The following is an excerpt from Bear Witness by Ross Halperin. It’s a featured Speakeasy selection, and there are still limited review copies available for qualified reviewers. Ross is available for speaking along these themes; please go here to learn more.
Since ambulance drivers usually wouldn’t enter Nueva Suyapa after dark, Carlos’s front door was sometimes people’s only pathway to urgent medical care. Soon after his heart-to-heart with Fidelia, in the early evening, a woman and her adult daughter knocked.
Carlos immediately drove them around the corner to a church, in front of which the woman’s son, a scrawny seventeen-year-old known as Niño, was lying, with blood gushing from a bullet wound on the left side of his torso. Carlos wanted the teenager, who had recently attended one of his camps, to survive, but many others might have rooted for the opposite outcome.
Niño was basically a prototype for what Chelito was in the process of becoming. His childhood had been very difficult—his dad was an alcoholic, his mom was psychologically unstable, and he and his six siblings had all been crammed into a small shack. But his adolescence had been quite exciting, because he and some friends had had the moxie to invent their own mara. Their flag was planted in the steep sector where Kurt’s church was located, and they were known to vandalize property and assault pedestrians. Nevertheless, Carlos had not given up on Niño. He felt, perhaps somewhat delusionally, that the teenager could still get back on the straight and narrow. Unfortunately for Niño, however, a Ouija board had recently informed him that he was never going to get to turn nineteen.
Carlos loaded him into the back seat, sped downhill, and hurtled three and a half miles west on a straightaway boulevard, alternating his gaze between the fading teenager behind him and the road, the taillights, and the neon pole-top signs up ahead.
Once they arrived at the hospital, Niño was pronounced dead. Carlos then purchased a coffin down the street before returning to the hospital to retrieve his camper’s corpse.
Carlos believed that the Encapuchados were the ones who had shot him. This was speculation—and it was probably incorrect—but he wasn’t yet in the business of solving murder mysteries, and the back-to-back killings of Javier and Niño were just two of the many crimes to wonder about at the time. For instance, in October 2003, a fifteen-year-old girl was shot in the eye for resisting a rape; later that month, a father of four was shot in the head for refusing to hand over his wedding ring; that same day, a body was found on the Montañita; in late November, a twenty-two-year-old man was murdered; in mid-December, a logger was taken out; and in late December, it was another twenty-two-year-old’s turn. Carlos came into contact with some of this stretch’s carnage—he recalls lifting and transporting three additional victims to the hospital. He once did so late at night, and though he wanted to immediately return home and shower, he worried that the barrio, at that hour, right after a murder, would be extra treacherous, so he just paced around the emergency room, waiting for the sun to rise, his attention lingering on the stench of the blood that was drying on his shirt.
After each of these gory transports, he would wash his upholstery and clothes, but he still couldn’t rid himself of that ferrous odor; at a certain point, he wondered if he was hallucinating.
One byproduct of extreme impunity is confusion, because if detectives, prosecutors, and judges don’t suss out and rubber-stamp the Truth, then people are forced to rely on gossip and inherent bias. Determining who was responsible for this spasm of violence was thus largely an unscientific exercise, and the same could be said of the spike in violence nationwide.
For much of the Honduran electorate, however, its cause was not at all uncertain—mareros were clearly to blame. That was why President Ricardo Maduro had ridden into office on an ardently antimara ticket, and that was why the police were now aggressively rounding up mareros as well as some people who just seemed to be. And dragnets weren’t the force’s only tactic; there were also covert detachments that summarily executed suspected gang members. Some of that clearly did go on, but just as the right-wing charlatans seemed overeager to pin every last unsolved murder on mareros, the left-wing bleeding hearts seemed overeager to pin every last one on the cops, and while there was certainly a measure of truth in both of those explanations, the only real truth in places like Nueva Suyapa was that the Truth did not exist.
Four months after Javier’s murder, on January 19, 2004, a twenty-two-year-old cop with three kids told his girlfriend that he was afraid to start his new assignment at the Nueva Suyapa police post. A few days later, he responded to an armed robbery reported near the bus terminal and was killed in a shootout with the culprits. Within hours, 150 cops and soldiers swooped into the barrio with a helicopter supporting them from above. This atypically large incursion was memorable; nevertheless, what really happened that day is not entirely clear.
According to La Tribuna, the armed robbers were Barrio 18 mareros, and one of them died in the initial shootout with the twenty-two-year-old cop. That may have been accurate, but given that the press was hungry for salacious mara-related stories, and given that crime reporters seemed to be overly reliant on not-totally-reliable police sources, it wasn’t necessarily. And Kurt and Carlos’s understanding, which presumably came to them through the barrio’s rumor mill, was different. They believed that the armed robbers were Encapuchados, and that during the megaraid, the police killed one of Javier’s murderers and arrested another. This was the version that solidified in their minds and precipitated a come-to-Jesus moment in their own bildungsroman.
