A gang truce in Honduras, with a Canadian connection

Gang members, Adam Blackwell, in El Salvador jail

The big news in Honduras this week is a gang truce, with a Canadian connection. The deal was brokered by the Catholic archbishop and a Canadian diplomat who works with the Organization of American States and played a similar role in El Salvador.

It’s a bit surreal. The gang leaders have issued press releases, just like any political leaders. (Except from prison, and with bandanas over their faces.)

It’s also a positive step, despite lots of questions. The two main gangs - Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, and Mara 18, or M18, - have signed on. They pledged to stop recruiting new members and committing acts of violence.

The truce in El Salvador, also brokered by the church and Adam Blackwell, the Canadian who is the OAS “Secretary of Multidimensional Security,” has made a huge difference in the murder rate. The rate in El Salvador fell by 52 per cent after the truce, the government says. (The murder rate fell to 38 murders per hundred thousand people. The Honduran rate in 2012 was 87; Canada’s was 1.7.)

The El Salvador truce was hardly a panacea. Gang members are still criminals, and - as in Honduras - extortion is still central to their business model. If you have a business, or drive a taxi or bus, or sell fruits and vegetables, gang members collect a weekly ‘tax.’ 

And truce or not, extortion only works when the victims fear violence and death if they don’t pay. 

The numbers - in either country - are staggering. An El Salvador business group did an informal survey of members, asking if they or their business had been affected by crime in the previous 12 months - extortion, kidnapping, thefts, assault. 

More than 70 per cent said yes; 55 per cent said they had been affected by crime more than once in the previous 12 months.

La Prensa reported last month that extortion is worth $63 million a year to the gangs, and that some 17,000 small businesses had just given up and shut down in the past year because of the gang’s demands.

And there are doubts that the impact will be as great in Honduras. Observers say the gangs are less well-organized, and the truce might be ignored on the street. And gangs here are claimed to be a smaller cause of violence than in El Salvador. A 2010 UN report found gangs were responsible for about 30 per cent of murders.

But people said much the same thing about the El Salvador truce.

Any reduction in the murder rate would be great news. The daily toll of some 20 dead bodies is terrible for families.

And the fact that Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world has become the only thing people know about the country. The news reports are grisly. Potential tourists don’t know that most murders are related to gangs, drugs or feuds, and crime is focused in poor urban neighbourhoods. Or that tourists are not targeted.

So perhaps only half the gang members will accept the truce. Based on the UN estimates, that would mean a 15-per-cent drop in the murder rate - almost 1,100 fewer murders in a year.

There are all sorts of issues still to be sorted. Gang members are worried about continuing police violence. Some Hondurans reject the idea that gangs might not face responsibility for past crimes as part of the deal.

And the government’s role and the future of gang members is unclear. Estimates vary wildly, but assume about 7,000 people are currently active gang members. They might stop killing each other, but without alternatives they aren’t likely to give up crime.

Still, even with all the caveats and unanswered questions, the truce is a good thing for Honduras.

Footnote: The two main gangs - Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, and Mara 18, or M18 - have their roots in Los Angeles, started by the children of a wave of Central American immigrants in the 1980s. They've grown into full-scale multinationals, in part because of a U.S. policy of deporting non-citizen offenders instead of dealing with them in the justice system. That's helped the gangs spread rapidly throughout this region.

For more information

Insight Crime has an excellent briefing on the truce here.

Our man in Honduras and a gang truce

Gang members, Adam Blackwell, in El Salvador jail      elsalvador.com

Canadians don't make the papers in Honduras very often.

But last week, Adam Blackwell got a full page in El Tiempo when he showed up to talk about peace talks between the maras in order to reduce the murderous turf battles.

Blackwell is a Canadian and career diplomat, currently the "Secretary of Multidimensional Security at the Organization of American States."

He's also Canada's representative on one of the many efforts to reduce crime and corruption here - the 

Honduran Public Security Reform Commission, created by Congress earlier this year. The notion is that the independent panel will design and oversee a process to improve security, including investigating the work of the national police and the courts. There are three members named by the Honduran government - a former university head, a sociologist and former cabinet minister. Blackwell, named by Canada, and Aquiles Blu Rodriguez, named by Chile, are to provide independent international advice. (Rodriguez, a retired general in Chile's national police force, is a controversial choice. He was accused of corruption in 2011.)

