Out of the Mountains (9 page)

Figure
1.1

At a more macro level, we might think of rural-to-urban migration—driven by rural problems such as environmental degradation, energy poverty, famine, drought, or conflict—as one side of a population flow system that connects the city to its hinterland and creates a need for the city to deal with a complex array of problems such as informal settlements; economic, governance, and transportation overstretch; pollution, traffic, and border security; and food, water, fuel, and electricity shortages. Just as an urban metabolism model helps ecologists analyze material flows into and through the city, this kind of systems model can help us understand how the city transforms nonmaterial flows and how it deals with by-products such as crime, conflict, social injustice, or political unrest. This approach also helps us analyze how a city's ecosystem nests, in turn, within a larger national and global system. It allows us to understand how coastal cities (in particular, the ports and airports that connect them to the outside world) function as exchange mechanisms that connect rural populations with urban ones, and local networks with international networks. Putting this all together, we can start to see what is happening in a city under stress.

Figure
1.2

In this model, a coastal city's ecosystem lies at the center of a larger pattern of flows, with rural factors in the city's local or international hinterland—things such as environmental degradation, poor rural infrastructure, and rural conflict—prompting population flows into the urban area, which in turn contribute to rapid urbanization. Along with material flows (food, air, water, electrical power, and fuel), economic flows (construction materials and other commodities both licit and illicit; ground, sea, and air traffic; and money), and informational flows, these flows of population contribute to the creation of informal periurban settlements. An accretion of slums, squatter settlements, and shantytowns grows in a transitional zone around the old city core, displacing land that was once used to provide food and other goods and services to the city, and covering the rainfall catchment area for the city's water supply. The city's growth puts its infrastructure under stress, so systems of governance, both within the old urban core and in newer outlying areas, now lack the carrying capacity to support the scale of the population and other inflows they are experiencing. The city's systems lack the carrying capacity to metabolize these inputs and become overwhelmed, and this leads to a buildup of toxic effects such as urban poverty and exclusion, disease, unemployment, social injustice, and ethnic dislocation. These in turn give rise to violent crime, social and political unrest, and—in severe cases—organized conflict. Shortages of food, fuel, electricity, and water exacerbate these problems, and urban violence in turn makes it harder to deal with these shortages. The city's connectedness (via information and money flows, and through transportation hubs such as seaports and airports) allows its population to participate in licit and illicit activities offshore, to influence (and be influenced by) conditions in the rural hinterland, and to connect with global networks, including diaspora populations. This set of interactions affects both local and international conflict dynamics.

Violent Ecosystem: San Pedro Sula

If this all sounds very abstract and theoretical (and I'm afraid it does), then it might help to describe a specific city by way of example. The city I have in mind is San Pedro Sula—the second city of Honduras—where, in early 2013, a Caerus team led by Stacia George conducted field research aimed at building a systems model of violence in what has become unflatteringly known as “the most dangerous city on the planet,” a city that happens to exemplify all the main trends we have been discussing.
75

The Republic of Honduras is smack in the center of the Americas. It's bounded on the east, southwest, and west by Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, with the Pacific Ocean to the south and the Caribbean to the north. It has a population of just over
8
million, and its two major cities—the administrative capital, Tegucigalpa, in the south, and the commercial capital, San Pedro Sula, near the north coast—together account for almost a third of the total population. San Pedro Sula, for several years running, has topped the list of the world's most violent cities, with an astonishingly high murder rate of
169
homicides per
100
,
000
inhabitants.
76
(For comparison, even at the height of the Iraq War, Baghdad had a violent death rate of only about
48
per
100
,
000
; New York's is
6
.
2
; Sydney's is
1
.
0
; London's is
1
.
2
. Even Moscow, one of Europe's most violent cities, has a rate of only
9
.
6
.)
77

Collaborating closely with local community organizations and civil society groups, and using tools and techniques developed by Caerus teams in Africa, Asia, and Latin America over the past several years, Stacia's group tried to figure out what was driving this extraordinarily intense violence, through fieldwork aimed at developing a metabolic model of the city. The results were compelling.
78
What seemed on the surface to be a chaotic pattern of violence among a multiplicity of local gangs, narco-traffickers, and other groups turned out to be the result of a small number of macro-level flows that have accelerated over the past decade. These flows, along with the city's spatial layout, its geographic location as the country's main economic and transportation hub, and local conditions in a series of urban microhabitats, account for virtually all of the observable violence in San Pedro Sula.

