A Western Called Honduras

I am surprised to find the doors wide open. I enter, nervously, as a group of patrons enjoys a meal. They chew their food, they look up, and for a moment their eyes stay glued in my direction. As do the eyes of the three women working a cast-iron griddle in the kitchen, who avert their gaze only when the pork chops, splattering oil, announce that they are done. I walk the aisle that separates the cooks from the diners and make my way to the back of the room. A security camera, mounted on the wall, records my every movement. I find a small booth tucked behind a wall of iron bars — a cage of thick steel grating as strong and imposing as the grille of a prison cell. After a few minutes, one of the restaurant’s eight employees —the man who heard everything— emerges from behind the partition. The Witness is nervous, but the fact that he came out at all suggests that he is a curious person. The Witness is, without a doubt, a curious person. It’s not every day that a stranger comes to this place to ask him what he heard on the night the son of the former chief of the Honduran National Police was murdered.

A young girl approaches The Witness, grabs my press ID out of his hand and says, with a joking smile: “Don’t believe him. He looks like a police investigator.” The Witness grabs one of the metal bars and seems to squeeze it as he peppers me with questions to verify that I am not, in fact, a police officer, and that my intentions in coming to this establishment in the mountains on the edge of Tegucigalpa, two months after the crime, are not malicious.

When I finish doing my explaining, The Witness agrees to tell me what he heard and saw after the shooting stopped on the night of Sunday, February 17. For a second, I imagine that The Witness and his coworkers must be very brave. Earlier, as I drove up the mountain, leaving the bustle of the city and winding my way between the gorges and peaks, I imagined that I would find the restaurant closed — that, in the aftermath of an incident like this, people might shut these establishments down, outlaw them, declare them plague-ridden places of bad luck and bad death. After all, if something horrible happened here once, who’s to say it won’t happen again? But when I speak with The Witness, I realize that none of this has anything to do with bravery; it’s about survival. And as with the saloons of the wild American West —where, as Hollywood has it, the doors always stay open no matter how many guns were drawn or bullets flew or bodies fell the night before— so with Honduras. Here, murders come as naturally as night and day: After one, another always follows, and the only thing to do is close the doors, clean up the blood, open the doors again, and survive.

On Sunday, February 17, Óscar Ramírez, 17 years old and the son of the former chief of the Honduran National Police, General Ricardo Ramírez del Cid, was murdered at this restaurant. After the two days the police spent cleaning up the crime scene, The Witness and his colleagues washed away the remaining blood stains, painted the walls, and barricaded the bar and the rest of the restaurant behind walls of thick iron bars, similar to the caging found in prisons.

One week after the incident, which shocked the country and pitted the victim’s father against the current police chief Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla, The Witness and his coworkers went back to their normal routines. Meanwhile, on the streets of Tegucigalpa Town, two high-ranking police officers had declared war on each other. Like cowboys on the American frontier, they challenged each other to duel. An outside observer, lacking context, might get the notion that this is a story of a good sheriff and a bad sheriff. But the problem with such a black-and-white narrative is that over the past three years, the Honduran Police have made it clear that they operate effortlessly in the gray, and keep plenty of surprises up their sleeves.

Former police chief Ricardo Ramírez del Cid —a man with light eyes, gray hair, good manners, and an easygoing demeanor— has accused the current chief of slowly cutting back his security detail, which has led him, invariably, to one conclusion: that the chief was involved in his son’s murder. The current chief, Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla, a hardened, dark-skinned man with black eyes and a face as rough as chiseled rock, like a carved head of the Olmec, vehemently denied the accusations. We know for a fact, however, that El Tigre reinforced his own security detail during the scandal: He went from having one bodyguard, his driver, a man he trusted completely, to an escort consisting of two pickups packed with agents from COBRA, the Police’s elite riot squad. Perhaps rumors that Ramírez del Cid was seeking revenge had found their way to El Tigre’s ears. On the first night of Óscar Ramírez’s wake at the San Miguel Arcángel mortuary,—a funeral home reserved exclusively for military and police officers—the former chief was ready to have his men track down and tie up El Tigre when the latter arrived to offer his condolences. “He was in the area that day, and when he showed up at the wake, my friends weren’t going to let him in, and if I’d have asked them to tie him up right there and then, they would’ve done it,” Ramírez del Cid said, five days after the crime.

Three days after the murder, unaware of these funerary tensions, The Witness and the rest of the restaurant staff were busy selling grilled pork chops. I ask him what the young man and his bodyguards were doing there, before they were killed.

“The chops are our specialty. They’d come to order the special pork chop plate [for three people].”

The victims were sitting facing the entrance, a COBRA security tactic: never turn your back to the street. When the attackers burst into the restaurant, through the wide-open doors, Óscar Ramírez was eating, surrounded by his bodyguards. For a moment, the victim locked eyes with his killers.

* * *

Óscar Ramírez was a young man beloved by family and friends. Those who knew him say he conducted himself with the same poise, kindness, and politeness as his father, Ricardo, the former police chief, a general with an unparalleled investigative pedigree, trained to move as the men who run state intelligence agencies are trained to move: like a spy. In Honduras, everyone who thinks they know about Ramírez del Cid’s professional life use this same epithet: “He’s a spy. Maybe the best spy the country has,” one former high-ranking police commissioner, now far removed from the misdeeds of the agency, told me.

