Honduran city's violence adding to immigration surge

By Michael Matza

  SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras - Shot twice in the face by two men on bicycles as he changed a car tire, Omar Gabaretta, 34, died Sunday and was brought to the morgue in this steamy city, which has the world's highest homicide rate.

On Monday, his cousin Claudia, 28 and pregnant, went there in a red pickup with a simple, black-painted coffin to claim his body. Distraught and not eager to talk, she said she did not know why her cousin, a machinist, was killed. He was the first in his family to die violently, she said, and he now is part of a familiar story.

Violence, corruption, unemployment, grinding poverty, and a crop-destroying drought are among the factors that fueled this summer's surge of illegal immigration to the United States by Central Americans. The largest group - including thousands of unaccompanied minors - came from Honduras.

It is not hard to see why they fled.

From January to June, this city of 720,000 people - about the size of Charlotte, N.C., or Fort Worth, Texas - logged 538 homicides, an average of more than three a day.

The Citizen Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice, a Mexican think tank that tracks international homicide rates, says San Pedro Sula topped the charts in its most recent compilation, with 169 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. By contrast, the top U.S. city in the 2012 study, New Orleans, had 56.

Even the morgue has been a crime scene.

Three weeks ago, a crime crew wearing masks machine-gunned down a dozen people at the entrance, killing nine. Most of the victims were members of a family who had come to retrieve the body of a man fatally shot the day before, authorities said.

Now, rifle-toting soldiers in flak vests stand guard outside the building. Such security is a paramount concern throughout San Pedro Sula.

A drive through the streets Monday showed parts of Chamelecon, one of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods, virtually deserted, with some homes abandoned because shootings are so common.

Across town, armed guards occupied high watchtowers in the parking lot outside Price Smart, a warehouse shoppers club, where a slaying occurred this summer.

Heavily armed soldiers patrolled the cavernous central bus station. And a local Denny's restaurant was staffed by a guard toting a rifle and wearing a bulletproof vest.

Franchisees do the dirty work

U.S. and local law enforcement officials say Honduras is a major transshipment point for an illicit drug trade that is controlled by the Mexican Sinaloa and Los Zetas cartels. Rival local gangs, called maras, got their start in the prisons and streets of Los Angeles and returned to Honduras when many of their members were deported.

Resurgent, the maras compete for recruits and position as franchisees to do the dirty work of the larger organizations. The peer pressure on young men to join gangs is intense; failure to affiliate can be a death sentence.

"Crime and violence are serious problems and the government of Honduras lacks the resources to address these," the U.S. State Department declared in its June travel advisory. "Since 2010, Honduras has had the highest murder rate in the world."

Since January, Hondurans have accounted for the largest percentage of the more than 57,000 Central American and Mexican immigrants who have tried to sneak across America's southern border or turned themselves in to border patrols, according to the Pew Research Center.

Using Honduras as the base for a possible pilot program, the Obama administration is considering a plan to offer many of these migrants the status of "documented refugees." If approved, it would allow eligible children into the U.S. without having to make the life-threatening trek across Guatemala and Mexico. According to a draft, which became public in July, eligible Hondurans could apply from inside their country.

The goal is humanitarian, but still controversial.

"If an in-country processing program were to be established," Bill Frelick, director of the Human Rights Watch refugee program wrote in an op-ed last month, "there would probably be an immediate hue and cry that 'illegal' Honduran asylum seekers who are already in the United States are 'jumping the line' and that they should go back to Honduras and 'wait their turn.'"

In a safer environment, Frelick wrote, waiting one's turn might make sense. "But it makes no sense for the boy who signs his death warrant by leaving or disobeying a gang that forcibly recruited him. Such a boy needs to escape the gang's clutches immediately."

To do so - and then stay in one's homeland - can be risky. Members of the Honduran national police have been linked to crimes, even murder, according to the State Department, and the government lacks the resources to catch and prosecute criminals. Police often do not even have the cars or gas to respond to calls.

"As a result, criminals operate with a high degree of impunity," the department concluded.

In El Progresso, a town outside San Pedro Sula, 13-year-old Alicia Godinez attends school and her mother, Iscela Lanza, works with a nongovernmental agency helping to resettle unaccompanied minors who have been deported from the U.S. The surge at America's southern border has caused U.S. authorities to step up deportations to Central America as part of a stern message: Don't come illegally. You won't be allowed to stay.

Deportations, and a festival of the immigrant

On Sunday, the mother and daughter were part of a crowd at a "Festival of the Immigrant" in central San Pedro Sula, attended also by the Honduran president's wife, Ana Garcia de Hernandez, who said the government was doing all it could to create better conditions for youths who see immigration as their only option. The park where she spoke was festooned with banners that highlighted the dangers of illegal immigration and called on Hondurans to stay put while "building paths of love and peace."

A nice idea, said Lanza, whose daughter translated her Spanish into English, but "poverty and gangs are driving them north." Then Godinez added: "We are trying to tell them, in Honduras there will be a change."

Change will be quite a challenge, said Natalia Salazar, a U.S.-born teacher and administrator with Bilingual Education for Central America, an organization that runs private schools in Honduras. Salazar, 23, graduated from Clark University in Massachusetts and wrote a master's thesis on violence and youth in Honduras.

"Everything you read says gangs are destroying the country," she said.

But she also worries about the secondary effect of the chronic violence in places not gripped by gangs and by kids, she says, "who have already seen the worst of the worst."

— The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 12, 2014