It's not a great job. No job that comes with both driver and bodyguard is. The problems of corruption and crime - Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world - are entrenched.

But Blackwell's effort to promote - or at least explore - the idea of peace talks between the gangs shows a welcome willingness to take real action.

He's already been involved in a similar effort in El Salvador, which seems to be working. Murders have dropped from 14 a day to four, the government reports, as gang members quit killing each other. The OAS has been monitoring and supervising the truce.

It's a controversial idea, and is at best a first step. Just because the gangs have stopped killing each other doesn't mean they have cut down on the robberies and extortion that push up crime rates. (In fact, some critics have argued crime has increased since gang members don't have to worry about being gunned down. Blackwell says there are no statistics to refute or support the claim.)

But something has to be done to reduce the murder rate and start to address the gang problem. Estimates have put gang membership at 36,000 in Honduras. (There are 14,000 in the national police.) The two main gangs - Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, and Mara 18, or M18, - have their roots in Los Angeles, started by the children of a wave of Central American immigrants in the 1980s. They've grown into full-scale multinationals, in part because of a U.S. policy of deporting non-citizen offenders instead of dealing with them in the justice system. That's helped the gangs spread rapidly throughout this region.

They are ultra-violent. That's not surprising in a country with lots of guns, few economic opportunities, a large population of young men and an ineffective police and justice system, but the extent to which the taboo against killing has been lost is striking.

And they touch the lives of many Hondurans in urban areas, collecting "a war tax" from businesses and bus drivers and others, on penalty of death. (Why call it a war tax? The name is a leftover from the civil wars in Central America when non-government forces collected what they called war taxes to fund their operations.)

The El Salvador truce was negotiated by MS-13 and M18 gang leaders sharing a maximum security prison, who called on a Catholic bishop and leftist former politician to broker the deal. The OAS has effectively been a guarantor. The gang leaders said they were tired of the endless war and revenge killings. Thought the government might have promised better prison placements as part of the deal.

Blackwell was in Honduras to meet with Bishop Romulo Emiliani, who already has credibility with the gangs. He walked into the middle of a prison riot in March - and prison riots here are grisly - and not only wasn't killed, but got them to quit fighting and allow police in.

Central American countries have tended to opt for the "iron fist" approach to gangs. That's crowded jails, but hasn't made a dent in crime and violence. (Sounds familiar.)

So a truce - between the gangs, and between the gangs and society, makes sense. Stopping the rampant killing isn't a solution, but it's not a bad first step. And the Salvadoran agreement includes a commitment to quit recruiting adolescents, another good step if it holds up.

The next stage involves finding alternatives to crime - not easy in a country with widespread unemployment and poverty, especially for 35-year-old gang members with a web of tattoos across their faces.

But talking is a start. And it's interesting that a Canadian is taking the lead.

Update: 
La Prensa reports that a police raid on gang members seized Beretta, Ruger and Glock handguns, an Uzi submachine gun, three fragmentation grenades, 560 rounds of ammunition and homemade bombs. What makes the seizure particularly newsworthy is that gang members in question were in prison.

Food prices, hunger and climate change

Pretty interesting juxtaposition of two stories on the El Heraldo website this week.

The cost of the basic food basket in Honduras - the food needed for a family of five for a month - has risen to 6,950 lempiras, or a little under $350, the newspaper reported, citing a report from the Ministry of Labour and Social Security.

The second story reported that the minimum wage might go up in December, depending on the inflation rate.

A little less rain, and the crops fail

But it also noted that the current minimum wage schedule ranges from $230 a month to $355 a month. (The minimum wage schedule varies depending on the nature of the work and location. Farmworkers and others doing similar work are at the bottom; urban office workers get the higher minimums.)

The laws aren’t actually enforced. But even if employers are paying minimum wage, the stories highlight how tough life is for Hondurans.

