IF SAN PEDRO SULA IS MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD, WHO MADE IT THAT WAY?
By David Bacon
The American Prospect, June 13, 2019
Refugees flee this Honduran city, which has long been a vast, American-owned sweatshop.
Women and children in one of the poorest barrios of San Pedro Sula.
A 30-second search on the internet produces at least two dozen stories from U.S. newspapers and other media about San Pedro Sula in Honduras. «Honduran City is World Murder Capital,» announces Fox News. Business Insider calls it «the most violent city on earth.» In an attempt to explain the motivation for migrant caravans traveling to the U.S.-Mexico border, NPR labels it «one of the most violent cities in the world.»
This wave of media attention has been going on for at least half a decade, as tens of thousands of Hondurans arrive at the border seeking refuge. President Trump’s rhetoric portraying the caravans as a threat has focused even more attention on this Honduran city.
Fear of violence is a completely legitimate reason for leaving home and making the dangerous journey north. Violence and gangs, however, are often presented by U.S. media as the only explanation for the exodus of Hondurans from this metropolis. Yet more than a century of history connects the city with the United States, in a close but unequal, and usually abusive, relationship, at least for Hondurans.
Over that time, San Pedro Sula has been the capital of banana exports, a city wracked by war and death squads, and a factory town for the garment industry. Most recently, it has become a community hit by deindustrialization as hard as any textile town in New England. The media almost always ignores this history, yet it is this long relationship that has produced the migration with which the media seems obsessed.
That «murder capital» narrative, however, is being challenged increasingly by U.S. organizations calling for a deeper look. Some of them started as defenders of migrants incarcerated in U.S. detention centers, and now seek to clarify the root causes of migration as a way to support migrants and their home communities.
A recent four-page spread in The New York Times Magazine described in detail the lives of young people in San Pedro Sula’s Rivera Hernández neighborhood. Its author, Azam Ahmed, explained to readers that he wanted to «bear witness,» «to capture just how inescapable the violence was,» in the context of «tens of thousands fleeing the region.» Honduras’s state of crisis, he wrote, is a result of «warring gang factions.»
Accompanying the article were Tyler Hicks’s dark photographs of gang members, their faces wrapped in bandannas, one holding his gun loosely by his side. Both text and images present these young people as the «other»-a vision to frighten comfortable middle-class readers with what seems an inside look into an alien and violent world.
The Timespiece is only the latest of many that paint this picture. Four years ago, Juan José Martínez D’Aubuisson wrote an even longer article about the same neighborhood. Pastor Daniel Pacheco arranged the meetings with the gangs, as he did for Ahmed and Hicks. That article, appearing in InSight Crime, concluded: «The violence here is difficult to understand. … The people live with the violence without thinking about it, like how the Eskimos spend their days without thinking about the snow that surrounds them.»
Steven Dudley, InSight Crime’s co-founder and a former bureau chief for the Miami Herald, at least acknowledged the link between violence in San Pedro Sula and U.S. deportation policy. «Gangs’ emergence in the mid-1990s,» he wrote in another article, «coincided with state and federal initiatives in the United States. … The number of gang members deported quickly increased, as did the number of transnational gangs operating in [Central America]. … With the deportations, the two most prominent Los Angeles gangs-the Mara Salvatrucha 13 and the Barrio 18-quickly became the two largest transnational gangs.»
Some 129,726 people convicted of crimes were deported to Central America from 2001 to 2010, 44,042 to Honduras. U.S. law enforcement pressured local police in the region to adopt a «mano dura,» or hard-line approach to them. Many young people deported from the U.S. were incarcerated as soon as they arrived. Prisons became schools for gang recruitment.
The Trump administration argues today that violence is not a basis for an asylum claim by refugees at the border, but this and previous U.S. administrations have cited that violence as a threat to Americans. When Marine Corps General John Kelly was commander of the U.S. Southern Command under President Obama, before his stint in the Trump White House, he framed Central American migration as a national-security threat, calling it a «crime-terror convergence.» And the gangs and violence became a justification for U.S. funding of the Central American Regional Security Initiative, which supplied $204 million to the corrupt Honduran government for army and police in 2016-2017, and another $112 million for economic development.
There is indeed violence in San Pedro Sula. But that violence has a long history, and is intimately tied to the city’s relationship with the U.S. That relationship is so close that the most basic decisions affecting the lives of its residents have often been made by powerful Americans.
A young driver of a rig bring down goods from the San Pedro Sula factories shows that the tread on his tires has worn so thin that the metal belt is exposed.
Carol Vasquez, daughter of Hector Vasquez,? an owner-operator and leader of job actions by the Honduran port truckers’ union.