"A Narco State Supported by the United States": How Crime & Corruption in Honduras Fuel Migration
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AUGUST 14, 2019
We speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Sonia Nazario, who has closely detailed why migrants from Central America are fleeing their homes in an attempt to seek asylum in the United States. Earlier this year, Nazario spent a month in Honduras documenting how corruption and gang violence are forcing many people to flee. Her piece, “Pay or Die,” ran in The New York Times, where she is a contributing opinion writer.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Sonia, I wanted to get to your amazing piece that appeared in The New York Times recently, “Pay or Die.” And here in the United States, we hear a lot about gang violence fueling some of the migration or much of the migration coming from Central America, but people don’t really understand what that means. And you’ve done a remarkable effort here —
SONIA NAZARIO: Thank you.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — to actually go into what actually is happening. You mention that since 2010, 1,500 Hondurans who work in transportation have been murdered, shot, strangled, cuffed to their steering wheels or burned alive by these gangs, because they did not pay the bribes that they were supposed to pay to be able to keep operating and transporting people. Could you talk about this whole issue of how transportation, especially, in Honduras has become this gold mine for the street gangs?
SONIA NAZARIO: That’s right. I was focusing, Juan, on the role of corruption in these countries, like Honduras, and that that’s really the swamp that we have to clean up if we want to help clean up in an attempt to slow this influx of people who are coming to our southern border. The corruption is what allows all the other bad things to happen, including gangs imposing this reign of terror in these neighborhoods and charging this war tax, this extortion tax, from anything with wheels — buses, taxis, motorcycle taxis — and from businesses. In the neighborhood where I spent time, one in four businesses was paying a war tax to the gang. And one in four businesses had shut down completely because they could no longer pay the war tax. So this is paralyzing the economy.
So I wanted to show what this was like for these bus owners, who are basically told by the gangs, “You have to pay up on Monday morning.” Every Monday morning, thousands of bus owners are going out and delivering these chunks, these bricks of cash to these gangs, or they are murdered if they say no. And along a bus route, if any driver refuses to pay, they’ll just kill a driver randomly. And so, this is what I saw, that in just the capital of Honduras, these gangs are receiving, are being paid an estimated $23 million a year in these war taxes.
More:
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/8/14/sonia_nazario_honduras_crime_corruption_migration
