Читать книгу Gun Baby Gun - Iain Overton - Страница 9

2. THE DEAD

The gun’s mountain of dead in hard numbers – Honduras – the most dangerous place on earth – the tragedy of three murdered women in a jaundiced street – a visit to the fire-marked morgue of San Pedro Sula – witnessing a journalist’s trade and a nighttime shooting – the secrets of the embalmers’ art

Guns kill, and in vast numbers, because even though we live in a world of nukes and ground-to-air missiles, chemical warfare and mortar rounds, it’s the gun that does the low-level, high-cost damage.1 The gun is the Top Trump of killers, and the numbers killed by gunfire are bloodily incontestable. While dead men might not talk, they do offer some statistical truths.

Global numbers are hard to come by, but estimates from international studies suggest that between 526,000² and 600,000³ violent deaths happen annually. UN data on homicides show that in areas of high levels of murders, the vast majority of these are with guns – often over 80 per cent of them.⁴ An assault with a firearm is about twelve times more likely to kill you than being attacked in other intimate ways, like with a knife,⁵ so taking into account that as many as 90 per cent of deaths in conflicts are from being shot,⁶ an estimated level of 300,000 homicides with guns every year seems reasonable. Then there are the suicides. The World Health Organization has estimated that 800,000 people kill themselves each year. As one of the leading ways to end it is with a firearm, a figure of 200,000 suicides by firearm a year also seems a reasonable estimate to make.⁷

This all adds up to about half a million people dying every year from gunfire.

The type of deaths from guns, clearly, differs from country to country. If you live in the US or Canada, suicides account for the majority of gun deaths. In countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Colombia or Albania the majority of gun deaths are homicide. Eastern Europe and southern Africa have lots of murder, but not many by firearm. Southern Europe and northern Africa don’t have many murders, but when they do, it’s much more likely to be with a gun.

The US stands out. Americans suffer about 80,000 non-fatal injuries and 30,000 deaths every year involving guns.⁸ It works out at just over eighty deaths a day. Things get even worse when you travel south. Although home to just 14 per cent of the world’s population, Latin America accounts for 42 per cent of all firearm-homicides worldwide.⁹

These figures, though, conceal one problem. As Eric Berman told me, there is a fundamental difficulty getting any figures worth a damn. Many countries don’t have proper ways to establish who has died violently, let alone how. Even in relatively developed South Africa, where gun deaths overshadow all other ‘external’ causes of death, only a third of death records are available for analysis.¹⁰ The World Health Organization’s mortality database provides figures for just seven sub-Saharan African countries.

From the data that are available, though, we know that, if you look at the rankings of how people are murdered, Puerto Rico tops the table with 95 per cent of homicides there being with a firearm.¹¹ We also know Brazil has the most gun homicides in the world outside a war zone in terms of sheer numbers.¹² And, perhaps of surprise to some, the worst place in the world for gun violence per capita is not the US, but the Central American country of Honduras. And there’s one city there that stands out as the world’s epicentre of gun violence: San Pedro Sula – the most violent city on earth not at war.

This fact was new to me. I had been to Latin America before – the story about gun violence in Brazil was just one of a number of things I had reported on in the previous fifteen years. From drug addiction involving the powerful cocaine residue paco to the rise of the left in Latin politics, I’d travelled to many counties there, camera in hand. But I had never been to Honduras as anything but a tourist, and even then the violence that gripped that land was hidden from me.

This time, though, I felt I had to travel straight to that heart of darkness of San Pedro Sula, to record what happened to the dead in this city of corroded wet streets and ivy-curled trees and to see how people coped under the constant presence of gunfire.

The body was out in the cane sugar field, in the shadows. We stumbled through the night and the plantation mud, the shifting light coming from the mobile phones the police officers were using to guide their way. There was only a weak moon in the Central American sky, and there was no budget for flashlights, so the officials had backed up the mortuary truck and let its headlights cast a low glow across the stubble-rich field. Their phones would have to do the rest.