If there is just one parent working at minimum wage - common enough - then the total income covers less than two-thirds of food costs, leaving no money for anything else. (A family of five is about average. Women start having children early - abut 18 per cent of women between 15 and 19 had children, according to the 2000 census. The Roman Catholic church oppose contraception. Sex education is lacking. And cultural factors support large families.)

Even someone earning the top minimum wage would see the entire amount go for food.

Of course, it’s not that straightfoward. Nothing is here. About half the population is rural, and many grow beans and corn, the staple foods. A tipico meal - breakfast, lunch or supper - virtually always includes corn tortillas and beans. 

But there was bad news on that front as well. Catholic Relief Services, along with a couple of expert food production groups, released a report on climate change and bean and corn production in the CA-4 countries - Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

The forecast is disastrous. By 2020, Honduras is predicted to see a 12 to 30-per-cent drop in corn production, depending on soil quality. Bean production is forecast to decline by 15 per cent.

That’s not surprising once you’ve seen Hondurans farms. About 70 per cent are on steep slopes, with poor soil and no irrigation potential. Farming follows a pattern that’s hundreds of years old - plant corn in May, in anticipation of rain, and add beans in September, when rain increases again. It takes only a small change - rain that comes late, or temperatures that are too high - and the crops fail. 

And in rural communities, that means hunger. Even today, the World Bank reports 29 per cent of children under five are stunted - shorter than the range for their age because of malnutrition. I’ve given up on guessing kids' ages - six-year-olds are the size of four-year-olds in Canada.

Cuso International and its partners are doing a lot of work on improving food production, diversifying crops and increasing cash incomes. But it’s a huge challenge when people are focused on having enough corn and beans for the next 12 months, and worried that any experiment that goes wrong will mean daily hunger.

Footnote:

Canadians shouldn’t get too smug. The Dieticians of Canada do an annual report on food costs, and found a family of four needs to spend $868 a month in British Columbia. A person working for minimum wage makes $1,666 a month, leaving not much for everything else.

A disabled person in B.C. trying to raise three children - it happens - gets $700 for rent and $672 for everything else - 77 per cent of the amount needed for food alone.

On the road to Tomalá, and the miracle spring

So there I was in Tomalá, having coffee with the mayor, perched on a couch in a dark living room, bags of newly harvested coffee stacked along the wall.

I had been minding my own business, sitting outside on the hotel’s plastic chairs, working on case studies on a couple of interesting women’s projects being done by OCDIH, the NGO I’m helping. (We love acronyms in development land.)

Then the mom of the family who owned the hotel brought her son, Edgar, and pushed him to talk to me. Last year, they sent him and his younger sister to an English-language collegio - high school - in a town a couple of hours away. She wanted to make sure the kids were learning.

They were. We talked, and their English was great. The parents stood watching critically.

Then the mayor came by, with a TV journalist from Globo, doing a piece on Tomalá and its big fair. 

The mayor wanted me to come to see a sacred spring, water with healing properties thanks to a sighting of the Virgin Mary there.

How could you say no? Simply by being a gringo, I had a vague celebrity status.

So we walked - the mayor, his wife, the hotel owner (an ex-mayor) and his wife and brother, the kids and the TV guy - up the cobblestone street a block and down a lovely path to El Posito de la Virgen. 

It’s a little pool, very clear, where water apparently trickles out at the base of a 15-metre rock face. It’s credited with healing powers, though I never really got the back story.

Some people were there, washing up. The TV reporter filmed the mayor talking about the spring with his little handicam. The mayor and his wife downed glasses of water from the pool. (I passed.) 

I noticed the TV guy kept framing his shots to get me in the background - I supposed it made it look like there were gringo tourists in town. He even did a brief interview, in which I uttered flattering generalities about Tomalá and Honduras in bad Spanish.

The mayor hopes publicity for the spring would attract devote Roman Catholics to the town, providing a badly needed economic boost.

That seems a long shot. Tomalá is pretty enough. But it’s almost in El Salvador. To get there from Copan de Ruinas - the nearest town with many visitors - we took four buses. The actual travel time was about seven or eight hours. Half the trip was jammed into rapiditos with too many people. 