One year before the crime, on January 13, 2012, Ricardo Ramírez del Cid was dressed in his finest. He wore an immaculate blue uniform, a hat embroidered with the Police crest, and shiny black shoes. I had joined him for a gathering on the soccer field at the headquarters of COBRA, the police special operations unit: Ramírez del Cid was celebrating the 130th anniversary of the Honduran National Police (“la Corporación,” or The Corporation, as it’s familiarly known). He and his guests were sitting on the covered bleachers, sheltering from the sun. At the far end of the field, snipers took turns climbing a wall used for training drills. In the background, a slum sprawled over the top of a hill.

After the celebration, I approached Ramírez del Cid to ask him what he thought about the things people had been saying about him. At that point, in January, he had just entered his third month as director of the institution, and in the corridors of Congress, the Presidential Palace, and the Ministry of Security, a message was circulating that posed an immense challenge to the new chief: He was to serve as the face of then-Secretary of Security Pompeyo Bonilla’s campaign to clean up the image of a police force plagued by corruption scandals and infamous as a den of thieves, extortionists, cops colluding with drug traffickers, and cops-turned-murderers.

“Sorry to bother you…”

“Oh, you’re bothering me? Then stop bothering me!” he replies with a laugh.

“They say you’re a smart man, that you know how things work in the agency. That’s why they named you head of the Corporation, because you know who’s up to no good.”

“Comments like that aren’t helpful, they’re damaging. What I do is apply the law, and as one of many professional officers, I rely on a group of advisors who have the necessary knowledge to apply the law within the framework of the purge we’re carrying out.”

Óscar Ramírez, the son of the former police chief, was the leader of an Evangelical group and loved playing soccer. He would often meet up with his friends at the sports club attached to the private school he attended: Del Campo International School, an institution only accessible to the children of the Honduran elite. The sports club was notable, on the one hand, because some of the young soccer players it produced have gone on to play for the U-17 and U-20 national teams. But it is most well-known in Honduras because the soccer field, which is regulation size, is made of synthetic turf, and the Honduran national team sometimes trains there when they are in Tegucigalpa.

On Sunday, February 17, 2013, Óscar was on his way home from the sports club when he asked his bodyguards to make a detour so they could get some food. Óscar was accompanied by Abraham Gúnera and Carlos Lira Turcios, two Cobras. Two gunmen with badges, trained to defend and attack. They followed him wherever he went, and the relationship between protected and protector was so cordial that whenever they went out on the town —and even though the agents always recommended they get takeout— Óscar would insist that his bodyguards eat with him, at a restaurant, sitting together. Perhaps he never imagined that anyone would be bold enough to attack the son of a former police chief. This was something his father never imagined either. And it was something, when it happened, that sent Honduras a painfully clear message: that the violence drowning the country —the most violent on the planet, with 85 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants— no longer affects only the bottom of the social pyramid. And when the accusations, once again, pointed to the very institution tasked with protecting the population, then Honduras was really up to its neck in water. “I was surrounded by a ton of people who had it out for me — people in the police force itself. But I never thought they’d do something like that. And, as I say: Having my suspicions about where it’s coming from makes it hurt even more!” Ricardo Ramírez Del Cid told the Honduran television program Hable como Habla, one week after the crime.

Is it possible that Óscar, the night he was murdered, was just trying to escape the fear that comes with living 24/7 under the watchful eyes of hired guns? Maybe he just wanted to feel like a normal kid again. And maybe that’s why, on his way home, he decided to stop at the restaurant with the greasy pork chops, rather than some more upscale establishment. Pork chops with fried plantain. That’s what they were eating when they were murdered. They had settled their bill, the equivalent of seven dollars in Lempiras, and were still finishing their food when a group of armed men stormed the entrance, the double doors already wide open.

“¡Al suelo, hijos de puta! On the ground, motherfuckers!” The Witness remembers one of the men shouting. Those five words kicked off the chaos. Five men in the entrance, guns blazing, against two bodyguards, barricaded behind an upturned table; everyone shooting to kill.

* * *

Ramírez del Cid, through his professional work, knows all the leaders of the organized criminal groups operating in Honduras. In every department, in every municipality, in every major city.

Ramírez del Cid also knows who the gang leaders are, and how they operate in each city.

Ramírez del Cid also knows which police officers belong to organized gangs, are involved in organized crime, or run their own gangs.

These three sentences flow together, and the man who pronounced them did so with such force, cadence, and clear intonation that his words resounded like an echo — like the repetition of a single idea: Ramírez del Cid is someone with a lot of information, and it would be ironic if he just stood back and did nothing. Alfredo Landaverde, a man with a voice like a grandpa, spoke these sentences on November 1, 2011, the day the spy-commander was sworn in as chief of police.

Alfredo Landaverde was a former security advisor to the Honduran government, a man seasoned in battles against police corruption, whom everyone turned to when they needed someone to repeat the narrative that the problems facing the police, and the country as a whole, were mostly the fault of drug traffickers and criminal organizations. Landaverde spoke those three sentences during an appearance on Frente a Frente, one of the highest-rated talk shows in Honduras. On November 1, 2011, while Landaverde sculpted Ramírez del Cid’s profile into a flattering statue, the show’s producers superimposed an image of the general’s light-skinned face. In that close-up, the spy-commander was wearing a dark blue peaked police cap.

