Drug War Capitalism (36 page)

Regardless of the new opposition force, President Hernández is entrenching the status quo. Similar to recent reforms in Mexico, in Honduras major reforms to the energy sector were undertaken immediately following the elections, before the new government took power. “The outgoing Congress passed the General Law of the Electrical Industry in a single debate on January 20, literally on the eve of the transition of Congress. The law mandates the conversion of the National Electrical Energy Company (ENEE) into a private corporation and then into separate generation, transmission, and distribution companies—all by mid-2015.”[55] In addition, the state telephone company, HonduTel, was set on the path to privatization, and a handful of public-private partnerships were announced.

Gang Control and Murders

Tegucigalpa, Honduras’s bustling capital, is an example of how modern mafia control functions in the Americas. During the day, there’s plenty of activity in the streets, but once night falls the place goes eerily quiet. Taxis, which can be hired as shared vehicles (at about 50¢ a ride) or privately, proliferate. Typically taxi drivers are a source of information only for the laziest of journalists, but in this city, it makes perfect sense to seek out their views. For one thing, taxi drivers are among the only residents who will talk about the gangs, as drivers are required to pay quotas, usually weekly, to either (and sometimes both) the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) or the 18 Street Gang (M-18), the two most important street gangs in the city.

Whenever I was alone in a cab, I asked the driver about the quotas. All the drivers were forthcoming, and said the consequence for not paying is simple: death. I met one young driver who paid US$200 a month in extortion, a weekly payment of $25 to each of M-13 and M-18. It was, he said, more than his monthly rent payment. But pay he did, every Saturday, in both of the taxi sites he worked from. Cab drivers are far from the only segment of Honduran society living in fear of street gangs, but they are the only people I met with the privacy to talk about it in their workplaces. Gangs regularly extort small and medium-sized businesses and working people throughout Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second city. People in these environments don’t dare to even hint that they’re being extorted, for fear they will be overheard. So they pay, and they try to get on with their lives. The biggest shops, US fast food chains and grocery stores, are the only ones that seem to get away without paying the so-called “war tax” to gangs. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, in 2012 there were an estimated 12,000 gang members in Honduras affiliated with MS-13 and M-18.

A critical mass of politicians, prosecutors, and police are in the business themselves, taking a cut of the illicit earnings in return for turning a blind eye to gang activity. Marvin Ponce, the former vice president of Congress,
said
in 2011 that at least 40 percent of Honduran police are involved in organized crime. A 2014 article in the mainstream Honduran newspaper
El Heraldo
explores the illicit activities of Honduran police, noting that their participation in illicit activity is carried out under the supervision of high-ranking officers. “These public servants put the power, the uniform and the weapons the state gave them to protect the citizenry in the service of the darkest part of drug trafficking and organized crime, in many cases with the complicity and tolerance of the high command.”[56] An internal police report released to the media linked officers of various ranks to “drug trafficking, organized crime, money laundering and illicit wealth, the commission of a rosary of crimes including hired killings, kidnappings, assassinations, bank robberies, extortion, selling drugs, drug dealing, car theft, robbery from drug traffickers and congresspeople.”[57]

Police are also accused of
participation
in death squads and in hate crimes against queer and transgendered people. Human Rights Watch
points out
that “according to local rights advocates, more than 70 members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) population were killed between September 2008 and March 2012. The alleged involvement of members of the Honduran police in some of these violent abuses is of particular concern.” In addition to the role of police in criminal activity, “the military has been linked to drug trafficking in Honduras since the 1980s, and recent reports suggest some sectors continue to engage in illicit activities.”[58] Military-grade arms, like grenades, anti-tank weapons, and assault rifles sold to the Honduran military, have later been seized in the possession of drug runners in Mexico and Colombia.[59]