And the last hour was up a dusty dirt road  in the mountains to get to Tomalá. The climate in the province of Lempira’s high country is extreme even by Honduran standards, with six months of drought followed by six months of torrential rain. The road would be frightening in the rainy season.

Tomalá, without the vendors

The mayor noted that the town is pushing to have the road paved. But Honduras has about 70 stalled construction projects now because the government hasn’t paid the contractors. Main highways are potholed and risky. Unless Tomalá’s spring does have miraculous powers, the chances aren’t good.

I liked the mayor’s optimism. And it’s surely necessary. There’s some subsistence farming and a little coffee. But it’s hard to see how anyone earns a living in Tomalá. (It’s not even on the drug transit routes.) 

The town - about 6,000 people including the settlements in the hills - hopes that it will get dividends if a talked-about hydro project goes ahead in the nearby mountains, but those tend to be developed by foreign companies with proceeds to the national government.

Judging by the number of people who tried out a “Hello, how are you” greeting, the town likely does benefit from remittances from residents who have made the long, dangerous to the U.S. (About 19 per cent of Honduras GDP is money sent home.)

There were visitors. We were there, because CASM, the organization my partner works with, has an office and she came to talk about communications and learn what they do. There were a half-dozen people from Minnesota, down on a project to hand out glasses in nearby, even-poorer villages. (Quite a good project - there’s a story here.)

And that weekend, the town was jammed with vendors for the saint’s day feria. Literally jammed. Makeshift stands were set up everywhere there was a three-metre square space, selling everything. Clothes, shoes, housewares, fruit, dried fish, vegetables, candy  - lots of candy - tools, and, of course, meals. 

Kitchens were cobbled together in a few hours. Hammer together a rickety wood surface - always, it seemed with reused wood and nails. Then top it with adobe, build a couple of rough cookstoves out of more adobe, start the wood fire and away you go. Vendors slept in the stalls at night.

It was festive. The fair saves Tomaláns, if that’s what they’re called, the two-hour bus ride to San Marcos to shop. (We changed buses in San Marcos; dustiest place I have ever been. If you are on the run someday, I’d suggest hiding out there.)

But not festive enough to attract tourists.

Which explains the mayor’s enthusiasm for the miraculous spring. It might seem a little desperate, but he’s trying. Better desperation than hopelessness. 

Murder in the city, daily life and tourism

Honduras took another hit this week when a British tourist was shot and killed in San Pedro Sula, the biggest city. 

The headlines in the British media, naturally, weren’t good. Most stories noted Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world, which seems to be the main thing people know about the country.

Honduras, for tourists, isn’t dangerous. My partner’s son and his family - including boys 11 and 13 - just spent six weeks here, feeling secure and welcome everywhere they went.

But Kaya Omer, the 33-year-old British tourist, had a different, tragic experience. 

It’s hard to tell tourists there are two Honduras. Copan Ruinas, Tela, Santa Rosa de Copan, most smaller communities are completely safe for travellers. The big cities are dangerous. 

The risk is that people will either be scared from the whole country, or not scared enough where they should be.

Omer was walking and shooting video in a nice San Pedro Sula neighbourhood around 11 a.m. Accounts vary, but it seems two young men and a woman tried to steal the camera, and his backpack, which contained two more cameras, an iPad and money. He resisted, they shot him.

You can’t blame the victim. But when we go to Tegucigalpa or San Pedro Sula, we carry nothing when we walk. Certainy not a backpack of valuables; if you travel with possessions in the city, you take a cab, with a driver you know. (Most Hondurans do the same if they can.)

During our in-country Cuso orientation, we learned to be ready to avoid eye contact and hand whatever we had over to a robber if it came to that. (And to carry at least a reasonable amount of money so the bad guys wouldn’t get mad at a mingy payday.)

But how do you give tourists that kind of advice and still expect them to visit? We found the orientation, with its bleak scenarios, alarming, and we were committed.