Landaverde was the man who knew, perhaps better than anyone, who was who in the ranks of the Honduran Police. Rarely, if ever, were his words questioned. His resume was too long, his accomplishments too well-documented, for anyone to ever doubt what he said.

Landaverde, a founder of the Christian Democratic Party of Honduras, was 71 years old in 2011. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he joined a commission, backed by the power of Congress and the president, that was tasked with modernizing the state security apparatus. The commission’s main achievement was to separate the National Police from the Honduran Army, an institution that, over the previous two decades, had converted the country’s public security forces into an apparatus of counterinsurgency and repression. Landaverde was one of the leaders of the commission, and he was supported by a sizable group of politicians as well as Cardinal José Rodríguez Maradiaga himself, who is currently overseeing the reform of the Roman Curia in the Vatican.

After serving on the commission, Landaverde was appointed as an advisor to the Ministry of Security, a government office created in the mid-1990s. Later, in the first decade of the 21st century, he became the right-hand man of Honduran “drug czar” General Julián Arístides González, head of the Directorate for Combating Drug Trafficking. According to those who knew him well, it was because of his work with the Directorate that the drug czar was assassinated on December 7, 2009. Two men on a motorcycle intercepted him as he was driving through Tegucigalpa and riddled him with bullets. Exactly two years later, Landaverde would suffer a fate marked by eerily similar circumstances.

* * *

When Ricardo Ramírez del Cid was sworn in as chief, the Honduran Police had a thoroughly tarnished public image. Two weeks earlier, a group of officers from the La Granja police station in Tegucigalpa had murdered two young college students in cold blood. The incident shocked the country, in no small part because one of the victims, Alejandro Vargas, was the youngest son of Julieta Castellanos, rector of the National Autonomous University of Honduras and a woman with considerable influence among Honduran political elites: Not only had Castellanos served as a United Nations official, she was also one of the key members of the Truth Commission that had denounced human rights violations following the 2009 coup.

The Ministry of Security was already aware that the police leadership that preceded Ramírez del Cid had been involved in the crime. This included then-Chief of Police José Luis Muñoz Licona, an ex-military officer accused since the 1980s of belonging to the notorious 3-16 counterinsurgency battalion; Director of the National Directorate for Criminal Investigation (DNIC) Marco Tulio Palma Rivera, an ex-military officer unapologetic in his assessment that the solution to violent crime in Honduras was to “wipe out the gang members, to set them on fire”; and the head of the metropolitan jurisdiction, José Balarraga, who was accused of working with drug gangs in the northwestern part of the country, and had faced accusations from the former chief of the northern border jurisdiction, Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla. El Tigre who would go on to serve as chief of the Honduran National Police, becoming the successor —and enemy— of Ramírez del Cid.

All the evidence against these officers pointed in the same direction: that they had allowed the perpetrators of the murder to escape. Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla removed the accused officers from positions of leadership to prevent them from hindering the investigations. To clean house, he brought in a man from the intelligence services, presumably under the assumption that this was precisely the kind of person the police and the country needed at that moment. There were many who criticized the move, not least of all because Ramírez Del Cid, they said, had plenty of his own skeletons in the closet. In January 2012, the head of internal affairs for the Police at the time, Commissioner Santos Simeón Flores, told the Miami Herald that there were four open cases against Ramírez del Cid —he did not specify which cases— as well as multiple abuse-of-authority complaints filed by the chief’s subordinates.

In January 2012, during the celebrations for the 130th anniversary of the Police, I asked Ramírez del Cid what he thought about the allegations against him and one of his fellow officers, the chief of traffic police, Randolfo Pagoada, who had been under investigation for five years for possible ties to drug trafficking in northern Honduras.

“The security minister is responsible for appointing police chiefs, not me. It’s a pretty complicated question, not because I’m incapable of doubting the integrity of my officers... But I think there’s another way of thinking about things, and if we’re in these positions, it’s because we have certain merits.”

Before he was killed, Alfredo Landaverde had suggested that if Ramírez del Cid wielded so much information, it would be strange if, under his leadership, the police purge didn’t go forward. And yet, since Ramírez del Cid took office, the persecution of corrupt officers remains a secret known only to the Directorate for Police Career Evaluation, the acting police chief, and the acting security minister. They have revealed nothing.

Back to November 2011. Ramírez del Cid, in charge of the police for only two weeks, already had a major crime on his hands, not to mention a spike in the national homicide rate. On top of this, a man highly respected in Honduras had publicly called him out, and on December 17, he would receive yet another rebuke from Landaverde. Once again, on Frente a Frente, Landaverde took a jibe at Ramírez del Cid.

“There are narco-businessmen in Honduras,” said Landaverde. “And what are they going to say: ‘Give us the name Landaverde’? Are they going to tell me they don’t know the names of the 14 businessmen in the north who launder drug money and work with drug traffickers? Is the attorney general going to tell me he doesn’t know? Is the chief of police going to tell me he doesn’t know? Is the head of the Armed Forces going to tell me he doesn’t know?”

There were many who understood that, by uttering those words, Landaverde had signed his own death sentence, and that those who had him in their sights were now certain to pull the trigger. And there were others who understood that Ricardo Ramírez del Cid was one of the people who wanted him dead.