The pressure that gang and police violence puts on the poor is intense. In 2013, I interviewed a thirty-three-year-old Honduran man, as he sat under a tree beside the railroad tracks in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, waiting for a cargo train to take its leave toward the north. He only gave me his first name, Alexander, which he backed up by showing me a battered copy of his student identification. Alexander was leaving a full-time job at a maquiladora in San Pedro Sula, fed up with paying the “war tax” to gang members every week on his $100 weekly salary. Others that I met along the way admitted that part of the reason they were leaving Honduras was because of the violence and extortion. Without remittances from Honduran migrants working outside the country (mostly in the United States), poverty would be much worse, according to Noé, the former finance minister. In 2012, he said, migrants sent home around $2.8 billion; in 2013, $3.15 billion. “That is almost the equivalent of two-thirds of the central government’s budget,” he told me. Today over 700,000 people of Honduran origin
live
in the United States; only about two in ten are US citizens. This brings us back to how the discrimination faced by this community in the United States has led Honduras to where it is today.

Gang activity in Honduras has a history that reaches back across the border to the United States. People deported to Central America from the United States initiated both the MS-13 and M-18 gangs. The number of gang members grew dramatically in cities like Tegucigalpa, as a Clinton-era policy of double punishment (deporting undocumented migrants after they’d served a prison sentence, even if they’d spent nearly their whole lives in the United States) came into play in 1996. The imposition of the prison system on jailed youth, followed by deportations, and with increasing poverty, rising unemployment, and the unplanned growth of urban areas in Honduras has swelled the ranks of these groups. This stands out especially in a comparison of gang membership between Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, with Nicaragua. The US Government Accountability Office reports that “Nicaragua has a significant number of gang members, but does not have large numbers of MS-13 or M-18 members, perhaps due to the fact that Nicaragua has had a much lower deportation rate from the United States than the ‘northern triangle’ countries.”

Though far more established than many cartels, street gangs are often portrayed as junior players to Mexican drug trafficking organizations, like Los Zetas. Here’s an example, from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime: “The Zetas are chronically short of manpower, and so may recruit
mareros
[gang members] with promise, but on an institutional level, they will most likely continue to use the
maras
instrumentally.” Being there in Tegucigalpa, trying to do interviews with people about the violence, I couldn’t help but notice uncanny similarities between gang-controlled areas and places said to be run by groups like Los Zetas: residents and victims terrorized into silence, the charging of regular extortion payments, the involvement of local police in criminal activities, and surveillance on a street-corner-to-street-corner level. But the Maras have a much longer history than a group like Los Zetas, which has existed as a totally independent organization for less than a decade. In so many ways, it seems like rather than the Zetas attempting to integrate gang members into their membership, it’s the Central American street gangs that provide a model for territorial control and for building a long-term economic strategy that is not tied to drug shipments. That said, gangs are also involved in drug trafficking; the UN Office on Drugs and Crime reported in 2012 that drug traffickers in the Aguán region allegedly contracted members of a gang denominated Mara 61 to defend their operations.

In any case, it is gangs and drug traffickers who take the brunt of the blame for violence in Honduras, when economic conditions and the activities of state security forces are major contributors to insecurity. “By blaming urban youth, gangs, and the poor, the state silences other possible definitions of violence that might include critiques of the policies that perpetuate structural violence in the form of extreme inequality,” writes scholar Sarah England. “By denying any social or political content to current crime rates and trends, the state can institute such policies as the ‘iron-fist,’ which allows for arrests without due process of young people who appear to belong to gangs without the public’s seeing this as a return to state terrorism.”[60] Though England was writing specifically about El Salvador, much of this is true in Honduras and Guatemala as well. The Honduran state has adopted anti-gang legislation that allows police to pre-emptively arrest people based on their social networks, the fact that they have a tattoo, or one of many other subjective accusations left to the discretion of police, prosecutors, and judges. “We passed the ‘anti-maras’ law. It’s actually an illicit association law. What it is, in layman’s terms, is conspiracy to commit a crime,” Oscar Álvarez, Honduras’s former minister of security,
told
InSight Crime. On October 23, 2013, Honduran military police raided the home of Edwin Espinal, a member of the LIBRE Party and a widely known community activist. The warrant authorizing the raid allowed police to enter Espinal’s house to search for drugs and weapons (neither was found during the raid), and specifically mentioned a LIBRE flag in his residence. Activists criticized the government for using drugs as a pretext for political persecution, further pointing to language used in the warrant to evidence their claims.