The call had come over the radio as if it was an urgent murder scene, but the body had decomposed long ago. The sugar cane had since grown and pushed up and out, through the man’s jeans. It had pierced his mottled flesh and was now sprouting through his body as if the bones themselves had grown. They looked like lilies in the half-light; you couldn’t tell the difference between the bones and the cane.

‘See, his hands have been tied,’ said one of the forensic examiners in Spanish. He was dressed in a clinical over-suit, but as he was using a garbage bin to put the bones in, it was clear any concern for evidence contamination had long been lost somewhere in the dark corners of countless other crime scenes.

‘Is that a rib bone?’ The mobile phones were held close to the ground.

‘No. That’s a twig,’ a voice in the pitch-black said.

‘I’ve found his skull,’ said another. An animal must have dragged it away, I thought.

‘Looks like they cut it off,’ the first voice said. I was wrong. You could make out in the shifting light the ragged hole where a bullet had struck and you hoped they had shot him before they had cut him. Either way, the bound hands and lonely death in a field made it clear this was a gang murder.

This was what I had come to witness, and it had not taken long. I had only been here for a short while, and this was the eighth body I had seen. Honduras, without a doubt, was a very violent place. In 2012, twenty people were murdered every day on average in this country of 8 million – a murder rate of 90.4 per 100,000 residents.¹³ In the US it is about 4.7.¹⁴ The city of San Pedro Sula, on whose darkened outskirts I was now, was even worse. The murder rate here was 173 per 100,000.¹⁵ There were, in 2013, just under six homicides a day in this municipal region alone.

The violence was partly down to San Pedro Sula being where it was. Stuck between the drug lords of Colombia and Bolivia to the south and the buyers from the US to the north, it had become a habitat of casual murder and cold pain. Some 80 per cent of the cocaine that reaches US soil was thought to be trafficked via here. And as drugs flowed up, guns came down – from south to north, down from the largest gun-producing country in the world.¹⁶

These realities, combined with poverty, corruption and impunity, had turned San Pedro Sula into a city where gangs fought gangs and cartels fought cartels over the immense profits that drugs could bring. The feared Mexican syndicates of the Zetas and Sinaloas had even been lured here, aligning themselves with local gangs such as the MS-13 gang or Calle 18. And death had come in their wake.

A few days before, as my plane banked over San Pedro, the lush hills of El Merendon National Park framing the city to the east, and the sprawl of the district of Choloma drifting far up to the north, I looked at my watch. A scattered cemetery speckled the earth in the rushing green below. It was 3.30 p.m. We dipped down to the surging runway. I write this because a skinny policeman was also to note that time – half past three – with a worn ballpoint pen in a crumbling police hill station close to the cemetery I’d just seen. The time was inscribed next to the names of three women who had been gunned down at that precise moment.

The first was Lesley Lopez-Pena. She was twenty-two, single, unemployed. When she died, the policeman noted, she was wearing blue jeans and grey sandals. On the small of her back she had a tattoo of the sun. The second victim was Miriam Portillo. She died with two bullets in her back and one in her chest. The third was Karen Contreros. The report noted that her underwear was pink and that she had five gun wounds in her chest, one in her stomach, one in her shoulder and one in her forehead.

These three women had been travelling back home from a visit out of town. One of them had a boyfriend, a gang member, in prison, and they had been to see him. They had probably given the young man some weed or pills to help pass the dragging hours and then returned. They were caught laughing as they got down from a converted school bus and fell as one from the assassins’ bullets. Dying, one dropped a child’s Spiderman bike she had bought in the market an hour before.

The policeman did not write down a motive. Murders such as these were just another thread in the endless sorrow of the drug wars.

On the way to the spot where the women had been gunned down, my driver, Frank, had pulled to the edge of the road and put black tape over the telephone number on the side of his taxi. With a deliberate show, he folded a piece of white paper and fixed this over his number plates. He knew the gangs would take these details and he did not want them to visit his home and see that he had a wife and child.

Getting back in, he insisted I lower my window. ‘If they can’t see in, then they will think we are the other gang,’ he said. ‘Then they’ll open fire.’ He was taking no chances.