On December 7, 2011, exactly two years after the assassination of the former drug czar, Alfredo Landaverde was murdered as well: the first uncanny coincidence. Two men on a motorcycle followed the vehicle in which the victim was traveling, intercepted it on a busy street in the city, shot Landaverde, and sped away: the second uncanny coincidence. The only difference between the two crimes was that the drug czar had been alone in his vehicle. Landaverde, on the other hand, had been in the company of his wife, Hilda Caldera, a respected sociologist in Honduras. The couple was well-known to several generations of police officers who had attended the police academy affiliated with the National Autonomous University of Honduras, where Hilda Caldera and Alfredo Landaverde had taught. Fortunately, Hilda Caldera survived the attack.

After his son’s murder, Ricardo Ramírez del Cid was asked by a Honduran reporter what he thought about the third accusation leveled against him when he was chief. He responded by asserting that nefarious forces had always been scheming against him.

“It could be that those same shady groups that have always been involved in crime... because they killed Alfredo Landaverde, and Alfredo Landaverde was my friend... They killed him and then tried to say I was involved, which... which isn’t true! It’s a sensitive situation. Everyone who knows me knows it isn’t true. And if it turns out to be the case, well, let them investigate me.”

* * *

The image that The Witness created in his mind during the three minutes that the shooting lasted was nothing like the scene he saw when it was over. He remembers feeling, for a moment, that he had gone deaf, and that the sound of the gunshots reminded him of New Year’s Eve celebrations. Since he hadn’t heard any screams, or at least he thought he hadn’t, The Witness assumed that the gunmen had poor aim and that, when he emerged from hiding, he would find people alive. Within seconds, he realized he was wrong. From the main dining room, survivors began to moan in pain. The Witness peeked out and came face to face with a young man who had been shot in his left leg. Before the shooting, the young victim had been sitting right behind Óscar Ramírez and his bodyguards.

The Witness surveyed the scene. He found two of the cooks, who had also been hit, each in one leg. Another patron, along with the third cook and a waiter, had taken shelter behind the grill, a batch of pork chops still sizzling in their grease.

Across the aisle, the tables were turned over and there were plates and pork chops and slices of plantain scattered across the floor. There were bullet holes in the walls. One of the bodyguards was slouched with his back to the wall, his face cocked to one side, his eyes lifeless, his chest soaked in blood. Near him, in a heap on the floor in the aisle separating the tables from the kitchen, The Witness saw two bodies. One was Óscar, the other was Óscar’s other bodyguard.

“They were all tangled together. It looked like the man had tried to protect the boy with his body,” The Witness said.

Next to them were two more victims. One was lifeless. It was one of the assassins. The other was badly injured. Three of the hitmen had fled.

Ten minutes later, a police patrol arrived at the scene. That same patrol had driven through the area just 20 minutes before the shooting. In fact, that same patrol had eaten pork chops at the same table where Óscar and his bodyguards would sit a mere 10 minutes later. The police had left right before Óscar and his bodyguards had arrived. Which is why, when the patrolmen returned to the scene of the crime, several witnesses overheard one of the officers lamenting to another, something along the lines of: “If we’d still been here, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”

About 20 minutes after the officers arrived, El Tigre Bonilla, the police chief, joined them at the crime scene. He walked through the doors with a stern expression on his face, with that stern and dark demeanor he always has. Then he exited the crime scene and, standing outside on the sidewalk, after answering no fewer than five phone calls, he shrugged his shoulders. The Witness remembers hearing him say something like: “This is a very serious situation.”

* * *

The day after the crime, El Tigre Bonilla found himself in a tight spot. In Honduras, killing any young man is not the same as killing the son of the former chief of police. Perhaps El Tigre reasoned that the case was another challenge from which he couldn’t back down. When he took over as chief in May 2012, Bonilla had promised to solve three of the most important cases in the country: the murder of the rector’s son (and his friend, David Pineda), the murder of Alfredo Landaverde, and the murder of HRN journalist Alfredo Villatoro, a radio host with sources in the government of President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, and a personal friend of the president. And now, on top of it all, the murder of Ramírez del Cid’s son. Three of these four cases involved Ramírez Del Cid. Landaverde’s, because of the accusations made against him; Villatoro’s, for the same reason; Óscar’s, because Ramírez del Cid was his father.

The downfall of Ramírez del Cid spelled the rise of Bonilla. Once again, all fingers pointed to the spy-commander who, in the opinion of his superiors, had not been diligent in his handling of the Villatoro case. Villatoro was kidnapped on May 9, 2012, and executed six days later in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the capital. His captors dressed him up like a soldier, in a camouflage uniform, shot him twice in the head, wrapped his face in a red cloth, and “left him standing at attention,” as Ramírez del Cid put it at the time. Some speculate that the aim of this crime had been to send a message to President Porfirio Lobo, a man with enemies in every corner and the recipient of equally powerful, if less bloody, messages from the country’s business elites. On more than one occasion, Lobo was assured that he, too, could be overthrown just as Manuel Zelaya was: by the military, in the early hours of the morning, expelled from the country on a fast-tracked flight.

