T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, JULY 29, 2019 | 11
People are so afraid they don’t even call
the gangs by their names, referring
instead to “antisocial elements.” It feels
like Voldemort — he who shall not be
named.
About one in four businesses here pay
war taxes, said Yonatan Venegas, who
until recently headed a low-interest
business loan program. The goal of the
program was to create jobs in Nueva
Suyapa, where half of those ages 18 to 25
are unemployed. But of 600 businesses
Mr. Venegas tracked over the last dec-
ade, 150 closed because of the cost of
extortion.
Brenda Margarita Raudales Ro-
dríguez, a 34-year-old mother of two,
stopped making payments to 18th
Street. She ran a tiny grocery store out
of her house in Flores de Oriente until an
assassin shot her in the face last year.
He’d asked for a drink, and she had just
returned with his change. Bleeding, she
stumbled toward the bedroom, where
her 4-year-old daughter was sleeping,
but died just shy of reaching the child.
The deadliest spot here is on the main
road that winds its way to the top of the
hill. Two-thirds of the way up lies the
neighborhood’s main bus terminal,
where taxis congregate.
Cristino Arias and his three sons were
all taxi drivers here. In 2005, Mr. Arias
told me, the drivers got their first extor-
tion demand, from 18th Street. They
went to the police, who did nothing. Two
drivers were murdered that year. Many
tried working out of different taxi stops,
but drivers got a note at those, too: Pay
up, or there will be a massacre.
By 2007, seeing no choice, he started
paying what amounted to about a third
of his take-home pay. Then the taxes
went up. His middle son, Jimmy, 30,
asked his father for a loan. His father
told him, “Son, I just don’t have it.”
Tears streaked into Mr. Arias’s salt
and pepper beard when he told me
about the three men with black masks
and big guns who came for his son on
Oct. 4, 2011. “I didn’t have the money,”
Mr. Arias told me. So his son “paid with
his life.”
The next day, they found Jimmy’s
taxi, No. 908, stripped down. For five
days and nights his father searched the
nearby mountains, not eating or sleep-
ing. The sixth day, someone found Jim-
my’s body in a trash dump. His hands
and feet were tied and he’d been shot.
Mr. Arias has since found work miles
away, dispatching taxis from an appli-
ance store. But his two surviving sons
still drive taxis out of Nueva Suyapa.
“There are no other jobs,” he said. “We
don’t have a choice.”
At the bus terminal, “you feel the
stench of death,” said Milagro Mejía.
“You feel the spirit of death.” Her
brother, Israel Palma Mejía, 40, was
killed on Nov. 17. He was the third motor-
cycle taxi dispatcher to be murdered
here in five years. He was shot at 6:
a.m. by two teenage assassins for refus-
ing to pay 18th Street. It happened in
front of an evangelical school, whose
gray stucco wall and black iron door are
pockmarked with bullet holes. Two
dozen people witnessed it. No one saw
anything.
Too often, children are caught in the
crossfire. On April 2, 2018, 12-year-old
Rodis Eduardo Peralta Rivera told his
teachers he felt sick and needed to go
home early. It was 11:30, and Eduardo’s
little brother, Adonis Jafeth, 5, was due
out of class at noon. So Eduardo satoutside their school, Centro Básico
Monseñor Jacobo Cáceres Ávila, to wait
for him.
The school is next to a shack where a
dispatcher sends buses down the hill.
Two MS-13 gangsters were there to
collect payments when three members
of another gang, Los Benjamins, came
up the hill. The gangsters shot at one
another, and then retreated.
When calm returned, an MS-13 gang-
ster noticed a boy convulsing on the
ground. Eduardo had looked up at the
sound of gunfire, and a Benjamin bullet
had pierced one of his big brown eyes.
The gangster ordered a woman selling
tortillas nearby to take Eduardo to the
hospital, where he soon died.
“I felt like the earth and sky had come
together and flattened me, that I had
been destroyed inside,” his mother,
Karol Jesenia Rivera Díaz, told me.
