Co-authored by Jennifer Ávila & Juan Martínez
Illustrated by German Andino
Edited by Alberto Arce
Translated by Andrew Hart

It’s been a long time since the twenty-one have all gotten together. A few might have already fled the neighborhood. Tonight there are three who walk quickly down the middle of the street.

They come to a corner, to one of the borders. Two flickering orange street lights and what little they manage to illuminate: a diffuse imaginary line only a few meters wide, that separates the neighborhood Cesura from the territory of the Mara Salvatrucha 13, shrouded in a deep and repellent darkness.

Two go in front, nervous as hell. Behind them Rubio tries to keep their pace steady, stumbling from the effects of the twenty beers earlier consumed. Drunk as he is, he knows the security protocol has begun.

“I’m wearing a white shirt!” he yells, cackling.

He buttons up the darker blue plaid shirt that hangs loosely over the white t-shirt he wears tight against his body. The other two also check their clothes to make sure they aren’t showing bright colors that will give them away in the darkness. The breeze, usually a relief in the oppressive heat of northern Honduras, moves the trees in the distance. Those movements play with the three boys’ perceptions as they leave a small blue house to patrol the neighborhood. The word “patrol” is a bit overstated in this case. The state police and the military patrol. In San Pedro Sula, so do the gangs and narco-traffickers… anyone with the weapons and personnel. For the rest, it’s just keeping watch. The three scared boys pop in and out of the light of the Cesura street corners, watching for the Mara Salvatrucha who may be coming to kill them.

Squinting their eyes, the three lookouts try to differentiate the silhouettes of trees from the silhouettes of gangsters. The dusty, potholed streets are jet-black at midnight, cut by vegetation breaking through at the edges. The smell of stagnant water and the chirping of insects fills the air. After a while, the sensations—the sounds, the fear—are similar to what we would perceive if we were to be submerged in a swimming pool: that little whistle behind the eyes, between the ears. Floating in a pool of black petroleum.

They stop when they get to an alley they must cross, where they will be exposed. Their bodies form an inverted L: legs vertical, bent at the waist, torsos hanging parallel to the ground. They look toward the edge of the neighborhood to guess at the identity of the black silhouettes—blacker than an oil stain in the night—moving far off in the Salvatrucha darkness.

“It’s people peeling potatoes,” says Andy, as he finishes pulling off his white t-shirt to reveal brown skin. Better camouflage. “Peeling potatoes” here means being unaware. Being where you shouldn’t be. Getting caught, for example, in the middle of a firefight.

“Must be Jehovah’s Witnesses. Those people don’t give a shit about walking around anywhere,” he adds.

The evangelists of the church—“potato peelers” by vocation—hand out bible pamphlets and wander through the neighborhood knocking on residents’ doors. They don’t realize that from here or from the Salvatrucha side, bullets could rain down on them at any time. Or worse, they do realize and believe their God will save them in the line of fire.

“The good thing is normally shootouts don’t start when people are out on the street,” Rubio explains, vocalizing as best he can.

They are three—part of a group that is forming, or is being forced to form. By now they are almost, whether they like it or not, a gang.

Even at dawn, the light doesn't illuminate the darkest corners of Cesura. Rather, it distorts them, making it difficult to recognize the streets. By day, the neighborhood remains sunken within dark boundaries. It’s one of the pits of San Pedro Sula, Honduras. A handful of streets with diffuse borders, punctuated by hotspots[1]: the dead projecting beams of light to guide the living. Translucent bars enclose the cage that has been abandoned to the beasts inside. Around this hole a self-destructive system lives and kills, working in an apparently autonomous and spontaneous way. Not to say less cruel. The fact that no one gives the order doesn’t mean it’s not happening. The fact that no one gives the order, doesn’t mean it was not a political decision made by someone of flesh and blood.

The fact that few are watching doesn’t mean the battle isn’t being fought.

Society is cruel to the inhabitants of Cesura. Society likes to show them that their lives—and the nightmares they live through—are real. That they belong to the present and not to a bad drug trip they can wake up from. The neighborhood is bombarded with a loud, monotonous, and repetitive refrain, a broken record that makes their torture even worse. They’re not dead. Not yet. So they must not forget that a world exists out there, a world they might try to run to. An escape route. They endlessly shake at the rusty chains that hold them, without pause, as they look upward towards the surface from the depths of their hole.