By the time we reached the crime scene, the light was fast departing, and the coroner’s wagon had taken the bodies away. The blood still stained that sandy road, and there was a small piece of intestine, blown out of one of the girl’s backs, lying obscenely in the middle of the track. I pushed it with my foot and watched it tremble in the electric light. Perhaps the coroner was too busy to clean up. After all, in the last three years there had been over 6,000 homicide autopsies carried out here in San Pedro, compared to just sixty-two natural death autopsies.¹⁷

I walked over to a huddle of people sitting back from the road. The mild drama of a Brazilian soap opera was playing out on a square television hanging outside a Portakabin. A fire blazed in an oil drum; the shifting of car headlights illuminated the area and cast dancing shadows. A man in a white England football shirt turned to me.

‘Three women?’ he said. ‘Yes – I heard fifteen gunshots and saw them fall. They lay there for about fifteen minutes before the police arrived, but by then they had been dead for fifteen minutes.’

His Spanish was fast, and because he repeated the word fifteen I was confused.

‘The journalists were here before the forensics arrived,’ he said, as if that made it clearer, and a fat woman beside him started to scream. I had no idea why.

‘The gangs do this as a sort of theatre,’ the man in the football shirt was saying. ‘They pick where they want the bodies to lie, they leave the gun-shells. They don’t care. We have piles of dead bodies here, and the police say they investigate them, but no one gets caught. No one goes to jail.’

The bullets were 9mm. ‘Claro’. Of course. It’s the gun of choice for the feared Calle 18 gang, who run these streets. And with that, he had nothing more to say and walked back into the shadows by his hut. When I approached others they too edged into the dark. The gangs were always here watching. This was just how it was. The killings had brought powerlessness, despair and, ultimately, silence.

Beside us, up a slope, stood a raised breezeblock hut. The lights spilling from the windows captured those inside in silhouette, and then, suddenly, their voices began to lift. They were evangelical Christians. In all of this, perhaps, God was the only one worth speaking to. Below, a line of tied, tired horses snorted in the night, startled at the noise. The cries of those few believers drifted upwards to the speckled sky. And out there, out in the darkness and in an even greater silence, lay three more bodies in a San Pedro municipal refrigeration unit.

Outside the morgue a man in short sleeves and a pair of stained trousers sat and waited and sucked on a bag of fizzy drink through a bent straw. At this time, the sun was already hard on your face, and it would be hours before the heat lessened. The passing cars kicked up small whirls of dust. No one spoke.

Beside him a coffin was propped open with a stick. It lay empty, but he remained hopeful. A quick burial cost about 2,500 lempiras – $120 – and he looked at the hunched relatives leaving the morgue, with their sallow faces and hurting eyes, and sucked on his straw.

He was from Funeraria San Jose, and was just one of the many morticians who came daily to this, the busiest morgue in the world. It would not be long before he got a customer. His name was Marco Antonio Ramos. At fifty-three, he hadn’t thought he would be doing this, but work is work, and this was good work. He had sold six coffins last month alone.

I asked him why he did it.

‘Money. I found a way through life with these coffins,’ he said, his voice light.

‘Do you prepare the bodies for burial?’

‘So the relatives can open up the lids and say goodbye to their loved ones – those whose faces are still there.’ There are at least ten funeral homes here in San Pedro, and yet business is still good. Just as the lure of death had brought Marco to these gates, so it had brought me – I had come to see how the municipal morgue could cope with so many gun murders.

There was shouting for people from the gate.

‘Is there anyone from Baracoa here?’ the call went out.

A hunched, fat woman went in, her back contorted, the knowledge of what lay on the other side heavy upon her. Here they got as many as thirty bodies a day; most had died violently. I turned and walked towards the visitor’s entrance, the only person to go through those gates that morning with neither tearful nor lifeless eyes.

Inside, Dr Hector Hernandez greeted me. He was the director of this morgue, a tidy man with grey hair and a patient calm, exact and professional. He led me into a large and empty lecture theatre. The walls were peeling, and the place felt like no one had taught here for years. He pointed towards a Formica table and pulled over a decaying chair. Hector’s face seemed melted with tiredness. He has a team of 146, he began. Among them are sixty-eight medics, two dental analysts, four toxicologists, two microbiologists and one psychiatrist.