“My brother was a little serious,”
Adonis said. “And a little funny. We were
always together. I miss him.” Adonis,
now 7, went on in his squeaky voice: “I
have nightmares. I don’t know why.”
Their father, Jack, said that Eduardo
loved to dance. Their mother hasn’t
turned the radio on since he died.
“Sometimes, I talk to her, and she’s
there, and sometimes she’s not,” he said.
The authorities caught the killer. But
when the family returned from visiting
Eduardo’s grave last
Mother’s Day, they
were stopped by an
MS-13 gangster.
“Don’t accuse people
unjustly,” he said,
stressing that he
hadn’t been the one to
kill their son. There
were rumors that the
family had gone to
the police. There is a
verb for this offense:
sapiar — to talk too much, like a sapo, a
frog. There was a rumor someone had
contracted a hitman to kill them.
Ms. Rivera wants to escape to the
United States, but the caravans are too
dangerous. “I won’t risk the life of my
son. He’s the only one I have left,” she
said. She doesn’t want to give up the
house Eduardo helped build. She does-
n’t want to leave his grave behind.
If the Trump administration wants to
keep families like these from fleeing to
the United States, it has to start acting
like it cares about what’s going on in
Honduras.
First we have to recognize that the
United States shares some responsibil-
ity for the corruption. In 1975, in what
was called “Bananagate,” an American
company paid a $1.25 million bribe —
promising double that — to Honduras’s
president in exchange for lower taxes
on banana exports. In the 1980s, the
United States paid Honduras hundreds
of millions of dollars with little care for
who pocketed the money as long as the
government agreed to host the contras
battling leftist Nicaraguan Sandinistas.
And of course much of the carnage
today stems from cartels and gangs
battling to control turf to move drugs to
the biggest buyer in the world: the
United States.
President Trump now says that send-
ing money to Central America is like
flushing it down the toilet. But that’s not
true: I’ve seen programs funded by the
United States reduce violence in the
worst neighborhoods.
If we do it right, we can use aid to
reduce violence, poverty, corruptionand impunity and to bolster good gov-
ernance. The money should go to vetted
international aid and Honduran civil
society groups instead of directly to the
government, but we can pressure the
government by setting benchmarks for
progress and cutting the money if they
are not met. For example, on violence,
we should establish targets for reducing
homicides, femicides and domestic
violence, and for increasing murder
convictions. This will take a long-term
commitment — 10 or 20 years. But in the
end it will be far cheaper and more
humane to fund change in Honduras
than to spend billions locking up asylum
seekers at our borders.
For its part, Honduras must purge
more than its police. It must do the same
with its judges and prosecutors. Cor-
rupt politicians need to go to jail. Undo
the Law of Secret Information. Pay
people in public office, especially police
officers, a living wage so they don’t feel
forced to steal. Churches could also play
a role: In June, the Honduran Episco-
palian Conference called for action on
corruption. Ultimately, corruption is
combated when people elect leaders
who have the political will to make
change happen.
In the meantime, Hondurans, both
stubborn and brave, are fighting back.
Some protests are big — like recent
demonstrations demanding the presi-
dent’s resignation — and some are
small.
At 6.45 a.m. on Feb. 4 — the first day of
school after a long break — Ondina
Esperanza Díaz, a wiry 52-year-old,
95-pound mother of eight who barely
completed fifth grade herself, is ready to
make trouble in Nueva Suyapa.
She stands sentry outside Pablo
Portillo Figueroa elementary school,
where her youngest, 9-year-old David
Ismael, is about to start fourth grade.
Every morning she comes to make sure
that the seven teachers and a principal
who are paid to work here actually show
up. She has been trained through an
A.J.S. program called Comunidades
Fuertes to do this, as have 22 other
volunteers at four Nueva Suyapa
schools.
Ms. Díaz is no shrinking violet: When
her ex-husband drunkenly beat her
when she was nine months pregnant
with her fourth child, she snapped, lit a
club on fire, and whacked him with it. “I
know you are going to kill me, but I’m
going to kill you, too!” she said. Now
she’s turned that fury on the schools.