The constant taking off and landing of airplanes—to and from an unreachable far-off world—is a reminder to the inhabitants of Cesura. A reminder that freedom of movement is right there within site and earshot. Standing between them is a few hundred meters and a few hundred dollars, a vertical gap impossible to close. Flights arriving and departing from and towards Miami, Guatemala City, Houston, or the Bay Islands of the Honduran Caribbean.

It’s not distance or fatigue that prevents people from walking those streets. There’s another problem. You’d have to cross a handful of neighborhoods and villages that are contested territory, fought for between one, two, or three gangs that almost control them. Here the word “almost” is as important as “control”: as important as the difference between being alive or dead, or in purgatory. This is a city of borders that are not crossed without money and permission. You always have to pay. Always always. If you don’t pay, you don’t cross. You can see the other side, right there and within reach, but no. It would not be the first (or the last) time a person is murdered here for entering the wrong neighborhood, for crossing an indistinct border. In this case, “wrong” means a neighborhood controlled by a gang that is the enemy of the one that controls yours.

In this sector you walk down well-delimited streets, always truncated, fenced off by fear. Streets that may be the only means to access resources for basic subsistence.

From the sky, flying over the Rivera sector of San Pedro Sula, you can appreciate its magnificent misery. 75 square miles stretching through the Sula valley—Usula was the name of the valley before the arrival of the Spaniards— crisscrossed by infinite asphalt and dirt side streets, columns of smoke rising up from the garbage, two or three winding hills, and draped over it all a spread of little houses. From a bird’s eye view, the place looks inhospitable.

Zoom in. San Pedro Sula: the breeding ground of Honduran gangs, the neighborhoods of the Rivera Hernández sector, Cesura. Here some gangs have existed for decades. The most powerful: the savage Mara Salvatrucha 13 and 18th Street Gang, both of Californian origin. The others, microscopic in comparison, more recent and endemic, reproduce quickly: Vatos Locos, the Tercereños, the Olanchanos, the Aguacates, the Terraceños… This sector of the city, shared in part by the sister city of La Lima and encompassing fifty-nine neighborhoods, is their territory.

With such brutal and omnipresent gangs as proprietors of these neighborhoods, who would attempt to venture on foot in search of an escape, challenging all survival logic? Here, the answer from every person who has been asked that morbid question has been:

The Metropolitan Unit 8 (UMEP, in Spanish) police post in the Rivera Hernández suburb has been completely remodeled. They painted the walls and rebuilt some sections of the building. Gone is the public bathroom area in the central patio: a cataclysm of shit stuck inside a pair of wooden sheds with tin roofs, surrounded by the corpses of police motorbikes that couldn’t be repaired. The UMEP 8 goes well with the new neighborhood park, constructed right next door a few years ago, during the first administration of the current president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández.

The only thing that evokes the conditions of the UMEP 8 in, say, the year 2014, is a battered patrol truck parked at the entrance. Three bullets have punctured the body and left holes where corrosion has taken hold just above the slogan: “Serve and Protect.” The rust will end up eating it away.

The section of the building that years ago was used as the kitchen and break room for the officers, right next to the outhouses, now contains offices painted septic green, little cubicles walled off with gypsum board, reminiscent of stables. The space is equipped with a large table and seven chairs which sit off to the side. This is the meeting room where we are received by Officer Nelson Murillo, sector police chief since early 2018.

Behind the long table, the largest wall is almost completely covered with an image from Google Earth, overlaid with red, green, and blue grid lines that show the three subdivisions under the jurisdiction of Metropolitan Unit 8. The territory that Murillo is in charge of. The Rivera sector, an area of the city inhabited by 228,000 people.

“What happened here in recent years?” asks Murillo, initiating an interview that feels more like a monologue, as he flips through papers he had ready on the table. He looks at the camera and waves. “Hello everyone,” he says smiling, addressing what he believes must be the public outside of the Rivera sector.

You get the feeling that Murillo, too, believes that far-off worlds exist where things work by a different set of rules.

Between 2011 and 2014, San Pedro Sula was considered the most violent city on the planet. Or at least, the most violent in countries where homicides are registered. More than 100 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Since 2015, the authorities have reported a considerable drop in homicides and those who listen to official propaganda are celebrating having saved San Pedro Sula from the epidemic of violence from which it once suffered. In a large part of the city, in neighborhoods with mutable borders and gangs, the residents do not perceive the same thing. The State is still far removed.