The real solution, of course, is to reduce the crime and violence. Tourists almost never experience crime, but urban Hondurans - especially those without the money to insulate themselves - live with the risk every day. Small businesses, taxi drivers, vendors in the city pay weekly extortion to stay safe.

Two days after Omer was killed, President Porifirio Lobo said security has improved this year. “Everyone feels that has gotten better,” he said.

But it’s hard to find anyone who actually say that. Some groups are predicting the murder rate will be higher again for 2012. There might have been a few tiny steps on police corruption. Drug seizures are up. (But Canadians have learned giant seizures don’t make a bit of difference to the trade, supply or crime.) But life hasn’t changed, or security improved, for Hondurans.

The Observatorio de la Violencia just reported on 2012 massacres, events in which three or more people were killed in the same attack. There were 115, killing 432 people. Half were gang executions, and another eight per cent involved fights between gangs. Imagine a mass murder in B.C. every week, based on the relative populations.

There are no easy solutions. The enforcement and justice systems don’t work - more 90 per cent of murders go unsolved. “Impunity” is a big public complaint. Some people are just above the law.

Still, efforts could be made. El Salvador reported a 41 per cent drop in murders in 2012 as a result of a truce between the two major gangs. That took the rate to 38 murders per hundred thousand people, from 65 in 2011. The Honduran rate in 2011 was 87; Canada’s was 1.7. (The deal was facilitiated by Adam Blackwell, a Canadian diplomat now on the Honduran Public Security Reform Commission. He has raised the idea of a similar truce in Honduras.)

It’s far from a cure-all. But two or three fewer murders a day would free up a lot of police time.

The frustrating thing, again, is that Honduras is safe for tourists, or as safe as their home countries. You can walk the streets of Copan Ruinas late at night without fear, people are welcoming and they are eager for you to like their country. 

But it’s asking a lot to expect people to ignore the headlines.

Like the auto club, but with shotguns

I've spent a lot of time telling people that Honduras isn't really as dangerous as the news reports make it sound.
Yes, it has the highest murder rate in the world. But a lot of the killings involve disputes between gangs and people in the drug business. They're just as dead, of course, but if you aren't in those worlds, you aren't at risk. (In El Salvador, the two main gangs have reached a truce, and the murder rate has fallen by two-thirds.)
That's not to downplay the impact of crime in the major cities. The gangs are into extortion, and murder is part of the business model. And robbers are casual about killings.
Still, the crime reports are overblown, I've maintained. Copan Ruinas at 1 a.m. is safer than Victoria when the bar crowd hits the street on a Saturday.
But this week I was stopped by a half-page ad in La Prensa. It was for a BCAA-type service, I thought, based on the woman peering beneath the hood of her car, stopped at the roadside.
The company didn't offer roadside repairs.
Instead, it would dispatch two guys on motorcycles, with body armour and shotguns, to guard you. The pictures above tell the story. (Sorry about the poor quality.)
It's a good deal - $2.50 a month, and you can call them 10 times a year. It would certainly help in settling questions of responsibility after a fender bender. (Unless, of course, the other driver also had the service.)
But really, a country is in trouble when people feel it's worth paying for armed response when they run out of gas, rather than a service that would send a tow truck.
There are lots of signs that people have lost confidence in the state. In the big cities, razor wire and electrical fencing tops high walls around houses and armed guards open the doors for you at many restaurants. Go to buy a bag of chips at the corner stores, and you shop through a barred window.
There have been lots of efforts to fix things since we've been here. The government called in the Chilean police for advice on reducing corruption and improving efficiency. There's a new, controversial head of the national police force, who has re-assigned total departments. And there's a plan to investigate all police officers, with lie detector tests and financial audits, to identify problem officers. (Though that will take a long time, and so far 24 of the first 169 officers called for the tests just haven't showed up.)
It is safe in Copan. But when roadside armed response becomes a viable business, things are spinning out of control.

Stranger in a strange land

They do look like TV people

I was good at understanding how things worked in Canada, or thought I was.

In Honduras, I often feel like a visitor from another planet. I do a blog for volunteers in Honduras, and for anyone interested in development issues, mostly aggregating content. That involves scanning the news sources and blogs and websites.