With the murder of Villatoro, the figure of El Tigre reemerged. Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla wanted to appoint someone completely different from Ramírez del Cid. Perhaps he thought the Police needed a tougher leader, a warrior, a tiger. Someone who would commit from the outset to hunting down the bad guys and solving the hardest-to-solve crimes. El Tigre would be resurrected from the reputational death to which the Police itself had consigned him. Before that, he had been a man who lived in fear of his fellow officers. After his last high-profile position, El Tigre took refuge in his home and even sought the support of Human Rights Commissioner Ramón Custodio. “He’s a brave man,” Custodio declared after El Tigre had visited him in his office to tell him about his exploits and to hand him copies of the complaints he had filed against several high-ranking officers allegedly linked to drug trafficking.

But in reality, by October 2011, El Tigre had become a man afraid for his life. Most of all because, before the rector’s son had exposed the corruption within the Honduran Police, those same corrupt leaders had been responsible for expelling then-Minister of Security Óscar Álvarez from the country. Before he left Honduras, fleeing for his life, Álvarez had promised to publicly name the high-ranking officers he claimed were involved with drug trafficking. But ultimately, he was the one forced to leave, to the United States. His departure exposed two groups within the Police that consequently realized that Tegucigalpa Town just wasn’t big enough for the both of them. One of these groups was led by Álvarez, and included soldiers like El Tigre Bonilla; the other was led by José Luis Muñoz Licona, who by October 2011 had been named chief of police.

Some say that Álvarez is a sort of political godfather to El Tigre, but considering how the latter has challenged the former’s authority, this is hard to believe. At times, El Tigre appears indomitable. The relationship between the two men dates back to 2002.

Óscar Álvarez is a former member of the Honduran Army’s special-forces division. In a 1995 interview with the Baltimore Sun, for a story exposing the U.S. government’s role, through the CIA, in supporting and training the Army’s counterinsurgency forces, Álvarez said: “The Argentines came first and they taught us how to disappear people. The United States made everything more efficient.” Óscar Álvarez is the nephew of one of the founders of Battalion 3-16, General Gustavo Álvarez. He served as the Army’s chief of staff between 1981 and 1983, and was assassinated in 1989 — allegedly shot to death by a guerrilla command unit. In his last statements to the press, he said that he regretted the human rights violations committed in the 1980s and that he had merely been following orders from above.

In 2002, Óscar Álvarez became President Ricardo Maduro’s right-hand man and led the government’s crackdown on gangs. He was at the top of a chain of command that was responsible for a police force accused of working with death squads that targeted young Honduran men allegedly involved in gangs in the cities of San Pedro Sula and La Ceiba. The head of internal affairs at the time, Police Commissioner María Luisa Borjas, called this group of assassins Los Magníficos (“The Magnificent Ones”). And El Tigre, according to her, was one of them. Borjas went even further: Not only did El Tigre belong to Los Magníficos, but, she said, he was also involved in the kidnapping and subsequent murder of former Finance Minister Reginaldo Panting. The relationship was simple, according to the evidence presented to Borjas: The kidnappers had been hired by third parties and had ties to the Police’s anti-kidnapping unit, which El Tigre coordinated from San Pedro Sula. The kidnappers murdered the hostage, collected the ransom money, and were killed by El Tigre’s team, which attempted to pass the crime off as a “police operation.”

Commissioner Borjas told Honduran media that during the interrogation conducted as part of the Police’s internal investigation, El Tigre had uttered only a single sentence. Borjas, now a candidate for mayor of Tegucigalpa, has become one of the fiercest critics of El Tigre Bonilla’s administration. And 10 years ago, despite her statements and the evidence against him, it was she, not El Tigre, who was ultimately removed from her post, on the orders of Security Minister Óscar Álvarez.

“If they want to put me on trial as a scapegoat, it’ll cause an uproar in the police force, because I can tell the security minister himself, to his face, that all I did was follow his instructions.” This, according to Borjas, was El Tigre’s statement during the interrogation.

Two years ago, when asked if he had ever killed anyone outside the law, El Tigre replied: “There are some things a person takes to his grave. What I can tell you is that I love my country and I’m willing to defend it at all cost, and I have done things to defend it. That’s all I’m going to say.”

* * *

The last high-level position El Tigre held before he was appointed police chief brings us to southwestern Honduras, to three departments that together make up a trafficking corridor used to transport drugs warehoused in Honduras to Guatemala and El Salvador. These three departments are Copán, Nueva Ocotepeque, and Lempira. This is where we would have found El Tigre, strutting around, standing nearly six-foot-three, bragging that no-one “fucks around” in his sector, that he goes wherever he wants without fear, that he searches whomever he wants, that he arrests whomever he wants, be it the mayor himself, and especially if the mayor is carrying an illegal firearm.

El Tigre denounced the former regional chief and former chief of the Metropolitan Police —Jorge Balarraga, one of three senior officers dismissed after the murder of Rector Castellanos’ son— for their professional failures in the region. When Balarraga was El Tigre’s boss in northern Honduras, the latter had denounced the former for delegating 80 officers to provide security for the inauguration of a new city hall building in El Paraíso, complete with a rooftop helipad. “When have you ever seen an entire department of the country left to waste in order to guard a worthless city hall?” El Tigre asked.