Because it forced them to face a humiliating fact. In the pursuit of justice, Fidelia had risked her life and lost her job, whereas all they had done was make a few phone calls—to seek advice. The thirteen people they believed the Encapuchados had killed since Fidelia approached Carlos bore down on their consciences, because theoretically, they could have gotten them arrested based on her intel.
Kurt had an ability to rapidly transform his negative emotions into focused reasoning, and a natural place for doing that was his classroom, where he could typically be found perched on the edge of his desk, a plastic tea mug in hand and a map of the world behind him. He liked to riff on the proverb that had become a platitude in the development world: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
Kurt now believed that neither “fish” nor “fishing”—neither aid nor development—helped the poor as much as advertised, because most of the impoverished people in the world lived in semilawless places where bullies could get away with stealing their “fish,” snapping their “poles,” and fencing off the “lakes” for themselves. In other words, giving a Honduran farmer seeds or a lesson about crop yields wasn’t going to make a difference if a bunch of thugs subsequently extorted him, drove him off his land, or emptied a clip into his chest.
Where Kurt was going with all this was that justice, not in the vague sense of the word, but as in, the administration of the law, was the “unserved niche in the global-how-do-we-help-the-poor agenda.”
In most English translations of the Bible, the word “justice” appears frequently in the Old Testament, which was originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic, but infrequently in the New Testament, which was originally written in Greek. This makes it seem as though Jesus prioritized sweet concepts like righteousness and love over justice and retribution. But a theologian Kurt studied with at Calvin, Nicholas Wolterstorff, felt that that interpretation was flawed.
The Greek words dikaios and dikaiosune, which appear hundreds of times in the New Testament, are typically translated to “righteous” and “righteousness.” When the scripture was penned, however, those words could also mean “just” and “justice,” and that’s usually how they are translated in Aristotle’s and Plato’s works.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus proclaims, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of dikaiosune.” Wolterstorff argued that, in that case, “justice” was the superior translation, because people generally don’t get persecuted for being righteous, or broadly moral. In his version, Jesus goes on to declare, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.”
The idea for the Secret Group began taking form.
Praise for Bear Witness
“This gripping account—unbelievable, were it not true—of the transformative work of a small, unassuming nonprofit tells the story of what happened in one of the most violent communities in the world when it asked a question that had escaped everybody from the Honduran government to the US Department of State to the United Nations: What if we make the institutions of justice actually work for the people?”
—David M. Kennedy, author of Don’t Shoot
“In this gripping work of investigative journalism, Halperin examines the risks, sacrifices, and criticisms these unlikely saviors endured in making their neighborhood a safer place to raise a family . . . Halperin’s skillful reporting and insight and his own risk-taking make Ver Beek and Hernández’s story unforgettable.”
—Booklist
“[A] gripping, gut-wrenching story of the courageous struggle of a small organization against the powers of darkness. . . . It’s a story of undaunted patience, bravery, faith, and hope in the face of threats, violence, and stonewalling. Take this and be moved and inspired.”
—Nicholas Wolterstorff, Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology, Yale University
“Kurt Ver Beek and Carlos Hernández are possibly the bravest people in the world and among the few who truly understand how homicide works. . . . Ross Halperin, a reporter who listens with his whole mind, is the one to tell [their story]. He’s gone deep and found the insights that matter. Bear Witness will be required reading.”
—Jill Leovy, author of Ghettoside
“Ross Halperin’s deep dive into one of the worst narco states in Latin America is poignant and chilling. . . . Halperin’s understated prose is mesmerizing, and Bear Witness is a cautionary tale about where politics, corruption, and religion collide.”
—Sally Denton, author of The Colony
“Superbly reported, rife with vivid human and physical detail, Bear Witness brings us novelistically close to the unlikely pair of heroic justice fighters at its heart. . . . I so admire Ross Halperin, the young journalist who has written this important, unforgettable book.”
—Francisco Goldman, author of Monkey Boy
“This riveting book reads like a thriller–two friends trying to prevent murders in one of the most dangerous places on earth. But it’s a true story, about not only the extreme danger they put themselves in, but also the nauseating moral quandaries they faced. . . . In Ross Halperin’s nuanced, sharp-eyed, empathetic story, there are no clean hands.”
― Larissa MacFarquhar, author of Strangers Drowning
About the Author
Ross Halperin attended Harvard University and worked under Mark A. R. Kleiman, one of the world’s leading criminal-justice scholars. He started reporting this story in 2018 and has since spent much of his time in Honduras.
Invite Ross Halperin to speak at your church or group
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