A psychiatrist? I stopped him.

‘The morgue is not just for the dead,’ he explained. What the gangs do to their victims is sometimes so vicious that their markings on the bodies leave much deeper markings on the minds of those who are left behind. After all, the killers have a method. They almost always end it with a shot to the head – they prefer a 9mm to do this – but they torture their victims first. ‘Violence here is intimate, but the gun sends them to the other side,’ he said.

Hector sighed when I asked him if this daily arrival of bodies had affected his morale. He was resigned to it.

‘In ten years, between 2003 and 2013, we had over 10,000 autopsies; 9,400 of them did not result in an investigation. For me, this is the hardest: this impunity. Nothing has been investigated.’

Right now he had 68 bodies in storage; 48 of them being matched for DNA, the other 20 were unknown. Most had died prematurely and violently.

‘After thirty days if no one claims a body, we bury them anonymously,’ he said. Last year, 120 people were interred in this way, the majority of them men between eighteen and thirty. Then I asked, in the sixteen years he had worked there, what had stayed with him, what memory of all of this violence had struck him the most.

He sucked in a breath. The murder of an entire family is hard, he said, his voice measured and exact. Like the time he saw a dead mother still holding her three children tight in her arms. The gangs had kicked down the bathroom door and killed them as one. Then there are the others. In this city these are the bodies that come packaged – trussed up in grey sacks. They die painfully, he told me, their legs tied up against their backs, their faces bruised, their teeth missing. They once found twenty-six bodies in sacks like this in a field: a grim harvest.

Suddenly, as if this was too painful a memory to dwell on, he rose, straightened his tie and beckoned me to follow. We walked through swinging double doors and out into the dissecting room. It was a sudden shift from talking about death to seeing it.

The tiles on the floor were loose and covered in water. The neon lights gave off a sickly glow and buzzed; the walls were smeared and wet. And there, on the left, lay a body placed on its side. It – he – was naked, and his legs were crooked and twisted. He had been shot in the jaw, and flies flickered above him.

The director leaned towards me in the molasses air and said there was no real danger of infection. ‘The dead are healthy. They didn’t die from diseases.’ Later, I walked outside and saw bags of seeping waste left against a wall, frenzied flies thick above the trailing lines of blackened ooze, and was not so sure.

We left and I followed Hector upstairs. A fire had ripped through half of the morgue on a summer’s night a year before and now the upper floor lay derelict: tortured iron railings and marked walls. Such is the state of Honduras’s morgues. As if death had seeped into the very structure of this place and left it rotten and mould-tainted.

Later, he introduced me to his medical colleagues. They shifted in their blue shirts when I shook their hands – they were embarrassed to be asked questions about what they did. Their work was difficult, Hector explained, and I asked what sort of people were drawn to this type of task. He repeated the words of the funeral worker outside: there is not much other employment around. Death creates its own labour.

I offered the coroner team something to eat, and we sat down together. Around the table were Sanchez, Garcia and Rodriguez, two doctors and a forensic photographer. I had bought fried chicken and, despite the sugar stench of death coming from just beyond the door, they ate their lunch. I did not; I had gone to the toilet to wash my hands and found neither soap nor towels.

I asked about the smell. There was a smirk. ‘What smell?’ These men had been busy and were hungry. On the day before they had nine bodies brought in: six homicides. Outside lay two more bodies. I looked at the white chicken meat and fried strips of skin in their hands and focused on writing notes.

‘Look at this. This one has been shot in the head,’ said the forensic photographer, glancing at the laptop before him, his mouth full. I shifted across to his screen: it was one of the women who had been killed the day before. There was the child’s Spiderman bike. The doctors looked too but were unmoved. The only thing shocking, they told me, is working with children who’d been tortured. One of them let out a low whistle. ‘It’s really common.’