On that occasion, Bonilla alleged that all 80 officers had received 1,000 lempiras each as payment following the event; the El Paraíso mayor’s office had thanked them generously. In his letter of protest attached to the allegation, El Tigre complained that this represented “a violation and discrediting of our image” because it showed that “the Police are in the service of individuals engaged in drug trafficking.”

To reiterate: At the time, El Tigre was speaking out without reservation, and one only needs to consider the context to understand why. In those days, Óscar Álvarez, the man whom many called El Tigre’s godfather, was once again security minister. He was the first to serve as security minister in the Porfirio Lobo administration. When Óscar Álvarez left the country, driven out by the Police leadership under the direction of Chief José Luis Muñoz Licona, El Tigre retreated from the public view.

* * *

The day after Óscar Ramírez’s murder, El Tigre again found himself in a tight spot. Perhaps what worried him the most, as he attended meeting after meeting on February 18, was that he —El Tigre himself— would be accused, once again, of murder: the murder of Ricardo Ramírez del Cid’s son. One way or another, he knew it would happen, perhaps because he knew what the former spy-commander, consumed by his rage, was thinking. And perhaps this is why, in one of the many meetings El Tigre attended that Monday, the 18th, he offered, without anyone asking him, to explain his whereabouts on the night that Óscar Ramírez was murdered.

El Tigre said that, on the afternoon of the killing, in the company of his personal bodyguard, he had been visiting Valle de Ángeles, a picturesque town of bars and cafés, located in the mountains some 40 minutes from Tegucigalpa. El Tigre said that he left Valle de Ángeles at around 7 p.m. and had planned to visit Hilda Caldera, the widow of Alfredo Landaverde. Those who knew them say that El Tigre, having been a student of both professors, and like many other officers, greatly respected the couple.

But at the last minute, El Tigre says, he decided not to visit Landaverde’s widow and instead asked his bodyguard to take him home. El Tigre’s house is located quite close to the scene of the crime, in a lower-middle-class neighborhood. His house is so close, in fact, that in the past, when El Tigre didn’t have the high profile he has now, he could often be seen eating at the restaurant, sitting in that very room, facing the street. Once he became police chief, El Tigre started sending his bodyguard to get takeout.

That night, after his trip to the mountains, El Tigre was hungry and asked his driver to go out and get him some dinner. Un pollo frito. Fried chicken. Back then, El Tigre lived alone in his house. Now he lives under the protection of an entourage of bodyguards.

The shooting of Óscar Ramírez occurred at approximately 8:10 p.m. El Tigre stated in one of his many meetings that, roughly 10 minutes later, an acquaintance told him that something had happened not far from the neighborhood. El Tigre thought about going after the shooters himself, but then decided against it, because his bodyguard wasn’t back yet.

By the time El Tigre arrived at the scene of the crime, the officers who had eaten pork chops at the restaurant just minutes before the crime were already on the scene, as were the agents who had been patrolling the area, who regretted not having been there to intervene. In one of the meetings in which El Tigre had explained his whereabouts, he said that a patrol had been near the area and that, had the officers acted professionally, they might have arrested the three perpetrators that very night, rather than allowing them escape.

* * *

Only by recognizing that Ricardo Ramírez del Cid is someone who knows how to procure information can we explain how he arrived at such a completely different version of El Tigre Bonilla’s movements on the night that Óscar Ramírez was murdered.

According to Ramírez del Cid, several witnesses said they saw El Tigre Bonilla in the vicinity of the restaurant where the spy-commander’s son was killed. Specifically, El Tigre was seen shortly before the shooting, at a gas station very close to the restaurant. According to Ramírez del Cid’s version, El Tigre himself had confessed to him on the night of his son’s wake —the night he planned to tell his friends to tie El Tigre up— that he had, in fact, been at that gas station and that he had, in fact, planned to stop by the restaurant to pick up some dinner, but that he had decided not to because there were too many people eating there.

The investigations that Ramírez del Cid conducted with his team, together with the investigation carried out by El Tigre’s subordinates, led him to the hospital where the assassin injured in the shootout was recovering. That investigation, and the “first testimony” provided by that shooter, confirmed Ramírez del Cid’s suspicions that not only had the police been involved in his son’s murder, but the army as well. The gunmen who burst into the restaurant while Óscar Ramírez was having dinner had presumably been hired to kidnap his son.

Days after the murder, the Honduran National Police arrested three other men and linked them to the case. One of them was a waiter at the restaurant, a young man who served pork chops and washed dishes. A young man who, according to The Witness, had nothing to do with the crime.

“You spend a lot of time around someone and you get to know them, and that young man had been working here for many years. He’s a humble kid, a good person,” The Witness says.

After the arrests, Ramírez del Cid alleged that the crime was being covered up, demanded El Tigre be removed from his post and investigated, and said that the assassin recovering in the hospital —who in his initial interrogation had claimed that police and military personnel had hired him and his fellow gunmen and had given them the weapons— was in danger. He also alleged that this witness had been forced to change his initial statement, that he was now saying that the goal of the gunmen had been to rob the restaurant, that they were members of the 18th Street gang, and that they had received their orders from gang leaders in prison. He also denied allegations that, in a desperate attempt to protect his son, the Cobras who were guarding him had provoked the shooting by drawing their weapons, causing the gunmen to fire theirs.

The Witness had read this version of events in the newspapers.

