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.
One of the most effective tactics is the creation of neighborhood outreach centers; the United States has sponsored 46 of these. Typically, a church donates the building, and the United States remodels it and provides computers, equipment and initial funds to hire a coordinator. The centers recruit mentors and provide vocational training for residents and help finding jobs for them as barbers, bakers and electricians. Arnold Linares, a Baptist preacher who runs one of the centers, says that, despite many shortcomings, The U.S. government has been a bigger partner in change than the Honduran government.
The United States has provided local leaders with audio speakers for events, tools to clear 10 abandoned soccer fields that had become dumping grounds for bodies, notebooks and school uniforms, and funding to install streetlights and trash cans.
One pilot program also focuses on children who are identified by trained counselors as having a number of risk factors for joining gangs, like substance abuse, unsupervised time and a negative life event having been the victim of a violent crime, having a family member killed. After a year of family counseling, children in that program were deemed 77 percent less likely to commit crimes or abuse drugs or alcohol, according to Creative Associates International, the company administering the program.
Finally, the United States is helping to bring criminals to justice by supporting a nonprofit operating in Honduras called the Association for a More Just Society (A.J.S.). In recent years, 96 percent of homicides did not end in a conviction. Everyone in Rivera Hernández knew what happened to witnesses who stepped forward: Their bodies were dumped with a dead frog next to them. The message: Frogs talk too much.
The A.J.S. assigns teams of psychologists, investigators and lawyers to look into all homicides and to coax witnesses to give testimony. More than half of completed homicide cases in seven pilot neighborhoods now result in guilty verdicts.
All this is not to say that the place is anywhere near safe. Children continue to be murdered: Last year 570 were killed in a country with a population smaller than New York Citys. One afternoon several months ago, a Mara Salvatrucha gangster was caught by the police in Rivera Hernández with a hacked up body in the front basket of his bicycle, casually on his way to dispose of it.
The test now is whether the United States can scale up from a few pilot programs to truly make a difference nationwide, and what it will cost. A program like that has to be massive, with lots of money, not isolated programs here and there, said Kurt Ver Beek, a co-founder of the A.J.S.