They described how victims’ hands and feet were often tied together and the rope wrapped around the neck, then lashed to the feet. ‘So, when they tire from struggling, they let themselves go. Their feet drop, and they end up choking to death. The rope just tightens around their throat. If they are lucky, someone shoots them before it gets to this.’

Luck, fate. These were the things they talked about – as if that’s all you could pin your hopes on. ‘Some people are shot twenty times and end up in hospital, still living,’ said Sanchez, a heavy-set man with eyes dark rimmed and deep. ‘Then there are people who are only shot just the once – a small wound – and they end up here.’

‘The beautiful thing about this job,’ said Garcia, wiping his fingers with a napkin to clean off the chicken grease, ‘is seeing up close what a bullet can really do to you.’ And then he picked up another chicken leg.

That night I met Orlin Armando Castro – a local TV journalist with a fixed gaze and an impish laugh. He had a fizzing energy that meant he never stopped moving. Beside him was his cameraman, Osman Castillo, a solid man in ripped jeans and a white shirt. Osman hardly spoke; Orlin was his voice.

On Orlin’s belt was a police radio that buzzed from time to time, and in his hand, always, was a Blackberry phone. He constantly scanned both and replied to his messages with a focus that could have been mistaken for something else. He was constantly awaiting that call – to a murder scene, to another death. On hearing of one, he and Osman would jump into their scraped blue Hyundai Tucson, whose passenger door did not open from the outside, and drive fast to where a body was sure to be lying. There they did what they were paid to do: they filmed murder.

I had arranged to meet Orlin because he was a local journalist here and I had been told – out of everyone – he was the first to get to San Pedro’s murder scenes. The one reporter the police would call whenever there was a shooting, his life was defined by gun killings. And I wanted to know what that could do to a man – to be a constant witness to the tortured secrets of this city, to have a career marked so powerfully by the gun’s ultimate legacy.

It was late when we met outside the chipped and long-shut-down hairdresser on a darkened corner of a crossroads. We shook hands, and then, casually, Orlin pulled open his car door and showed me his guns: a 12mm shotgun and a 9mm Beretta pistol.

‘Have you used them?’ I asked him in the half-light.

‘Yes,’ Orlin said. I wasn’t used to journalists packing heat, less so firing them. One time, he said, he drove into a gunfight by accident. He had to put down his microphone and pull out his pistol and start shooting, because the gangs, in the confusion, had begun to shoot at him. Even so, he refuses to wear a bulletproof vest because the gangs might think he’s a cop and then they’d be sure to kill him.

He had worked for the past eleven years for a national Honduran news channel, Canal 6, and had seen things on these eternal, yellow-lit night streets that you should not see. A six-month-old killed in the middle of a gunfight; whole families executed in their homes. He looked at me, his head tilted slightly, and flipped around the screen of his white Blackberry phone. On it was the decapitated body of a woman, her vagina on display. His thumb flicked, and another image appeared. Three day-old dead men lay in cornfields, the heat causing their eyes to pop out of their heads. He laughed, his eyes twinkling, and he showed me another woman, semi-naked in death. His phone was filled with corpses. Young men from the 18 gang slumped in awkward positions, as if asleep. Before and after shots of the living and the dead, from smiling to something else.

When he does not work, he gets bored, he said. There’s so much drama in what he does. The closer he gets to death, the more alive he feels. This, he told me, was real journalism. I began to fear this little man’s love for the tenebrous corners of this city.

There’s much that he cannot report – if he did he’d be killed. Some murder scenes he just has to stay away from: he knows things would get too complicated with the gangs if he reported on certain killings. He feels he’s walking on an edge. ‘On the one side there is deep, dark water, on the other side there is fire. Here you don’t know who is who. In a war you take sides. You know who an army is – they are in green. But here . . . you have no idea,’ he said.

A call came in. There had been a shooting in the Barrio Rivera Hernandez, and Orlin’s face changed. We jumped into his car and we were off, pushing through the down-lit streets to the murder scene. In this light the street took on the colour of jaundice, the plaster on the low-slung houses hanging like pockmarked skin, the grill-lined windows the shade of mustard gas.