“But what I don’t understand is, if that’s what happened, why didn’t they steal the money from the cash register, if that’s what they came for? Why did the guys who were still alive after the shootout just run away?” The Witness says.

One of the last complaints leveled by Ramírez del Cid was related to his claim that he was being followed, and that the man in charge of his surveillance was Officer Daniel López Flores, an agent under investigation for stealing weapons from the Police. The Corporation denied that Ramírez del Cid was under surveillance.

* * *

El Tigre Bonilla, today more than ever, is a man with a lot of power. His opponents and critics, as well as his supporters, realized this at the end of March, when El Tigre appeared before Honduran Congress.

One month after Óscar Ramírez’s murder, Congress held a week-long celebration to honor the justice system, during which the public security apparatus pledged to be accountable to the legislature and to the nation. It was a sort of public atonement. A show in which, one by one, the officials in charge of the country’s security presented what they considered to be their achievements, and the congressional deputies, with very little rigor or enthusiasm, questioned the claims that didn’t sit well with them. Many considered the atmosphere conducive to turning the event into a public trial. They imagined El Tigre in the hot seat, forced to explain and defend himself against the accusations of Ricardo Ramírez del Cid. But when El Tigre Bonilla arrived at the event, he appeared calm and composed, and in the end, emerged completely victorious.

Unlike the Honduran attorney general, the head of the Directorate for Police Career Evaluation, and Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla himself, El Tigre left the event unscathed. The three former officials were excoriated, in corresponding order of severity, by legislators. The first —the attorney general— because he stated, openly and honestly, that the institution he oversaw was only capable of prosecuting one-fifth of all crimes committed in the country. In April, Congress formed an investigative commission that will ultimately determine his political future.

The second —the man who oversees the police— faced an onslaught of tough questions about what legislators considered to be the slow progress of the police anti-corruption purge, which had begun more than a year ago, after the murder of Rector Castellanos’ son. No matter how much Eduardo Villanueva tried to explain that, if progress was slow, it wasn’t because he was “protecting” corrupt officers but because the legal tools at his disposal required him to follow certain procedures, to subordinate himself to the chief of police, and to “recommend” dismissals, Congress came back with the same clear message: that if the Police continued to resist reform, Villanueva would be the one held responsible. In the aftermath of the congressional hearings, Villanueva’s position has been hanging by a thread, and the Honduran press is already reporting that President Lobo is on the verge of firing him. While the third man —Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla— did not face the same intensity of criticism, he was nevertheless unable to distance himself from facts that reflect badly on his administration: After nearly two years in his post, Honduras continues to rank as the most violent country on the planet.

No less than three of the guests who attended the event recalled that, when it came time for El Tigre Bonilla to speak, the atmosphere became extremely tense and even they themselves felt nervous. El Tigre, dressed in his formal attire, stood to testify, his gait rough and his brow furrowed as usual. Among the audience was one former police commissioner who complained —quietly, in his mind— about El Tigre Bonilla’s attitude during the event. Later, he would describe El Tigre’s air as dismissive and disrespectful, especially with respect to one detail that, for those who know El Tigre, would come as no surprise, considering that the last thing anyone would expect of him is to be a gentle, well-mannered, ceremonious man.

“He didn’t even have the decency to follow the protocol they teach us at the academy. He kept his sergeant’s cap on the whole time. Unbelievable! You’re supposed to arrive wearing your kepi or your hat, take it off during the ceremony, and put it back on when the ceremony is over,” complained the former commissioner, who witnessed Tigre Bonilla’s speech before Congress.

Perhaps if this were some other country or some other official, his superiors would have temporarily removed him from office to conduct an investigation to determine whether he was involved in the alleged crime. One might expect as much, especially when such an investigation would otherwise be overseen by the very official accused of the crime in question. And even in Honduras, one would have expected, and Ricardo Ramírez del Cid certainly would have expected, that El Tigre would be questioned about the murder of Óscar Ramírez during his appearance before Congress. But no-one asked El Tigre anything. He took the podium, presented the figures he wanted to present, said that the country was safer since he became chief, and stepped down from the podium. No-one asked him anything.

“It was like all the congressional representatives, and there were more than 100 of them present, were afraid of him. Because you really can’t say that he charmed the audience. He’s way too serious, even when you’re just talking to him,” said another former government official who attended the event.

El Tigre Bonilla, who has spent 27 of his more than 50 years of life dedicated to the Police, is a man with a great deal of power. And that day, when he appeared before Congress, perhaps El Tigre felt completely sure of himself. In any case, his future remained promising: The host of the congressional event, Juan Orlando Hernández —the president of Congress, the presidential candidate for the National Party, and the presumed successor to Pepe Lobo— had selected as his national campaign director former Security Minister Óscar Álvarez, who has long been the shadow behind El Tigre.

Today, Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla has everything going for him and nothing can touch him. At the end of March, the Associated Press published an investigation revealing the probable existence of death squads led by police officers in Honduras, similar to the units that El Tigre was once accused of commanding. The investigation reignited debates over whether Bonilla, as Commissioner María Luisa Borjas once alleged, belonged to an organization dedicated to “social cleansing.” Since he assumed leadership of the Police in May 2012, this accusation and past investigations into El Tigre’s conduct have prompted the United States to withhold $11 million of the total aid it provides to the Honduran Police. This multimillion-dollar reduction exclusively affected the units reporting directly to Bonilla. According to the AP article, the United States says it will not release these funds until it receives specific confirmation that Bonilla has been exonerated of the accusations against him.