Rural Violence and Social Control

As I traveled through the interior of Honduras, I was constantly surprised at the large stands of forests and the strong-flowing rivers cutting through the landscape, which stood in stark contrast to the extreme poverty of the urban areas. In some rural areas of the country, things are quieter, and murder and violence is considered a city problem. In others, however, especially where state security forces as well as US forces have been deployed with the stated purpose of fighting against drug trafficking, the sensation of war is present. “Drug trafficking has been a pretext to militarize, because in reality the amount of trafficking hasn’t fallen, but because of narco activity there are now military bases in La Mosquitia, for example, and there are more bases than ever. [It’s a] US occupation, and narcotrafficking is the pretext,” COPINH’s Cáceres told me during a short interview in Siguatepeque, a small city in central Honduras. For Cáceres and others involved in struggles against oil drilling, mining companies, hydroelectric projects, wind farms, large-scale forestry, and the exploitation of petrified wood, the militarization of Honduras brings with it direct and deadly consequences. Three of her four children are living outside of the country because of fears for their safety. When I spoke with Cáceres in late 2013, she was keeping a low profile, having been arrested and held on trumped-up charges she described as an attempt to keep her from participating in resistance movements. She was later released, but still had an arrest warrant pending, which has since been dropped.

US assistance to Honduras in combating the drug war has already had deadly consequences, including the 2012 massacre in Ahuas, in the Mosquitia region of Honduras, when four Indigenous people were shot at from a helicopter and killed in an incident overseen by the US DEA. No one denies there are clandestine landing strips in the region that are used by drug traffickers to move their product, but this activity has traditionally taken place on the edges of daily life for most people in the area, who live from fishing, the dangerous practice of lobster diving, and agriculture. Times are changing, however, as drug traffickers begin to take a more active role in displacing people from their lands. According to two journalists who traveled to the Mosquitia region in 2013, drug traffickers are on the front lines of dispossession, forcing local people from their lands. They write: “On our last visits to the region, the dynamics of narco-dispossession were impossible to ignore. Residents recounted story after story of being coerced—by money or violence—to give up their lands. In the Miskitu town of Brus Laguna (population 11,000), for example, few residents plant their fields any more, since most agricultural lands were bought up by a narco. If locals wish to fish in the town’s lagoon, they must get traffickers’ permission. In another community, a trafficker pressured an Indigenous landowner to sell. When the landowner refused, he was killed by hitmen. His terrorized wife then sold the land at a very low price. In the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, whole communities have abandoned their lands following threats from traffickers.”[61]

A report written by US solidarity activists who visited Ahuas shortly after the massacre states: “In general, the policy of increased militarization of drug interdiction policies is negatively perceived in the Moskitia region, and places communities already vulnerable due to their isolation and extreme poverty at much greater risk. This is particularly concerning at a time when there is growing focus on the exploitation of natural resources Miskitu communities defend.”[62] Following the coup d’état, six military bases were built in Honduras. “One of the bases is in the Moskitia, where President Chávez, may he rest in peace, was planning to work with Honduras on oil extraction; in addition in this area there is natural gas,” said Carla García from the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH) during a panel on the drug war hosted by the Centre for Constitutional Rights.[63] “Basically this Indigenous community is simply a stone in the shoe of those who want to continue with giving away [the resources]. The United States has always denied the participation of their soldiers in the massacre, but we are victimized because we are poor, because we are Indigenous, and because we are standing in the way of these investments.”