T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, JULY 29, 2019 | 9

TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS It’s Monday:

Time to pay the gangs.

A bus owner wearing a red knit hat

waits for the call he’s gotten every

Monday morning for 10 years. That’s

when Honduras’s gangs began charg-

ing anything with wheels — buses,

taxis, motorcycle taxis — a “war tax.”

Just here in the capital, the owners of

these businesses pay an estimated $

million to gangs each year.

Nonpayment equals death.

Since 2010, more than 1,500 Hon-

durans working in transportation have

been murdered — shot, strangled,

cuffed to the steering wheel and burned

alive while their buses are torched. If

anyone on a bus route stops paying,

gangs kill a driver — any driver — to

send a message.

At 10:13, the bus owner’s phone rings

with the 18th Street gang’s instructions:

“Can you bring it early today?” We

jump into a small black car.

He agrees to let me come along, on

the condition that I crouch down in the

back seat, and that I never reveal his

name. We stop next to a hardware store,

where a bus dispatcher arrives and

hands over an inch-thick block of cash

— 16,000 lempiras, about $650. The

gang calls again. “I’m coming,” the bus

owner says.

Armed lookouts watch as the car’s

engine strains up the hill into Las Pavas,

a stronghold of the 18th Street gang in

the north of the city. Near the top, the

bus owner stops at the same spot he has

for a year, a green house with a peach-

colored iron railing. We tense up. Unlike

the MS-13 gang, which requires you to

walk toward youths holding AK-47s to

pay your “taxes,” 18th Street has drive-

through service — unless gangsters

sense something is amiss, and order

you out of your car. I huddle down, turn

my phone to record video, press it

against the car’s tinted window, and

pray no one sees me.

Two youths materialize. The bus

owner rolls the window down two inch-

es, and shoves through the cash.

I spent a month reporting in Hon-

duras earlier this year. What most

pushes people to despair about the

country’s future — and ultimately

drives them to leave — is corruption,

the sense that everything is rotten and

unlikely to get better. The corruption is

what allows all the other bad things to

happen. It allows gangs to impose a

reign of terror. It allows nine in 10 mur-

derers to get away with their crimes. It

fuels poverty: Politicians steal 30 to 40

percent of all government revenues, by

some estimates, crippling schools and

hospitals.

And it is rocket fuel for migration. The

number of Honduran migrants appre-

hended at the southern United States

border has surged from 47,900 in 2017 to

205,039 in just the first nine months of

this fiscal year.

I spoke to another man who owns 35

buses. He told me he pays $120,000 a

year to three gangs — 30 to 40 percent

of everything he makes. On Christmas,

Mother’s Day and Easter, gangs insist

on double (for vacations, they explain).

They are now demanding a 34 percent

increase. He considers himself lucky:

Other owners pay six gangs.

He said he has asked the police for

help six times in five years. He has

taken police officers and an army colo-

nel along on cash drops, provided them

the Banco Azteca account number he

used initially to pay MS-13. Surely that

was traceable? But nothing changed.

Lately, anti-extortion officers have told

him they just can’t touch MS-13 or 18th

Street. “They know people in the gov-

ernment are with them,” he said. “They

know this is uncontrollable.” He, like

many I spoke to, felt the corruption was

getting worse.

Lt. Col. Amílcar Hernández, who

heads the National Anti-Gang Task

Force, disagreed. He said that his unit,

which works with the attorney general’s

office as well as the police and the mili-

tary, prevented around $10.6 million

from landing in the gangs’ hands over

the past five years. He said some bus

owners used to pay seven gangs and

now pay only two, and two Tegucigalpa

bus routes no longer pay anyone at all.

“We are containing the problem,” he

argued. “It’s not paradise. But it’s bet-

ter.”

And yet he acknowledged that bus

drivers still go to the country’s prisons

to drop off extortion payments and that

even a general he knows has to pay the

gangs for three buses he owns.

As a teenager in Argentina, I had to

pay bribes to get a train ticket or the gas

turned on. Lots of places, the United

States included, have corruption. Still,

Honduras makes the swamp in Wash-

ington look like a piddling puddle.