But Murillo says: “The way we have been working for the last few years… we have saved between 30,000 and 40,000 lives. Because we came from a spiral of nearly 90 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. Right now in 2018 we have between 40 and 42 [deaths] per 100,000 inhabitants. We have lowered the homicide rate [by] more than 50%,” he affirms, and shifts to one side of the map to avoid blocking the content, just like a weatherman would.

One question, Murillo: if one could explain the circumstances of the many disappearances—the thousands, tens of thousands—in Honduras—an impossible task at this point, of course—the whereabouts of all those people… Would it significantly affect this homicide rate you are currently reporting in San Pedro Sula? What does it mean to disappear in Honduras?

“Ok, look, crimes being reported is a determining factor for the investigative teams, but in Honduras the problem has been that for lack of credibility [in the police] in other times, the culture of reporting crimes has been lost. These days, with the investments that have been made, we have a way to react immediately thanks to the unification of the national police, intelligence units and emergency response teams. But the investigations into disappearances are very complex, very complex. But thanks to the magnitude of the work that we do, I think that would have a minimal effect,” Murillo explains and he continues with his lecture. “Look, in earlier times, displacements of people and disappearances due to violence were happening a little more often. [They happened] so much that there are many people that left the country and no one knows where they are. They may have applied for political asylum, they [may have] left for lack of employment, they [may have] left out of fear, the [may have] left because their parents lived in the United States or Spain… but there are many social or socioeconomic factors that determine what a disappeared person is. It doesn’t necessarily mean that a gang came along and kidnapped them and took them away. Remember that we have a monitoring system with more than 2,000 cameras in Honduras, we have a web page, and we have social networks; people are reporting crimes more these days. They are getting organized through community leaders and evangelical ministers…”

250 words that don’t answer the question. The interview has taken a strong political tone.

The takeaway: the police do their job, a “titanic” work, according to Murillo. The numbers—also according to his criteria, and in this he is correct—of people that disappear under violent circumstances are lower in comparison to the number of people that migrate from the country due to violence and the indifference of the Honduran government. The rest remain suspended in limbo, wanting but unable to leave.

The forced displacements—both internal (the majority) and external (a growing number)—to Honduras, seem to be, for the chief of police, a more acceptable phenomenon than a possible upturn in the homicide rate. Like the infamous 2014 homicide rate that attracted waves of journalists from all over the world to film San Pedro Sula’s crime scenes.

Honduras loses lives. It loses people. It loses resources. It loses attention.

“The result of the first investigations gives the idea that it’s a confrontation between criminal bands and that there may be some illicit business in the middle of it all,” declared the Vice Minister of Security, Armando Calidonio.

“The killings occurred on a football field in the Felipe Zelaya neighborhood, a populous area with high rates of violence in the northeastern sector of San Pedro Sula, some 243 kilometers north of Tegucigalpa,” published the newspaper La Prensa. The best reference they could come up with to place the location of the massacre was the capital of Honduras, hundreds of kilometers away. The entrance to the neighborhood Cesura is a three-minute walk from where the massacre took place.

“The masked killers arrived in two cars and—after drawing their AK-47 rifles—began to fire on players, referees, and fans. Before doing so, the masked men selected a group of fans whom they made raise their shirts to confirm whether they had tattoos. According to San Pedro Sula Channel 6 news, three referees and two players were killed, while the other nine dead were fans.” (As reported by La Vanguardia.)

What remained on the field that day had nothing to do with sport: daughters and wives asked—are still asking—that justice be done for their dead. Their cries were heard in the middle of the tumult of forensic technicians wrapped from head to toe in white suits, red and blue lights, bicycles strewn around on the ground, cameramen pointing their equipment wherever they saw blood or pain…

In an interview for a San Pedro Sula television channel, one of the neighbors said: “We condemn this type of massacre because we have lived it not only now. We have lived it for years…” This was the third or fourth massacre of the year in San Pedro Sula.

The owner of the little blue house where Raquel now lives, died on the football field that day.

