San Pedro Sula—Nelson fled Honduras for the United States to escape a murderous gang that was trying to force him to sell drugs.
Just 23, he was deported back to his homeland, his 46-year-old mother Marina says. He was soon dead.
They are two of countless ordinary victims of an extraordinary tragedy: the gang violence terrorizing Honduras, possibly the most dangerous country in the world.
Poor families like theirs are fleeing home for their lives.
Honduras’s National Human Rights Commission says more than 74,000 people in this country of eight million moved or emigrated between 2004 and 2014.
A gang murdered Geraldina’s three sons and now she fears for her daughter.
“She saw when they killed her brother,” Geraldina says.
“They came into the house and put a pistol in her mouth to tell her not to talk.”
Like other witnesses of gang violence interviewed by Agence France Presse, she asked not to be identified by her full name.
The Megalocos gang killed two of her sons, aged 19 and 22, for disobeying warnings not to wear the shirt of their football team Olimpia, Geraldina said.
The third, aged 23, was killed because he refused to join the gang.
The head of the country’s human rights commission, Roberto Herrera, said that last year more than 16,000 Hondurans applied to the commission to be relocated abroad.
That was a 99 percent increase from the previous year, he added.
They flee their home neighborhoods, driven out by murders, kidnappings, extortion, assaults and threats.
Many of them seek to move to Costa Rica or Canada, Herrera says.
Many others don’t wait, but flee straight to the United States — as Geraldina’s daughter did.
She, too, was deported back to Honduras. Now she and her mother live in a neighborhood far away from the gang.
Honduras has one of the highest homicide rates in the world: more than six times the world average, according to the World Health Organization.
Officials blame gangs and drug-traffickers.
Groups such as the Salvatrucha Gang and District 18 rule the poor outskirts of Honduras’s main cities.
Before it was torn apart by the murders, Geraldina’s family lived in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second-biggest city—and one the world’s most violent.
“There is shooting every day. It goes for an hour or more,” says one local woman there, Petronila.
Young gang members cruise around in luxury vehicles toting guns.
“A lot of weapons end up scattered in the street” after a battle, she says.
The US government’s development agency USAID runs “community-based efforts to prevent crime and gang activity” in Honduras.
USAID estimates there are 36,000 active gang members in Honduras. Its web page says it aims “to reintegrate ex-gang members, and promote juvenile justice.”
The police are not up to the fight, officials warn.
Honduras has had to set up a commission to clean up the force.
“Only four percent of crimes get as far as a court hearing, because of the lack of effective criminal investigations,” commission member Omar Rivera said.
Maria, 43, searched for her son after he was “disappeared” by a gang in 2014.
“When I set out to look for him, I was afraid I would find him in pieces,” she says.
But she found nothing.
“I wonder where my son can be, whether he is alive or dead.”
Her sister and nephew joined in the search. Her nephew turned up in the morgue with a bullet in his head.