If the United States wants to slow

migration from Central America, that’s

the swamp we must help drain. Instead,

the Trump administration failed to

protest when Guatemala kicked out the

head of a United Nations-sponsored

anti-corruption mission last year and

ordered it closed altogether this Sep-

tember. Its Honduran counterpart, the

Mission in Support of the Fight Against

Corruption and Impunity in Honduras,

could get booted from the country when

its mandate from the Organization of

American States ends in January.

The administration has slashed

foreign aid to Guatemala, El Salvador

and Honduras to punish the countries

for failing to do enough to stop the mi-

grants. The Association for a More Just

Society, the Honduran arm of Transpar-

ency International, which relies heavily

on American support to fight corrup-

tion, has been told that the money will

be spent only on drug enforcement and

blocking migration. Barring any new

resources, by January the group will

have to cut its staff of 140 to 40.

This is especially frustrating because

the fight against corruption in Hon-

duras really revved up only four years

ago, in response to enormous street

protests by fed-up citizens called “indig-

nados.” The investigations and revela-

tions by anti-corruption groups that

followed have actually driven up de-

spair, by highlighting both how big the

problem is and how few of the bad guys

end up in jail.

Last year, faced with charges that at

least five and as many as 60 additional

current and former lawmakers had

stolen $55 million in public funds, the

Honduran Congress passed a law re-

stricting corruption prosecutions for

three years. It had already passed a

Law of Secret Information, making it

possible to classify just about any gov-

ernment information — including

spending — as secret for up to 25 years.

Not coincidentally, the statute of limita-

tions to try public officials is less than 25

years. The Supreme Court even ruled

unconstitutional the arm of the attorney

general’s office that tackles corruption.

The rot starts at the top, with Presi-

dent Juan Orlando Hernández. In 2015

he acknowledged that his first cam-

paign for president, two years earlier,

had taken money from companies and

politicians that had illegally siphoned

some $300 million from the Honduran

Institute of Social Security. But he

denied knowing where the money came

from, telling reporters that “me, myself,

Juan Orlando, I have nothing to do” with

the scandal.

Since he was re-elected under very

dubious circumstances in 2017, he has

stuck to that line, even as many of his

family members and associates have

been implicated in scam after scam.

There are two main ways to get rich

illegally in Honduras. One is to take

money from cartels to help them move

Colombian cocaine to the United States.

The president’s brother, Tony, was

arrested last November in Miami,

accused of brazenly labeling shipments

of cocaine with his initials. The brothers

were protected by the same presiden-

tial guard, prompting Carlos

Hernández, the executive director of

the Association for a More Just Society,

known as A.J.S., to ask the president

incredulously: You didn’t know your

brother was moving tons of drugs?

The other way is to steal from the

public coffers. This is often done

through the creation of nonprofits that

get government contracts and either do

the work at inflated prices or don’t do

anything at all and pocket the pay-

ments.

According to a forthcoming study by

A.J.S. based on public records and its

reporting, two nonprofits linked to the

president’s family received $87 million

in no-bid government contracts be-

tween 2014 and 2017. One received

almost five times as much government

funding as the budget of the largest

nonprofit operating in Honduras, World

Vision. There has been no accounting of

how the money was spent.

Fernando Josué Suárez Ramírez

helped run a number of nonprofits tied

to the president’s family and has since

turned himself into the authorities. His

lawyer, Omar Menjívar, told me in an

interview that, according to his client,

$9.4 million went from the government

to one of these nonprofits to buy school

uniforms for children. No child got a

uniform. He said another called Frijoles

Hay — We Have Beans — never distrib-

uted a single bean.

A unit in the attorney general’s office

has been investigating another major

scam called the Pandora case. Between

2011 and 2013, nearly $12 million was

stolen from the Ministry of Agriculture

and paid to two nonprofits controlled by

the president’s sister, Hilda. The groups

were supposed to teach improved culti-

vation and irrigation techniques to

farmers affected by climate change, but

no training occurred, said Elsa

Calderón, the chief of the special anti-

corruption prosecutor’s office.

According to a transcript of Mr.

Suárez Ramírez’s testimony to the

Supreme Court that was illegally re-

corded last year and published by Noti-

bomba — a website focused on Latin

American politics — this money also

went to fund the president’s 2013 cam-

paign.