Today, Front Line Defenders, a credible Irish human rights group, had a post about Donny Reyes, an activist for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered) rights in Honduras. That's dangerous. At least 60 people in the community have been murdered in the last two years. Reyes has already suffered some brutal repercussions for his efforts.

Last month Reyes was tracked from his Tegicugalpa home by a man on a motorcycle, who he says was trying to kill him. He went to a rights organization, and they made an official complaint to the police so he could be escorted to a safe place. (He's already been granted protection, but it hasn't resulted in action.) The rights organization arranged a meeting the next day with police and a lawyer in the National State Security Agency. But 30 minutes before the meeting, the Human Rights Unit of the state security agency called and said they couldn't send anyone, because there was no gas for their official cars.

The rights organization offered to buy gas, but the unit said that would be unethical.

Five days later, Front Line Defenders reports, the Under Secretary of State wrote saying she was unhappy with the events.

"Firstly I want to tell how how sorry I am for this impasse which developed and which absolutely should never be allowed to happen again. I was out of the country at the time and was not notified of the problem which was caused by the fact that the garage which supplies petrol to the National Security Agency refused to give any more petrol because they had not been paid, a problem which is being resolved at this moment. However I acknowledge that this is not a valid reason for failing to deal with such a serious issue.

"I believe that your case was not adequately dealt with by the staff in my office and I have in the past left instructions that in these situations they can use the car which has been assigned for my personal use. We are taking all necessary steps to remedy this situation and I urge you to contact this office to reschedule the meeting as soon as possible."

It's fair to be skeptical about the explanation. But, based on seven months here, it's also possible that there was no gas. (OK, probably not.)

 The private contractor that provides dialysis turned away patients this week, because the government hasn't paid its bills. Roadwork halted across the country last week, because contractors hadn't seen government cheques in five months. (In neighbouring El Salvador, the government has announced it doesn't have the cash to issue tax refund cheques, hardly an incentive to pay taxes.)

It's a land of weird stories. 

Today, Nicaraguan police reported finding $7 million in smuggled cash hidden in six vans that were supposed to be carrying a Mexican TV crew with varying explanations of what they were to report on. They had cameras and satellite dishes and some of the vans had TV station logos. But come on. What TV stations sends six vans and 18 people 1,600 kilometres to cover a story? 

The vans and the money had passed through Honduras. Nobody in this country, or on the border, apparently considered the convoy of TV trucks suspicious.

Donald Trump's stupid wall and Central America

There is no wall tall enough.

Even if you can leave aside the racism and the attempt to exploit and worsen fears and prejudices, Donald Trump's plan to build a wall along the Mexican border is remarkably stupid.

Early in our stay in in Honduras, I started hearing about the huge number of people who went to the United States. It was an incredibly difficult, dangerous and expensive effort. People set out with almost no money to make a 3,100-kilometre journey through Guatemala and Mexico and across the already difficult U.S. border. They risked robbery, kidnapping, rape, extortion and a lonely death in the desert. Many travelled on La Bestia, a Mexican freight train that carried hundreds of migrants.

I wrote about the journey here and here. The idea that a wall would deter people willing to risk death and sacrifice everything they had for a chance to spend a few years in the U.S. is idiotic.

As is Trump's failure to recognize the risk to U.S. interests created by his $15-billion wall plan.

Hondurans, for the most part, didn't want to move to the U.S. They wanted to spend three or four years working at the jobs no one wanted and sending money home, to pay for a better education for their children, a plot of land to farm or to start a small business. (In countries where employment is scarce and precarious, even a tiny business offers some security.)

Remittances - money sent back by Hondurans working in other countries - equals about 18 per cent of the GDP of Honduras, according to the World Bank. It's about 17 per cent for El Salvador, 10 per cent for Guatemala and nine per cent for Nicaragua (although much of that country's remittances come from people working in Costa Rica).

For comparison, the natural resource and sectors combined contribute 16 per cent of British Columbia's GDP.