The entrance to the property, shaded by banana trees, is a narrow alleyway that leads to a worn wooden gate. Past the gate, across the “river” of graywater that runs from the basin where they wash clothes and dishes, the space opens up into a mini-jungle: the backyard of Raquel’s house from which music blasts day and night. According to her, the music signals—at least at night—that there are people home, so that no one comes around to bother them. In the center of the yard—ruled by a vicious dog, wary of strangers and chained to a chair—rises an enormous mango tree that casts shade over everything. The little blue house, surrounded by a fence made of rusty metal sheeting and old boards, languishes among those soaring mango trees, lemon trees, avocado trees, papayas, and another five similar houses.

The Chinese food is served at a table under the shade of the mango tree. Everything is laughter. The people seem to blend in like chameleons to their earthen environment. Brown and black faces inhabit this place: they are who Subcommissioner Murillo, people around the neighborhood, even themselves, the 21 boys, in a joking tone, refer to as Los Locos de Cesura.

“We don’t want gangsters around here,” Roger exclaims, sitting in a chair beneath the mango tree. At twenty-five-years-old, he is the eldest of the group of boys that gets together at Raquel’s house. “We aren’t gangsters, man. Not panochos [18th Street Gang], not dry shit [Mara Salvatrucha 13, with a play on words in Spanish], not Olanchanos, not Tercereños, not anything. You got me? We just want to be left alone. We don’t have guns or anything. We stay in here, we don’t even leave this neighborhood except to work… those of us who work, you know?”

The others distract themselves; they have free time to spare. Raquel serves the food on disposable plates in the kitchen and Andy—her son and one of the three nighttime patrolmen of Cesura—carries them out. Jafet, the rapper and barber of the group, pounds fists with Cristian who, until a moment ago, was spraying his shirt with a water pistol. Andy’s little cousin sets the table where we are going to eat, right here under the mango tree. Rubio is making Silent nervous, who in turn pulls his hat down over his face. Rubio tells him to say something, recording with his cell phone camera and laughing his crazy laugh. Filo, a boy who speaks two or three words per day and who Roger describes as “the most savage warrior of the group,” sits down to talk with Brandon who is entertaining himself watching Youtube videos on his phone. Dany, a skinny seventeen-year-old with a big scar that runs across his face and neck, and Charro, possibly the most likeable of the group, control the sound system and rap along to songs by La Santa Grifa. “...Today I dance with death, fifteen-years-old, I was just an adolescent. I didn’t want to go, I didn’t want to die, now I can’t smile anymore…” They shout the words by the singer, Yusak.

The rest: a whirlwind of children between ten- and twelve-years-old swirl around the patio. Raquel’s cousin and mother, both blind drunk, shout over the others.

Her bedroom is roofed with zinc sheeting, which means that at midday in San Pedro, given enough time sitting here, we would slowly be cooked… even with the window swung out as far as the hinges can go. A few brave birds can be heard singing from the yard. From a light post—one without light—springs a mess of cables that untangle as they run through the bedroom pinned to the walls and the boards to which the metal roof is fastened. A fan buzzes and strains to circulate air through the room.

“I’ve been living in the Rivera[2] for thirty-two years.

My sister was widowed in that massacre on the soccer field. We lost my brother-in-law there, and we lost the owner of this house too. That day the whole block was in mourning. If you came by you’d see a body on every corner, one here, another over here, another over here, around the block everyone was grieving. My sister had to go to the United States to give her children a better life. I stayed,” begins Raquel. So, she took in her sister’s three kids, among them the twelve-year-old girl who crosses the patio in sandals, bringing out food, water, beer, cigarettes, whatever the boys ask for.

Raquel continues. When she was barely twenty-years-old she fell in love. Later she would explain that Fernando, a powerful figure in the neighborhood, was a gangster. Raquel knows. She has experience. From that love, which for her was a refuge from a violent family, a boy was born, a prize for Fernando, the firstborn son who deserved the respect of the whole neighborhood. Andy, the patrolman of Cesura.

“‘Doña Olga tell Fernando he’s not taking away my son,’ that’s what I said to my mother-in-law. ‘You know he’s a boy, and they raise boys to be like them.’”

Fernando spurned her, then, for her stance towards the gangs, while Andy, by association, belonged to them.

“When he was born, the very first thing [Fernando did] was take a photo with beers, a photo with his gun… Andy became the king, you know?

Fernando used to hit me all the time. That’s why I left him.”