El Tigre Bonilla acts as if nothing can stop him: not even those 11 million dollars; not even the United States government. He enjoys the support of President Lobo, Congress, and the new minister of security, Arturo Corrales — although the Honduran press has reported “frictions” between the new minister and the current police chief. El Tigre remains in his position (Pompeyo Bonilla was dismissed after the upheavals in Congress, and is currently serving as Lobo’s private secretary).

No-one can stop El Tigre. On March 28, 2013, William Brownfield, the Assistant Secretary for the U.S. Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, came down hard on Bonilla. “[The United States government] will not work with the Director General of the National Police,” he said. “We have no relations with him; we don’t give him so much as a dollar or even a cent. And we have also severed any ties with the level immediately beneath him, the 20 officers or officials who work directly with the Director General.” Less than two months later, Brownfield was more conciliatory. “I respect the work that El Tigre Bonilla is doing. I admire him, and I think he’s good for Honduras, but I’m limited by U.S. law in terms of who I can work with,” he said.

* * *

One month after Óscar Ramírez was murdered, his father had already left the capital. His townhouse showed no signs of life, and the Cobra agents patrolling the neighborhood where he lived —a private community with a perimeter wall and a guardhouse at the entrance— were nowhere to be seen.

A source close to Ramírez del Cid says that, for the time being, the general can only be reached by telephone... but he’s not answering his calls.

Two days later, the source informs me that the general is not taking calls because his phone has been tapped and his life, and the lives of his family, are in danger.

One week later, the source tells me that Ricardo Ramírez del Cid will be leaving Honduras.

On Sunday, May 24, Ricardo Ramírez del Cid bid farewell to his son Óscar at the San Miguel Arcángel Cemetery, where the remains of elite police and military personnel and their families are laid to rest. While his wife and surviving children left the burial niche to go buy some flowers, Ramírez del Cid knelt on the grass in front of the grave and pressed his hands to his face for a few minutes, as four armed Cobra agents surrounded him, standing with their backs to the former chief and facing the four cardinal directions.

This image inevitably draws us back to the early morning of February 16, 2012, to the guard house at the entrance to Comayagua Prison, located in the eponymous department, near Palmerola, a former military base once used by the U.S. Army to support the counterinsurgency efforts of Central American armed forces in the 1970s and 1980s.

That morning, the prison courtyard and surrounding area looked like a bombed-out field hospital in a war zone. Medical waste was strewn about: bloody gloves, dirty masks covered in soot, scraps of burnt fabric, blood, blood mixed with a substance resembling charcoal, coating the gloves and plastic suits that the forensic team had left scattered about. The smell of burnt flesh wafted from the prison. Human flesh. The stench of decay was strongest in the room where Ricardo Ramírez del Cid was meeting with other officers, prosecutors, and forensic experts. It was the worst prison tragedy in Honduran history. No less than 360 inmates burned alive in a massive fire, following an incomprehensible decision by the authorities: The order was given that no-one would be let out.

And there stood Ramírez del Cid, assessing the damage, finding himself overwhelmed by the scale of the violence. He rubbed his head, massaged his face with both hands, and collapsed in exhaustion, two dark bags under his eyes. When he finished counting the bodies that morning, Ramírez del Cid didn’t feel like saying much. “We’re exhausted. Let’s talk tomorrow. This is too much,” he said.

Perhaps the general was overwhelmed, or perhaps his mind was racing, his attention consumed with a decision he knew he had to make. An inevitable decision: He would have to dismiss the director of the Honduran prison system — Danilo Orellana, another police officer accused of a series of human rights violations in prisons. Orellana had become one of Ramírez del Cid’s closest collaborators during his first months as police chief, and the two men were also close friends. Orellana’s dismissal was announced in the hours following the tragedy, but to date there is still no confirmation of any proceedings being opened against him for his role in allowing 360 people to burn to death in state custody.

Outside the prison, early that morning, a group of men and women, all relatives of the victims, had set up camp. One of the men, the cousin of one of the victims, was kneeling on the ground in front of the prison gates. The man was drunk, and was crying inconsolably for his cousin.

The day after kneeling in front of his son’s grave, Ricardo Ramírez del Cid boarded a plane at the airport in San Pedro Sula, a city five hours by car from Tegucigalpa. “Former Police Chief Exiled with His Family,” read the headline in the Honduran newspaper La Prensa.

* * *

In early May, Ramírez del Cid answers the phone. I ask him if he will tell me the story behind his son’s murder. He says yes, but he doesn’t have time to talk right now. I ask him if I can visit him later, wherever he’ll be, and the general is silent. I ask him if he is in the United States or if he has returned to Honduras, and the general is silent. I tell him that I know he suspects his calls are being tapped, and we agree to communicate by email.

I write him an email, I let him know my intentions, I tell him that I will call again.

“Okay, I’ll expect your call.”

A week later the general answers the phone again.

“How should we proceed? When do you plan to come back to Honduras, or where can I find you?”

“All I can tell you is right now, everything’s too complicated... too complicated...”

*Translated by Max Granger