San Pedro Sula, Honduras (dailynewyorknews) – Flanked by police with assault rifles and driving on a road in the back of a police van, police commissioner Julian Hernandez explains the difficult task to fight against crime.
“The United Nations recommends that a city this size has 4000 employees,” he said. “But I only have 1000.”
Overrun by drug violence, San Pedro Sula is the second largest city and most violent in Honduras – a country that is kill the capital of the world.
At the end of the first day of filming CNN “Narco Wars” The report, which was with the commissioner, hoping for a quick interview. Instead, Hernandez jumped into the back of the police van, with Kaj Larsen and corresponding to the rest of the CNN crew in the streets of San Pedro Sula, an industrial city with good infrastructure.
A convoy of police vehicles joined us as we go further into the city. But instead of a tour that began after a shabby brown van. A lawsuit has occurred. Finally, on the outskirts of the city, surrounded the vehicle. Its three occupants were taken at gunpoint and forced to lie on the road. We surprised everyone in the capture of this camera, given that most serious crimes remain unresolved here.
In the next moment the three stood, smiling. It turned out that the police had made showing the demolition of their tactics.
A minute later, a call came and we were back in a police van in the direction of the actual crime scene: another body was abandoned, another group of neighbors who had not seen or heard any thing, one where the murder was not ‘t going to be a dramatic chase that ended with arrests.
Welcome to the most violent region in the world.
Getting Away With Murder
The Americans are well aware of drug war in Mexico and the terrible violence that takes place a stone’s throw from the United States.
However, drug trafficking and violence is not confined to Mexico.
In fact, Honduras, El Salvador, Belize, Guatemala and Panama had higher per capita murder rate in Mexico in 2010.
CNN “Narco Wars” focuses on Honduras and Guatemala, because these two countries have become the main corridor of the cocaine reaching the United States from South America. This coincided with a dramatic increase in the homicide rate, according to the UN. In Honduras, killing more than doubled between 2005 and 2010, the UN reports. As a result, the U.S. Peace Corps last week drew more than 150 of its volunteers in Honduras, while examining the security situation.
Almost all murders committed in the Central American countries will be solved. The impunity rate – the rate of serious crimes remain unresolved – is very high, estimated by the United Nations by 98% in Guatemala.
Here, the chances are overwhelming that you can literally get away with it.
Certainly there are other places where the impunity rate is high, as in parts of Mexico, where his rage war against drugs. But in Mexico, the victims are the result of a war against the drug cartels began with known organized clash.
In Central America, the authorities believe that drug trafficking is a factor in 60% of murders, but not always clear who killed whom and why. Maybe a murder is linked to a large shipment of cocaine. Or maybe more top-selling drugs $ 50 on the sidewalk.
Origins of a war against drugs
It all started 30 years ago when hundreds of thousands of Americans began to immigrate to the central United States, many of them illegally. Some ended up in Los Angeles, the capital of a street gang in the United States, if not the world. Some of the children of immigrants has increased and become gang members. There were two big bands, the Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13 and Calle 18. Neighborhoods where gangs are based have become active areas of the homicide division of the LAPD in the 1990s.
It was as if the civil wars in Central America in the 1980s had moved north.
And the United States expelled many of these gang members back to Central America. Consequently, the Mara Salvatrucha and Calle 18, a native of Los Angeles, became the Central American gangs. The region began to experience an explosion of cases of robberies and murders committed by gang members of extortion.
The threat was so serious that the FBI in 2004 created a task force to fight against these transnational street gangs in the United States, Mexico and Central America. In 2005, homicides in Honduras has increased to nearly 2,500 per year.
With the United States are working hard to stop the trafficking in the Caribbean and South America, Central America – with its violence and disorder at a high level of impunity – it has become an interesting alternative.
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For 2011, the DEA estimates that 25 tons of cocaine a month moving through Honduras. And there were about 7,000 homicides there, a 250% increase in half a dozen years. The killings in El Salvador reports neighbors increased to its highest level since the civil war in that country in the 1980s.
Of course, these numbers are correct. In soil, the growing level of violence has created a kind of prison.
When the sun goes down in San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, people retire to their homes as if it was 4:00 in the morning important sections of the city to be abandoned, and armed guards everywhere.
Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/01/19/world/americas/narco-wars-guatemala-honduras/index.html?hpt=ila_c1