When Raquel managed to escape the gang house and take Andy with her, she didn’t look back. She went back to the hell that was her parents’ house. Back to her alcoholic mother. Back to misery.

“We practically raised ourselves. We as sisters had to deal with two brothers. We would give the little one bean soup in a sippy cup because we could never afford milk. My older sister and I worked as cleaner at the markets. We worked for food, and we would eat with the little ones. As we grew up, we would say to one another that we would leave for the first man who came along. We’d move on from here the first chance we go, and I think that was our mistake. I never had a birthday.”

And the first man who celebrated her birthday, who brought her a cake the day she never would have expected it, Raquel told yes, that she would go with him, even though he was much older, had courted her mother first, and was in the military.

His charm lasted about as long as it took for the frosting on the cake to dissolve on her tongue. Raquel suffered his beatings even when she was pregnant. After one of those beatings she gave birth to her youngest child, and decided to leave her second tormentor.

“I stayed in Honduras because I have three boys and if I have to run away, I run with them. I would never leave them. I used to work, but I haven’t worked for two years now because I was sick with a stomach problem and had to stay at home. But yes, I need to work because the money doesn’t go far. I have three sons, in high school studying… I can’t make ends meet,” Raquel explains. “Plus this daycare I have here…”

What is life like in the Rivera Hernández?

“Horrible,” answers Raquel, an unstable, frightened woman, letting her tangled mane of hair out little by little, and letting out a tired sigh. The children are occupied with the Playstation in the Tetris-like furniture arrangement that makes up the living room of the house, adjoining the bedroom.

“Around here you have to look after the kids every day or they get killed… SUV’s drive through, pick them up, and make them disappear,” she continues. “They don’t even respect me as a woman these days, but with my faith in God I always look after the kids. So much crime…

I wish I knew how to set them on a good path, so they don’t turn into... So that the gang doesn’t snatch them away. You know the gang always snatches kids away. And I want so much for them to keep studying so they can be someone in life, someone of good standing.”

Raquel is magnetic. The unprotected—they come to her, take refuge in her home. Almost every day up to twenty-one boys come spend the afternoon and sometimes the night. She shoulders the despair, the fear, and the trauma of this ad-hoc community. And that of the women, who—like her—have known nothing but violence.

“Some come from the neighborhoods Planeta and Kitur.[3] And others come from the Choloma sector,” Raquel adds.

“Here the 18th Street Gang broke up; here there are no gangs; here it’s just them. Their mothers have left them in the street because they like the street life. Some have been in gangs and want to change their lives.”

And why has your house become the refuge for so many people?

“The father of my children bought this house. I hadn’t come here before because I was with him, my mom lives around here. But when he and I separated, and I was alone with the children, I couldn’t pay rent. It’s so hard to pay rent, school, food… So I decided to come to this house. I painted it [blue] and everything. They told me this house was a refuge for some of the 18th Street Gang but since my parents live around here I thought: “they’re going to respect me.” They [the gangsters] came every day and out of fear I would give them water... a tortilla... and so they got comfortable little by little. They got to the point where they would come, cry, they would vent with me. And I felt bad for them. I have boys, you know? When their mothers don’t care for them, don’t give them food… they come and say to me: “mamá Raquel, give me food,” so I do. Here, we’re in a war zone because the MS13, the Olanchanos, the 18th Street I mentioned, the Vatos Locos I mentioned… all want to take over this group of boys… These kids are in danger every day. Honestly so am I with my sons… Around here they cry. Every day. These kids hide from the gangsters, from the police, from everything. I mean, there’s no life, on this block there’s no life. They can’t find any place to go. They feel at rest when they come sit beneath these trees.”

She speaks of a block where 16-year-old children are at war, because some are “pesetas” (former members who left) of the 18th Street Gang. A peseta is like a prisoner sentenced to death—the living dead. The 18th Street Gang wants to kill them, but so do the Mara Salvatrucha (MS13), because they consider them rivals. The Olanchanos too, because they are causing trouble for them in the neighborhood, attracting the attention of police. Amidst this crossfire sits Raquel’s house. A distant world, on a forgotten street, hundreds of kilometers from the capital.