Hilda Hernández would call and ask

Mr. Suárez Ramírez to bring money. He

carried the cash in suitcases or back-

packs — there was so much of it he

would often weigh it rather than count it

all out, Mr. Menjívar told me. The

money paid for lavish campaign events,

a helicopter to transport the candidate.

One day, Mr. Suárez Ramírez claims he

signed checks to some 2,000 National

Party activists, a $282,845 giveaway.

Ms. Hernández also helped herself: She

bought land, cattle, apartments in

Miami, before she died in a helicopter

accident in 2017.

No one has yet been convicted in the

Pandora case, but 38 people have been

charged. The president is not among

them. According to a spokesman for the

Mission in Support of the Fight Against

Corruption and Impunity, the attorney

general’s office is still investigating Mr.

Suárez Ramírez’s accusations.

The president’s office said it was

unable to comment in time for this

article’s publication. But the president

has previously cautioned reporters

against discussing these matters, say-

ing, “If somebody has proof of some-

thing, they should present the evidence

to the relevant authorities; that is the

procedure — that is justice.”

“I think we will get J.O.H.,” said Ms.

Calderón, using the president’s initials.

“I’m not sure when.”

The corruption trickles down into the

country’s classrooms, where teaching

salaries are handed out as political

favors to “ghost teachers” who never

show up at school. A decade ago, one in

four teachers never came to class. A

whole soccer team, 22 athletes, got paid

as teachers. Honduras was spending a

greater percentage of its budget on

education than any other country in

Latin America, but had the worst test

scores after Haiti.

In 2011, A.J.S. put together a list of all

the teachers on payrolls at the nation’s

schools, and asked volunteers to see if

they really existed. The government

was paying 85,000 teachers. It turned

out only 55,000 were real. The disclo-

sure led the minister of education to

resign and to a purge of bogus teachers.

But the reforms weren’t made perma-

nent, and Mr. Hernández of A.J.S. be-

lieves there are already 5,000 new ghost

teachers and 100 new ghost schools —

some in imaginary towns. While test

scores have risen, most Honduran kids

still don’t make it past elementary

school.

The corruption of Honduras’s schools

robs children of their futures. But the

corruption of its medical system can rob

them of their lives.

The first sign that something was

seriously amiss was a spike in women

dying in childbirth in 2011. A drug to

stop uterine bleeding, oxytocin, wasn’t

working. A.J.S. sent 10 medicines from

three Honduran drug companies to a

lab to be tested. Many were so sub-

standard they were no better than a

placebo. Later tests showed that drugs

for diabetes and hypertension didn’t

work. Some were diluted, containing 5

percent of the active ingredient. Some

were chalk dust — fakes. Others were

contaminated: IV drips contained fecal

matter.

Dr. Suyapa Figueroa, the president of

Honduras’s Medical University, esti-

mates that at least 2,000 patients died

between 2010 and 2014 as a result of bad

medicines and a lack of available dialy-

sis drugs.

How did this happen? The head of the

Institute of Social Security organized a

ring of criminals to steal an estimated

$300 million from the

health care system.

Officials took bribes

to overpay for

shoddy products.

James Nealon,

who served as United

States ambassador to

Honduras from 2014

to 2017, said about the

scam, “It’s not that

the criminals were

subverting the sys-

tem; this was the

system.”

That ring was eventually brought

down — the head of the program has

been sentenced to 41 years in prison —

but the same tactics continue. Ms.

Calderón, the anti-corruption prosecu-

tor, said 80 politicians and employees of

the health department are now under

investigation in a case involving a drug

company that was paid more than

$694,000 by the government to provide

medicine and supplies to public hospi-

tals. None of it ever arrived, she said.

As a result of all this corruption, the

United Nations oversees the purchase

of most drugs in Honduras. The govern-

ment makes up a list of the medications

it wants to buy, and the United Nations

administers the payments. But about 30

percent of drugs are still bought directly

by local hospitals, and there the fraud

continues.

“People say: Well, the state robs, so I

can rob, too,” said the A.J.S.’s Carlos

Hernández.

Finally, corruption has rotted the

police. Officers would shut down high-

ways so drug planes could land, and

even killed top government officials

who got in the way of the narcos.

