I spent a night recently in San Pedro Sula, the second biggest city in Honduras and the countries "industrial capital" as signs at the entrance proudly advertise. The overwhelming stenches of industrial waste and the smog pouring out of factories everywhere one travels confirms the proud claim. San Pedro has a reputation as being incredibly dangerous, with one of the highest murder rates in all of Latin America. Every week or so Honduran papers carry news of some type of massacre or atrocity committed by gangs in the city, and in many parts of the city walking even in daylight is considered dangerous. I have heard stories about people being robbed at gunpoint in the city for a cheap cell phone or 10 dollars.
So life in San Pedro is unliveably dangerous. For the poor. We stayed in a midrange hotel in the dangerous center of town, behind barbed wire fences with armed security guards. At night we wanted to get dinner and the hotel had taxi drivers who work for them exclusively, so we didn't even have to step foot outside to look for a taxi. So we took a taxi to the impossibly big City Mall that dwarfs those found in most American suburbs. City Mall tries to be subtle about that fact that it is a fortress patrolled by countless men with all forms of armed weapons, but its fairly obvious. We went into an Applebee's where rich Hondurans with laptops sat out on an open air patio behind the men with guns using the free internet access provided by the mall, and I suddenly felt exactly like I was back in the United States. Then it was straight into a taxi without leaving the mall parking lot and swooped back through the chaos to our hotel door, needing to take less than 5 steps in the San Pedro night. At around 7 o'clock the sun had barely set but the streets around our hotel were already rapidly turning seedy. The only people we saw on the dark city streets were a fair number of prostitutes with their pimps, a number of drug dealers, drunks drinking straight out of plastic bottles, and homeless families curled up in doorways.
The police force of Honduras is for all intents and purposes a joke, and it is known by everyone everywhere that the police don't do anything to help anyone. Perhaps the Honduran police force is better than those in other Latin American countries where the cops actively make life worse by colluding with drug dealers and constantly abusing their power to steal money in bribes everywhere. Generally speaking, the Honduran police force seems too lazy to even be corrupt; police officers sit at checkpoints guzzling Coke and occaisionally take bribes but don't go out really looking for any problems. The only time I have really seen a cop move fast in Honduras was when I once heard gunshots near where I live and almost was run over by a police car flying as fast as it could in the other direction.
So a poor person in San Pedro has no support from the police if his house in one of the slums is robbed, which is likely to happen because his house is more of a collection of rubbish patched together than an actual house with a strong lock. If he has a bicycle or manages to buy a tv, he could lose it at any point to thieves unless he can afford a gun or do something to scare the neighbourhood robbers away. And walking down the street at any point of day or night he can be robbed and lose the little money he has in his pocket.
Meanwhile, those who actually have anything to steal fly by in their taxis, or sometimes armored cars driven by professional security guards. They go to wealthy American owned restaurants and stores protected by the same private security forces, maybe spending in an hour of shopping what the slumdweller makes in several months of work. Yet those who can afford to protect themselves are virtually as safe as they would be in an American city, they don't go anywhere that is not patrolled by their security. And the poor slumdweller trying to sell tacos out of her house gets no upper class business because she has no security for laptop toting millionares who funnel their dollars back to the US at Wendy's and Applebees.
This is the story of Latin American cities. Levels of inequality that seem to be impossible to maintain; a million starving people staring in at the few thousand of the elite class, watching in awe as they spend money as if it is not even real. And the rich few spend millions of dollars protecting this insane reality. In Sao Paulo, Brazil, one of the world's most excessively unequal cities the elite fly around in helicoptors to avoid the traffic jams and danger of crime on the streets. Department stores actually have helicoptor landing zones on their roofs so the rich can literally live in their own reality, soaring over the slums. Sao Paulo has millions of people living in extreme poverty, yet more private helicoptors than Tokyo, New York City or Los Angeles. Wouldn't investing in a police force and better roads to reduce traffic be cheaper than buying a HELICOPTOR??
Latin American governments invest nothing in policing their cities but rather have privatized security for the rich, so that those with money can buy safety and the ones who hardly have anything can have it taken at any time. I know members of the United States government are currently waging a war on all the services our government provides. I wonder if the wealthy political class in the US is looking towards Latin America as a future model for our country. As the US undeniably continues to get more and more unequal, more people may be desperately poor enough to committ crimes. Will the government continue spending on police forces or will the wealthy move to gated communities and hire their own security? Will we continue to use taxation to maintain order for the masses, or is that too socialist? Under Donald Rumsfeld, the US began to turn to private security to fight our wars, with disasterous results and countlss scandals. I sincerly hope our government grows up and begins to view things like public security as a duty of government, because I don't imagine myself ever having enough money to pay my own bodyguard! American police forces aren't perfect by any measure, but they are paid and trained well enough to generally respond to crime and be responsive to people's needs. Living in Honduras makes it hard to take this kind of public safety for granted.
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