went on to assure the nation that the police was not involved in criminal acts, thus shrouding --- some say by design --- a serious problem under the cloak of his office's prestige and reputation.
Showing regrettable insensitivity, President Maduro would later make things worse by arguing that the people had elected him to protect "the interests of honest people, not delinquents." A member of the National Congress who spoke on condition of anonymity told this reporter that the statement was widely greeted as a subliminal declaration of complicity and guilt.
"We are witnessing the heights of moral bankruptcy in this country," the legislator asserted. "The president is neither blind nor deaf. He knows what goes on. Persecution will engender more crime, not less. Surely Mr. Maduro understands that a nation racked with so many ills --- corruption at all levels, rampant inflation, an astronomical foreign debt, hunger, misery, injustice, crime and violence --- is incapable of policing itself. It will take a great leader, surrounded by people of good will who put the nation's interest ahead of their own to clean up the mess. Until then, Honduras will continue to sink in a quagmire of its own creation."
THE POLITICS OF SUBMISSION
It is the inevitable fate and unenviable obligation of economic vassals to play by their masters' rules. Taken to the limit, such compliance induces further acts of meekness and passivity that invite scorn and erode national self-esteem. It came as no surprise when Honduras, in step with the US, voted at the UN to censure Cuba's human rights record. Predictably, and given its own dismal history of persecution and assassination, Honduras's asymmetrical posture is being seen as a shameless act of cowardice and hypocrisy by a mercenary nation given to political harlotry. Contempt turned to derision when it was learned that, as Honduras cast its ballot, the president's wife, Aguas Ocaña de Maduro, was in Havana seeking Cuba's help for victims of child sex abuse at home.
Meanwhile, gang warfare and extrajudicial executions continue unabated. President Maduro's "Zero Tolerance" policy is being seen by a growing segment of Honduran society as a sonorous but empty and disingenuous slogan. Others call it an outright failure.
"All it takes for a society to spiral down the slippery road to disintegration is a faltering economy, widespread discontent --- and someone to blame," says Bruce Harris. "What we have, is a lack of a political will to end the carnage. Whatever it is --- reluctance or sheer incompetence --- events sadly suggest that this culture of impunity may outlast us all."