The U.S. has fretted about security risks in Central America since the 1890s. And now Trump proposes a wall that, to the extent that it works, will destabilize economies and governments in the northern triangle — an already troubled region.

Cracks in the Central American drug war front

It's been a big news week in Honduras. Joe Biden was in town.

And what everybody wanted to talk about was the war on drugs. Some wanted to talk about giving up on it.

The U.S. vice-president flew into Tegucigalpa for meetings with Honduran President Porfiro Lobo and the heads of Central American countries. (Well, not actually into Tegucigalpa. The U.S. Air Force has a big base without about 500 troops in Comayagua - the city where the prison burned - and Biden landed there. I don't blame him. The Tegucigalpa airport, with hills around, offers one the the world's scarier landings, including a sharp turn 45 seconds before touchdown. It's not a bad metaphor for arriving in Honduras.)

The war on drugs looks a total botch-up from North America, as I've argued in the past. Wasted money, increased gang activity and petty crime, higher prison costs and zero success. Only a fool keeps doing something when, decade after decade, it's not just ineffective but destructive.

That's nothing compared to the view from the countries that are on the front lines of the war on drugs.

For them, it's a real war, not a catchy political slogan. The drug war in Mexico - fought largely at the behest of the U.S. - has claimed about 50,000 lives in six years - civilians, police, justice officials, traffickers, tourists. The U.S. lost one-tenth that many troops in the Iraq war and people were unhappy

Honduras, largely due to fights over the drug transport business, had the highest murder rate in the world last year, at almost per nine per 10,000 people. About 60 per cent of murders - 4,400 last year - were linked to the drug trade.

The U.S. has been chipping in some cash - about $361 million to Central America since 2008, La Prensa reports.

But every year in that period, more people died, more drugs moved and crime and corruption increased.

None of that should be surprising. A UN study estimated the North American cocaine market at $38 billion in 2008. The U.S. says 79 per cent of South American cocaine lands in Honduras on its way to North American consumers.

Honduras total GDP is about $15 billion. The chance to make money handling and shipping a high-value product is hugely attractive. The need to fight anyone who gets in the way - other drug shippers, or police - is part of business.

It is, La Prensa, noted in an editorial before Biden arrived, simply a principle of capitalism - that where there is demand, in this case North America, there will be supply. The money, in a poor country, is irresistible even if the risks are great, for the drug shipment kingpins and the people who can earn a few hundred dollars carrying loads from Copan over the hills and into Guatemala. That much, surely, has been established over the years.

Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina came to the summit promoting an end to the war drugs. Legalize drugs, says the former army general, including the transhipment. Tax and regulate and arrest those who who operate outside the rules. Let the U.S. work harder at reducing demand with treatment, education and innovative approaches. (That's one of the criticisms here, that the U.S. is asking other countries to tackle supply, at great cost, while doing nothing to reduce demand. Hard to argue given the record and, for example, the lack of available treatment options, in Canada.)

Reaction was mixed, but the leaders of Costa Rica and Honduras said the proposals should be discussed.

The alternatives all look grim. Escalating the war on drugs, as in Mexico, means more deaths, more violence and, likely, more corruption. The Honduras Weekly reported that the head of the Honduras' National Council Against Drug Trafficking warned drug trafficking groups are funding candidates to consolidate their power in next year's national elections. A Liberal party presidential hopeful said there are already "narco-congressman and narco-mayors."

In Washington this week, Gen. Douglas Fraser, head of U.S. southern military command, said the U.S. expects "the military in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador will continue to play an important role in domestic security in coming years." That too makes many people nervous in countries were democracy is a fragile thing.

Biden flew home after photo ops and meetings pledging that the U.S. would not waver in its war on drugs, despite its utter failure. (OK, he didn't say that last part.) Central American leaders seemed onside, for now.

And it's hard, given the state of U.S. politics, to imagine any intelligent, evidence-based discussion of drug policies.

But Guatemala's position on legalization, the willingness of some other countries to consider a new approach and the horrific toll being taken may signal that change is coming. Painfully slowly, but coming.

Note: Cartoon from La Prensa.