She has seen boatloads of corruption:
Teachers don’t show up, or talk on their
cellphones all day, even steal students’
snack money. This morning she tells the
school’s principal, Velis Velásquez, “I
am watching you.” She counts teachers
as David cuddles against her in the
morning chill. “Another teacher!” she
says, as the third one arrives.
She keeps her eyes peeled for her
particular target — the sixth-grade
teacher, José Orlando Vasquez. He has
failed to come to school every Monday
for years. He told her he has a nose
problem, rhinitis, that flares up on
Mondays. Another teacher comes eight
minutes late. Mr. Problem Nose never
shows, nor does her son’s fourth-grade
teacher.
There are no substitutes. They are
working on it. In the meantime, “the
children will be taken care of” with
activities, she’s told.
The way Ms. Díaz sees it, the least the
government can do is get the teachers to
teach. The parents do the rest. This
morning dozens of mothers have
showed up to clean out the classrooms,
which are filthy after being chained shut
for the break. They pile desks in the
courtyard and sweep pigeon droppings
and dirt off the red tile floors. Someone
removes a dead animal from the second-
grade closet.
While the mothers clean, the teachers
who have shown up for work line the
students up outside. They have them
unfurl the Honduran flag and sing the
national anthem, and then tell them
about the promise of a new year.
“Good morning! How much are we
going to learn this year?” a teacher
asks.
“Mucho!” the kids answer in unison.SONIA NAZARIOis the Pulitzer Prize-
winning author of “Enrique’s Journey:
The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odys-
sey to Reunite With His Mother.”Cristino Arias holding a photo of his son, a taxi driver killed in 2011 in Honduras by a gang that was extorting him.PHOTOGRAPHS BY VICTOR J. BLUE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESopinion
believer in the greatness of the “Eng-
lish-speaking peoples.” But the rela-
tionship was born out of dire necessity.
Churchill knew that Britain would not
be able to defeat Nazi Germany with-
out active help from the United States.
Roosevelt, who was no friend of
British imperialism, was well aware of
the danger posed to the United States
by a Europe dominated by the Third
Reich. But in 1940, most Americans
were not at all keen to go to war to
help Britain. The most fervent opposi-
tion came from right-wing isolationists,
and some of them, such as the aviator
Charles Lindbergh, had more than a
sneaking sympathy for the Nazis.
Their slogan, revived by the Trump
campaign in 2016, was “America First.”
At the end of 1941, the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s
declaration of war against the United
States silenced the America Firsters.
Churchill and Roosevelt drew up the
Atlantic Charter, envisioning the world
after Hitler’s defeat. It was marked by
deeply internationalist ideas: coopera-
tion between countries, free trade and
political freedom for all. The United
Nations, now much disdained by the
Trump administration, was born from
this charter.
After the war was won, Churchill
gave a famous speech in Zurich, in
which he called for the creation of a
United States of Europe. He believed
that only full European integration
would stave off another devastating
war. Quite where Britain fit into this
grand European design was left a little
vague. Churchill thought that Britain,
the United States and the Soviet Union
should at least be sympathetic patrons
of a united Europe. Many members of
his generation had a hard time seeing
Britain as just another European coun-
try, on a par with France or Italy.
Among the 52 percent of Britons who
voted for Brexit, there are plenty who
find this difficult still.
The new British prime minister, Mr.
Johnson, sometimes gives the impres-
sion that he feels nostalgic for the
glory days of British imperialism.
When he visited Myanmar as foreign
secretary in September 2017, he star-
tled his hosts, as well as the British
ambassador, by reciting Rudyard
Kipling’s patronizing poem “Road to
Mandalay” in Shwedagon Pagoda, one
of the country’s main Buddhist sites.