The body lay still under the ash-blond glare. The policemen were placing small fluorescent triangle markers out under the shadowed light, tracing where the spent rounds had fallen. The body lay awkwardly, his legs twisted, the shoulders tucked underneath. The dead man was wearing an orange polo shirt, which looked almost white now, and you could glimpse tartan boxer shorts poking above his stained blue jeans. When the cameraman turned on his light, you could see the blood still seeping gently from the man’s back.

The police took out a tape measure and began to measure the ballistic range, but you felt they were doing this because the television crew was nearby. The police spoke to no one, and the street’s occupants stood back in the shadows. All the neighbours had come out to look and to talk in quiet voices. A fat baby sat on the sidewalk, gurgling; a girl, about three years old, in a pink frilly dress with small pierced ears, asked her mother for a hug; to her side a man laughed and swung his son between his legs. And in front of these children, the police flipped the body, and the man’s destroyed face stared up into the deep black sky.

Orlin, his face caught in the camera’s brightness, stood before the body and delivered his lines, repeated a thousand times before. And the image on the video screen showed him, the whiteness of the light hard contrasting with the sulphur-tinted streets, like a broken angel. Luminescent. Then the camera’s light went out, and Orlin turned and took one more photo with his phone, and another crumpled face of death was captured.

When they finally put the dead man into a long, rustling black bag, the crowd grew bored and drifted away: the show was over. And the police tipped the body into the back of the forensic truck and then they too left; and all that remained were patches of sticky, coagulating blood, thick on the ground.

Orlin walked back to his vehicle. I caught a glimpse of his face lit in the reflection of his phone. He was looking to see if any more murders had been called in that night. And so it goes, I thought. The endless hunger for death in these streets never sated – one that totally consumed this slight, sad-faced man. I climbed back into the car and we drove away.

The low barbed-wire-rimmed walls of the district flickered beyond the window. And the silent homes of the people of San Pedro, with their contained patches of blue electricity, began to thin out, until all that was left were the spotlights of the car and the silence, and the yellow streets in the rear window diminished into the night.

The coffins attached to the wall are the pricier ones, Daisy Quinteros explained to me the next day, pointing to the far end of the funeral parlour shop.

‘The most expensive is 54,000 lempiras,’ she said, smiling – just shy of $3,000. She was a good saleswoman and dressed appropriately for this sad room: motherly. Her hair was flecked with lines of white, and her trousers a smart grey that strained slightly around her hips. She wore a tastefully embroidered white shirt. The look clearly worked – she sold about three coffins a week, getting a commission from each. She once earned over a thousand US dollars in just one month, she said.

We were overlooking a street lined with funeral homes. The kerbs were filled with solemn cars, and beside them pine trees cast spots of shadow onto the baked pavement. One of the funeral-home owners had planted white, almost translucent, orchids in pots leading up one stairway; and all around the entrances and pavements were swept clean. Unlike other parts of the city, this area was free of graffiti. This street looked the richest of them all.

I had come here to see one more community impacted by the gun – to look at the art of the undertaker. In San Pedro you did not have to travel far to meet one.

Daisy beckoned me to sit down at the glass table in the centre of the showroom. Unusually around here, she had not lost anyone personally to the violence. That was not to say that it had not affected her; the suddenness, the shock of death coming unexpectedly, these were the things that still disconcerted her.

‘You can see it in the eyes of the family members,’ she said, and leaned forwards and touched my arm; 90 per cent of her clients had died violently.

‘It’s not all bad, though. The other day we buried this old man. He was 102. No one lives that long here.’ And she smiled a thin smile, because she knew this wasn’t what I was here to write about.

I asked her if earning a living from the violence bothered her.

‘Well, we’ve been here twenty-one years. We provide a service – we are a necessity. I don’t think our business is taking advantage at all. What would they do without us?’ She talked quickly and without pause, her moving hands covered in gold rings. ‘Everyone is going to need this service some day.’ She pushed a folder towards me. It was filled with images of coffins and garlands, plaques and headstones: a catalogue of death.

