Drugs, guns and blood

The Spanish journalist Alberto Arce worked for Associated Press in Honduras in 2012 and 2013. After a year, he says: ‘My wife and daughter left me. It was the right choice.’ Arce stayed on in the capital, Tegucigalpa, ‘fighting against addictions, sadness and depression’. He believes he ‘won’ that fight, ‘but only because each morning I counted down the days until I could leave’.

So: Honduras, says Arce, is bad. How bad? He tells us that ‘Tegucigalpa is the most dangerous capital city in the world without a declared war.’ And that ‘in 2012 and 2013, more people were murdered in Honduras than in Iraq, even though the population in Honduras is three times smaller’. Also that in 2012, there were 7,100 murders. That’s 598 per month, or ‘20 daily homicides,’ in a country with a population of 7,000,000. London, with a slightly higher population, has around one murder per day. Almost all murders in London lead to a trial. In Honduras 91 per cent don’t.

Why is this place so violent and lawless? Partly because, in 1998, Hurricane Mitch smashed the country to pieces, and partly because, soon afterwards, the Colombian drug cartels began to use Honduras as a useful depot on the way to Mexico. Lots of drugs, lots of guns, lots of blood. As a foreign correspondent, Arce wrote what he calls ‘red journalism’. When he sees a body on the street, he says, ‘you smell the blood’.He sees two bodies in a car: ‘Blood is spattered on the window, the steering wheel, the shirt.’ The other body is ‘less bloody’: ‘A little red dot at the temple.’