“Here the police and the military come and kick them, and if you get involved,” Raquel raises her voice, speaking with rage, “they say to you ‘shut up! You old bitch. You don’t want me to put a bullet in you too.’ It’s sad for me to see how the fathers of those kids do nothing. I don’t know what to do.” She adds, laughing nervously, “I buy food for the whole month. But after seventeen days I have no more food. My ex-husband sends food only for me and for my kids, but how can I tell him I have twenty-one sons-of-bitches holed up here asking me for food…?”

Could it be that these twenty-one boys are forming a new gang?

“No. At least, not as far I know. I tell them: “if you’re gangsters, don’t come here to me. Don’t speak to me, because I have sons…” These are kids that left the gangs, that want to change their lives, but since people have already seen them in gangs they aren’t trusted. These kids are growing up that way: no one loves them, they look at them like cockroaches, they can’t go looking for work. I tell them, ‘look at my Andy, he studies and works. Look for a job.’ They tell me, ‘we can’t, we’re already burned.’”

Being “burned” means that you’ve been seen “collaborating” with one of the gangs in Rivera Hernandez. It doesn’t matter which gang, your particular affiliation, or your location. Someone can assume you were doing something that you may not even have been doing. Or you could have simply not done something that was expected of you at a given moment. Not greeting someone. Turning down the wrong street. It is a difficult stigma to get rid of. In many cases, in San Pedro Sula, living in a neighborhood controlled by a gang closes nearly all of the doors to employment when you leave your streets of origin behind. If there is any possibility that a person belongs to a gang—and this includes people from entire neighborhoods—no courtesy is given.

Andy, Brandon, Silent, Dany, and Filo are all sitting on the same bed. The overgrown grass in the patio grows is to hip level. Since last night, they’ve been hiding in a precarious space of questionable security; a secret stash house for arms and people, surrounded by a broken down cinder block wall covered in graffiti, the classic area RIPs, dedicated to a Mario and to a Moi. Clothes hang from a cable that traverses the patio from corner to corner. They sit in sandals without shirts, wet from head to toe, tense and nervous and at the mercy of a feeble fan that moves as slowly as the digestion rate of a desert animal accustomed to the burning heat. They swallow from the fear, the adrenaline, the waiting, forced to make difficult decisions without few options. In the other corner of the yard, beside the wash basin, Roger is refreshing himself by pouring buckets of water over his head.

Looking from the street, the hideout is a dusty house littered with trash that looks like it’s about to burst into flames, ignited by the midday sun.

The military police patrol the area insistently, looking for those responsible for the shooting that left a body in the street a few hours before. In their street, in their territory. According to Raquel, it was the man who collects bottles and cans for recycling. He was the father of members of the Mara Salvatrucha in the adjacent neighborhood. She speculates that the Cesura boys shot him for two reasons: as a personal attack on the Salvatrucha and because they believed that each time he came into the neighborhood collecting trash the man was taking information from the center of Cesura back to the enemy neighborhood.

The Cesura boys say that the man was killed by three stray bullets. Three. On the other side of the border, in the Salvatrucha neighborhood, the shooting is interpreted as an open declaration of war.

“Little motherfuckers! You can suck my dick you piece of shit. Where you at? Where’s your crew, motherfucker?” Psychological war through WhatsApp audio messages on Andy’s phone. “We came up yesterday!” shouts one of the Salvatruchas from the adjacent neighborhood. “What’s up, where’s your crew? Come on down. Come down, we’ll be right here at the mango tree.”

“Come on! You’re gonna hear what this rifle sounds like, motherfucker. You think we’re kidding, you shit. We’re everywhere. The Mara Salvatrucha. A couple of weak little girls! That’s all you are, motherfuckers.” Another gang member joins the festival of insults and threats. “You’re gonna see the Beast in the streets. The Salvatrucha. The Mara Salvatrucha…” At the same time, the other one shouts, “We’re gonna chop you up into little pieces of panollo.[4] You’re gonna meet the Beast.”

Despite the onslaught of threats, the boys feel confident leaving the hideout once the police have left. Andy is on the phone and shares the backseat of the car with Silent, while Roger acts as copilot and plans the tour along the border of Cesura. They stop for a moment.

What by night was just two streetlights in the distance submerged in petroleum, takes a more lifelike form up close and in daylight. It’s a contradictory landscape: a bucolic side street, bright-colored houses juxtaposed with arid desert vegetation or rainforest thicket. Damaged houses abandoned by families threatened or extorted by the gangs.