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1 of 1- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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- Registered: 1/29/2015
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How the Most Dangerous Place on Earth Got Safer
How the Most Dangerous
Place on Earth Got Safer
Programs funded by the United States are helping
transform Honduras. Who says American power is dead?
San Pedro Sula, Honduras — Three years ago, Honduras had the highest homicide rate in the world. The city of San Pedro Sula had the highest homicide rate in the country. And the Rivera Hernández neighborhood, where 194 people were killed or hacked to death in 2013, had the highest homicide rate in the city. Tens of thousands of young Hondurans traveled to the United States to plead for asylum from the drug gangs’ violence.
This summer I returned to Rivera Hernández to find a remarkable reduction in violence, much of it thanks to programs funded by the United States that have helped community leaders tackle crime. By treating violence as if it were a communicable disease and changing the environment in which it propagates, the United States has not only helped to make these places safer, but has also reduced the strain on our own country.
Two years ago, some 18,000 unaccompanied Honduran children showed up on the United States border. Now community leaders say the number of youngsters heading north from this neighborhood has been cut by more than half. Honduras has dropped from first place to third among Central American countries sending unaccompanied children to the United States illegally.
Smart investments in Honduras are succeeding. This offers a striking rebuke to the rising isolationists in American politics. A Pew Research Center poll in April found that most Americans think the United States should “deal with its own problems” while others deal with theirs “as best they can,” a sentiment that’s at the core of Donald J. Trump’s “America First” slogan and “build a wall” campaign. Many seem to have lost their faith in American power.
The funding for violence prevention in Honduras — which this year cost between $95 million and $110 million — has also come under attack from the left. This summer, a bill was introduced in Congress to suspend security aid to Honduras because of corruption and human rights violations. These concerns are legitimate, but cutting our support would be a mistake.
What we really need to do is double down on the programs that are working and replicate them elsewhere. Even as fewer children are coming to the United States from Honduras, the overall number from Central America could set a record this year. What is working in Honduras may offer hope to Guatemala, El Salvador and other countries in crisis.
Until recently, parents didn’t let their children outside in Rivera Hernández, for fear of the six gangs that controlled the sprawling neighborhood of 150,000.
The gangs enforced a 6 p.m. curfew. Bodies littered the dirt streets in the morning. The 18th Street Gang set up a checkpoint, and every entering driver was asked: Where are you from? Where are you going? Anyone with wrong answers was shot on the spot. I heard from multiple sources — including in the State Department and the Honduran police — about gangsters playing soccer with the decapitated head of someone they had executed.
“It was like a ghost town,” said Jesús René Maradiaga, a community leader. Two of his daughters had been shot, one fatally.
No longer. In two years, homicides have plummeted 62 percent. On a recent Thursday night, I went to Daniel Pacheco’s twice-a-month movie night. A pastor and part-time carpenter, Mr. Pacheco picks up kids from the 18th Street Gang’s territory as well as kids from the area controlled by its fiercest rival, the Mara Salvatrucha gang.
Continued at
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.