In 2016, President Hernández, under

pressure from the United States and

worried about the coming election,

ordered a purge that resulted in the

firing of more than 5,000 of the coun-

try’s 13,500 officers. All 40 of the high-

est-ranking officers were dismissed

because they were suspected of being

criminals, didn’t pass a polygraph or

were incapable of doing the job, said

Omar Rivera, one of three members of

the Special Commission for the Purge

and Transformation of the Honduran

National Police. Before, Mr. Rivera said,

all cops were paid to look the other way.

Now — he hopes — only a minority are

on the take.

In 2016, the commission referred 455

officers suspected of committing crimes

for prosecution. That number has since

grown to 2,100, according to a member

of the commission. And yet only one has

been convicted.

“This is so rotten, it is full of pus,” Mr.

Rivera said.

Most disturbing, the purge found

around 100 police officers and officials

who were actual members of MS-13.

Five were high-level officials in charge

of whole regions of the country, said

Carlos Hernández, who also worked as

an adviser to the purge commission.

This kind of infiltration is MS-13’s new

trademark. The gang has sent its people

to school to become lawyers, account-

ants and doctors, to treat gang mem-

bers who have been shot. It has sent

gang members to the police academy to

become cops. “At the bottom and at the

top of the police, there are members of

MS-13,” said Jaime Varela Lagos, a gang

expert who works with A.J.S. A 911

operator and a Supreme Court investi-

gator were found to be undercover

gangsters. In some neighborhoods,

MS-13 has its own security cameras.

The ultimate goal is to control the

police, the courts and Congress.

An official who investigates gangs

and asked to remain anonymous told

me MS-13 has paid off so many prosecu-

tors, politicians and judges that he has

to have three times the evidence to keep

its members in jail than he does for 18th

Street gangsters. In June 2016, when he

took part in an MS-13 bust, he said he

found nine bags of cash the gang had

individually addressed to legislators,

police officers and to the mayor of one of

Honduras’s largest cities.

I get the chills when I hear Blanca

Munguía, who combats corruption at

A.J.S., say, “They are growing so fast

that soon they will control everything.”

And my heart breaks when I see how

one neighborhood, Nueva Suyapa, has

borne the brunt of this corruption.

I have been reporting in Nueva

Suyapa for two decades, and what I

have found there is a microcosm of the

corruption that A.J.S. investigates on

the national level.

Perched on Tegucigalpa’s eastern

edge, Nueva Suyapa used to be a trash

dump until people displaced by Hurri-

cane Fifi began settling there in the

1970s. Today, some 50,000 bricklayers

and tortilla makers live in humble

homes that cling to the verdant hillsides

above the gleaming white Basilica of

Suyapa, where Hondurans arrive by the

thousands to thank the Virgin of Suyapa

for a miracle or — perhaps more often —

to pray for one.

Residents include Blanca Velazquez,

whose diabetic mother almost died

from taking ineffective insulin the

government supplied, and Mario Rosa-

les, a social worker, who saw a police

officer’s patrol car take cash from an

MS-13 gangster just last year. At the

entrance to a section of Nueva Suyapa

called El Infiernito, or Little Hell,

Baudilia Amaya lives with fourkids in

an adobe hut whose walls are about to

fall down; they barely step outside for

fear of the gangs. She wants to flee to

the United States.

Since 2005, gangs have been battling

for control. Today, 18th Street controls

part of the bottom of the hill, MS-

themiddle, and 18th Street the top — a

neighborhood called Flores de Oriente,

the most feared place to go. Life in MS

territory is no picnic, but the 18th Street

clique here, called Colombian Little

Psycho, is particularly violent. A local

activist told me that last year 18th

Street gangsters captured a girl they

thought was snitching. They killed her

by cutting off her arm piece by piece.

They recorded it and shared the video.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY VICTOR J. BLUE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

MS-13 and

18th Street

gangsters

want to run

Honduras.

Cutting off

American aid

isn’t going to

stop them.

Sonia Nazario

Contributing Writer

Pay or die

Baudilia Amaya’s

son Jeremy at

home in Nueva

Suyapa. Ms.

Amaya hopes to

emigrate to the

United States.

I huddle

down, turn

my phone to

record video,

press it

against the

car’s tinted

window, and

pray no one

sees me.

N AZARIO, PAGE 11

Ondina Esperanza Díaz waiting with other parents and students for the principal to arrive at a primary school.

A bus company bundled and readied its

payments to three Tegucigalpa gangs.

Opinion

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