But even the most radical Brexiteers
realize that those days are over. Some,perhaps including Mr. Johnson, see a
future Britain as a larger version of
Singapore, a kind of low-tax and low-
regulation free port. Others dream that
it will become a global power again
once it is released from what they see
as the chains of Brussels. Yet others
believe that a revived special relation-
ship with the
United States is the
gateway to national
greatness.
The special rela-
tionship appeals to
another type of
nostalgia: kinship
with the largest
nation of English-
speaking peoples,
which many older,
mostly white, Brit-
ons find more con-
genial than shared
arrangements with
foreigners on the
Continent who eat garlic and speak in
strange tongues.
Mr. Johnson has pushed all these
buttons. But the main thing most Brex-
iteers have in common is an obsession
with national sovereignty, “taking back
control” and keeping foreigners out —
a yearning for that old British idea:
splendid isolation.
Hence the fetish of the Dunkirk
spirit, used to great effect in the Brexitcampaign. Hence, too, Mr. Johnson’s
rhetoric revolving around the fantasy
of wartime derring-do.
When he promises that Britain will
leave the European Union by Hallow-
een, “do or die,” he is mimicking
Churchill’s bulldog defiance of the Nazi
foe. Like Trump, he has an exaggerat-
ed belief in national power and in his
own country first, unfettered by inter-
national institutions or cooperative
arrangements, even though many of
those were set up by the American and
British governments in the wake of
World War II.
The United States can afford to
indulge in bashing international
norms, at least for a while, because it is
a huge country, with a powerful domes-
tic economy, unparalleled military
strength and great natural resources.
Britain has none of these things. The
idea that Britain, acting alone, can
exact favorable terms from much
larger powers such as China, Europe
or, indeed, the United States, is a delu-
sion. If it leaves the European Union,
Britain will become a middling provin-
cial country, whose fortunes will be
subject to the whims of others. Trump
probably won’t care. Churchill would
have been horrified.Churchill would despise Boris Johnson
B URUMA, FROM PAGE 1When
Mr. Johnson
promises that
Britain will
leave the E.U.
by Halloween,
“do or die,” he
is mimicking
Churchill’s
bulldog
defiance of
the Nazi foe.IAN BURUMA, a professor at Bard Col-
lege, is writing a book about the Anglo-
American relationship.Boris Johnson, then the British foreign minister, visiting the Shwedagon Pagoda in
Myanmar in 2017. Myanmar, then Burma, gained its independence from Britain in 1948.THEIN ZAW/ASSOCIATED PRESSN AZARIO, FROM PAGE 9Adonis Yafeth Rivera at home. His brother was killed in a shootout while waiting to
walk Adonis home from school. “We were always together. I miss him,” Adonis said.“It’s not that
the criminals
were
subverting
the system;
this was the
system.”Pay or die in Honduras
Order the International Edition today at
nytimes.com/discover
In unpredictable times, you need journalism that cuts through
the noise to deliver the facts. A subscription to The New York
Times International Edition gives you uncompromising reporting
that deepens your understanding of the issues that matter,and includes unlimited access to NYTimes.com and apps for
smartphone and tablet.Newspaper subscription offer:
Save 66% for three months.
Whatever happens
next, we’ll help you
make sense of it.
Offer expires December 31, 2019 and is valid for new subscribers only. This offer is not available in all markets and hand
delivery is subject to confirmation by local distributors. Smartphone and tablet apps are not supported on all devices.РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
РЕ
ЕAdonis Yafeth Rivera at home. His brother was killed in a shootout while waiting toAdonis Yafeth Rivera at home. His brother was killed in a shootout while waiting toAdonis Yafeth Rivera at home. His brother was killed in a shootout while waiting toAdonis Yafeth Rivera at home. His brother was killed in a shootout while waiting toЛЛ
ИЗЗППОД
ГОТОВИЛАГРУППА"What's "What'sNews"Adonis Yafeth Rivera at home. His brother was killed in a shootout while waiting toAdonis Yafeth Rivera at home. His brother was killed in a shootout while waiting toVK.COM/WSNWSVK.COM/WSNWSVK.COM/WSNWS