‘So – how would you like to be buried?’ I asked, and through the tinted windows you could see a chain of cars pass slowly outside. Another cortège. Another profit line reached.

‘I’d like a mid-range coffin. I’ve already bought it.’ She flicked though the laminated sheets and pointed to the one she had in mind. It was modest, and beside it was a list of measurements. People are getting fatter, she said, now you have coffins in XXXL. But they only come in a set height, so with a 6ft 2in. man like me they would have to do something to reduce my leg size. She didn’t elaborate, and I imagined someone shortening me with a hacksaw on a metal gurney.

Daisy seemed the happiest of all the people I had met so far in this city. Perhaps her job was meaningful in a way others were not. She still had contact with the living – even if they were suffused with grief. Other professionals I had met in San Pedro, like Orlin, had jobs that focused on the bodies delivered by the carnage. But Daisy dealt with those with breath still in their lungs. She had to be professional and sympathetic, not least to help families navigate their way through the layered choices presented to them in her laminated folders.

Later, I sat down with Daisy’s hidden counterparts: three embalmers who were brothers. They were in their fifties and had the same triangular and light-brown features. One had lived in the US for many years, and the good living had bloated him to twice the size of the others, but they all had the same eyes. Eyes that had seen things get steadily worse over the last five years: ‘Once we buried five people from the same family, all dead from guns,’ one said. ‘We prepare far too many teenagers for the ground,’ his brother added, and the three nodded in unison, like priests. ‘Many are just fourteen years old,’ the third said.

Their skill stretched back to their grandfather, ninety years before. It wasn’t like it was now, not back then. But theirs was the oldest outfit in Honduras, and they were still working hard; on average they prepared thirty bodies a week. The preparation took place out in the back, away from the light of the shop front.

They led the way. Past a line of neat walnut-coloured coffins, through heavy swinging doors and out to a room that looked like a cheap operating theatre with a metal trolley at its centre. But here there were no machines to monitor life: just things to mimic it.

To the side was a kitchen tray bearing lines of mascara, rouge, lipstick in neat, ordered rows. In this Catholic country, the casket was often left open at the funeral. People wanted to file past to bid farewell; death was so often sudden and unexpected many things left unsaid had still to be said. So these brothers worked to make sure that the bodies looked peaceful. They erased the look of terror imprinted on lifeless faces. They brought back the illusion of serenity – peaceful resurrection with a make-up bag.

The eldest, Arnold Mena, a softly spoken man in a crisp white shirt and a lined jacket, was so good at what he did that it wasn’t an issue if you’d been shot in the face. ‘One shot, two shots, three shots – as long as the bullets don’t destroy the face – you can just stitch up the entry hole and cover it with foundation.’

‘Here they use smaller-calibre guns, and that doesn’t break the face so much,’ Arnold said. ‘But if the skull is totally destroyed . . . we have to use a small football to keep the shape.’

He explained how they use small prosthetic eyeballs too, but then they have to keep the eyelids closed and fix small pins to keep it all in place.

‘The real challenge,’ he told me, ‘was when we do not have a photo and do not know what the victim looked like. Then you have to be a little creative.’

They did other things here, too. In that stark room, beside a metal table with an ugly drainage hole for the dripping fluids, stood rows of formaldehyde from ‘The Embalmer’s Supply Company’. Twenty-four bottles cost $180 here, and that was enough for twelve bodies. ‘It will keep a body for a week, even without refrigeration,’ they said, even in this Central American heat.

Beside the bottles were small plastic bags. They put the intestines inside these. The bags were then sent elsewhere to be burned, and they packed your body with ‘pulverised hardening compound’ instead.

After a while I shook their hands, and they told me to stay, to come back soon, but I wanted to leave. I did not want to know more about plastic bags filled with intestines or skulls filled with balloons. And the smell had long ago seeped into my clothes.

I had seen enough of death’s ugly business – I knew all too well what the gun could do. I just wanted to head back to the land of the living. Or, at the least I wanted to see a glimmer of hope in all of this sunless despair; so I left and sought instead to meet those who had managed to survive the gun’s barbed impact.