an estimated level of 300,000 homicides with guns every year seems reasonable. Then there are the suicides. The World Health Organization has estimated that 800,000 people kill themselves each year. As one of the leading ways to end it is with a firearm, a figure of 200,000 suicides by firearm a year also seems a reasonable estimate to make.7
This all adds up to about half a million people dying every year from gunfire.
The type of deaths from guns, clearly, differs from country to country. If you live in the US or Canada, suicides account for the majority of gun deaths. In countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Colombia or Albania the majority of gun deaths are homicide. Eastern Europe and southern Africa have lots of murder, but not many by firearm. Southern Europe and northern Africa don’t have many murders, but when they do, it’s much more likely to be with a gun.
The US stands out. Americans suffer about 80,000 non-fatal injuries and 30,000 deaths every year involving guns.8 It works out at just over eighty deaths a day. Things get even worse when you travel south. Although home to just 14 per cent of the world’s population, Latin America accounts for 42 per cent of all firearm-homicides worldwide.9
These figures, though, conceal one problem. As Eric Berman told me, there is a fundamental difficulty getting any figures worth a damn. Many countries don’t have proper ways to establish who has died violently, let alone how. Even in relatively developed South Africa, where gun deaths overshadow all other ‘external’ causes of death, only a third of death records are available for analysis.10 The World Health Organization’s mortality database provides figures for just seven sub-Saharan African countries.
From the data that are available, though, we know that, if you look at the rankings of how people are murdered, Puerto Rico tops the table with 95 per cent of homicides there being with a firearm.11 We also know Brazil has the most gun homicides in the world outside a war zone in terms of sheer numbers.12 And, perhaps of surprise to some, the worst place in the world for gun violence per capita is not the US, but the Central American country of Honduras. And there’s one city there that stands out as the world’s epicentre of gun violence: San Pedro Sula – the most violent city on earth not at war.
This fact was new to me. I had been to Latin America before – the story about gun violence in Brazil was just one of a number of things I had reported on in the previous fifteen years. From drug addiction involving the powerful cocaine residue paco to the rise of the left in Latin politics, I’d travelled to many counties there, camera in hand. But I had never been to Honduras as anything but a tourist, and even then the violence that gripped that land was hidden from me.
This time, though, I felt I had to travel straight to that heart of darkness of San Pedro Sula, to record what happened to the dead in this city of corroded wet streets and ivy-curled trees and to see how people coped under the constant presence of gunfire.
The body was out in the cane sugar field, in the shadows. We stumbled through the night and the plantation mud, the shifting light coming from the mobile phones the police officers were using to guide their way. There was only a weak moon in the Central American sky, and there was no budget for flashlights, so the officials had backed up the mortuary truck and let its headlights cast a low glow across the stubble-rich field. Their phones would have to do the rest.
The call had come over the radio as if it was an urgent murder scene, but the body had decomposed long ago. The sugar cane had since grown and pushed up and out, through the man’s jeans. It had pierced his mottled flesh and was now sprouting through his body as if the bones themselves had grown. They looked like lilies in the half-light; you couldn’t tell the difference between the bones and the cane.
‘See, his hands have been tied,’ said one of the forensic examiners in Spanish. He was dressed in a clinical over-suit, but as he was using a garbage bin to put the bones in, it was clear any concern for evidence contamination had long been lost somewhere in the dark corners of countless other crime scenes.
‘Is that a rib bone?’ The mobile phones were held close to the ground.
‘No. That’s a twig,’ a voice in the pitch-black said.
‘I’ve found his skull,’ said another. An animal must have dragged it away, I thought.
‘Looks like they cut it off,’ the first voice said. I was wrong. You could make out in the shifting light the ragged hole where a bullet had struck and you hoped they had shot him before they had cut him. Either way, the bound hands and lonely death in a field made it clear this was a gang murder.
This was what I had come to witness, and it had not taken long. I had only been here for a short while, and this was the eighth body I had seen. Honduras, without a doubt, was a very violent place. In 2012, twenty people were murdered every day on average in this country of 8 million – a murder rate of 90.4 per 100,000 residents.13 In the US it is about 4.7.14 The city of San Pedro Sula, on whose darkened outskirts I was now, was even worse. The murder rate here was 173 per 100,000.15 There were, in 2013, just under six homicides a day in this municipal region alone.
The violence was partly down to San Pedro Sula being where it was. Stuck between the drug lords of Colombia and Bolivia to the south and the buyers from the US to the north, it had become a habitat of casual murder and cold pain. Some 80 per cent of the cocaine that reaches US soil was thought to be trafficked via here. And as drugs flowed up, guns came down – from south to north, down from the largest gun-producing country in the world.16
These realities, combined with poverty, corruption and impunity, had turned San Pedro Sula into a city where gangs fought gangs and cartels fought cartels over the immense profits that drugs could bring. The feared Mexican syndicates of the Zetas and Sinaloas had even been lured here, aligning themselves with local gangs such as the MS-13 gang or Calle 18. And death had come in their wake.
A few days before, as my plane banked over San Pedro, the lush hills of El Merendon National Park framing the city to the east, and the sprawl of the district of Choloma drifting far up to the north, I looked at my watch. A scattered cemetery speckled the earth in the rushing green below. It was 3.30 p.m. We dipped down to the surging runway. I write this because a skinny policeman was also to note that time – half past three – with a worn ballpoint pen in a crumbling police hill station close to the cemetery I’d just seen. The time was inscribed next to the names of three women who had been gunned down at that precise moment.
The first was Lesley Lopez-Pena. She was twenty-two, single, unemployed. When she died, the policeman noted, she was wearing blue jeans and grey sandals. On the small of her back she had a tattoo of the sun. The second victim was Miriam Portillo. She died with two bullets in her back and one in her chest. The third was Karen Contreros. The report noted that her underwear was pink and that she had five gun wounds in her chest, one in her stomach, one in her shoulder and one in her forehead.
These three women had been travelling back home from a visit out of town. One of them had a boyfriend, a gang member, in prison, and they had been to see him. They had probably given the young man some weed or pills to help pass the dragging hours and then returned. They were caught laughing as they got down from a converted school bus and fell as one from the assassins’ bullets. Dying, one dropped a child’s Spiderman bike she had bought in the market an hour before.
The policeman did not write down a motive. Murders such as these were just another thread in the endless sorrow of the drug wars.
On