Honduras has only one major seaport, Puerto Cortés, about forty-five minutes from downtown San Pedro Sula and part of its greater periurban area. The vast majority of the country's sea traffic passes through this port, and the only way to get to the port is through San Pedro Sula. Likewise, the only major road out of Honduras to the north and west passes through San Pedro Sula and Puerto Cortés before crossing into Guatemala, making San Pedro Sula the key chokepoint in the country's entire economic and transportation system. Because of its proximity to land and sea transport hubs, Morales Airport, outside San Pedro Sula, is also by far the country's busiest airport. In effect, the entire Honduran economy flows through San Pedro Sula, explaining the city's very high rate of growth (in economic and population terms) over the past decade. In terms of urban flows, the main impact of this economic growth is mass population movement: every day, several hundred thousand people flow into and out of San Pedro Sula in order to do business in the city itself or its surrounding areas. This huge flow is hard to understand, let alone protect, because San Pedro Sula's central location means that it has a multiplicity of entry and exit routes by sea, air, and land.

The city's licit economy has been booming since at least
2005
, with textile factories (
maquilas
) being constructed in districts on the northern side of the city, closer to the port. The
maquilas
are in tax-free zones on the city's outskirts, between the port and the old urban core, which is now the city's downtown area. They import yarns and textiles from the United States, turn them into finished clothing for companies such as Gap, Nike, and Adidas, and then reexport the finished products back into the U.S. market. Both the inflow of raw materials and the outflow of finished clothes rely on shipping and port facilities, making the San Pedro Sula–Puerto Cortés corridor the most valuable piece of economic terrain in the entire country. The city itself is shaped like a flattened arrowhead pointing at the port, with inflows of people, goods, money, and traffic coming from the southeast, south, and southwest, and the major outflow to the north toward Puerto Cortés. Anyone dominating this intersection has a chokehold on Honduras's economy—and, unsurprisingly, a large proportion of violence in the city turns out to be among gangs that are fighting each other for control of this critical economic terrain. Scattered across dozens of microhabitats (the central bus station, the nearby outdoor drug market, the food markets, the small businesses lining the bus routes, and the alleys and periurban slums on either side of the main roads into and out of the city), the violence can look chaotic, but in fact it revolves around a competition for control over economic terrain and over an extortion racket targeting small businesses.

Beside the violent struggle to control the legal economy, the competition to control illicit trade is even more violent. The major illicit flow into San Pedro Sula is the influx of cocaine, coming from South and Central America and the Caribbean by land, air, and sea. The drug trade is dominated by groups such as Mexico's Sinaloa cartel and Las Zetas, both of which subcontract Honduran gangs to move drugs for them. The Sinaloa cartel tends to dominate ground-based trafficking into Guatemala and on to Mexico, while sea-based smuggling currently seems to be dominated by the Zetas. The cocaine trade, with its associated flows, has transformed the patterns of violence in San Pedro Sula. Narco-trafficking gangs have displaced traditional street gangs based on local turf identities and known as
pandillas
. The
narcos
use the city (with its central location, transportation links, and excellent access to the U.S. market) as a smuggling hub. This pattern spiked in
2004
–
5
as cocaine traffickers responded to counternarcotics successes in Colombia and the Caribbean by opening new Central American routes, taking advantage of the existing gang structure in Honduras, and hiring local groups as enforcers. The cartels pay local gangs in cocaine, creating a domestic drug market in the city, and competition to control this new domestic market accounts for another large part of the city's violence.

Another key illicit flow is that of money. Narco-traffickers such as the Mexican Sinaloa cartel came to San Pedro Sula in the mid-
2000
s in part because it was an ideal money-laundering location. The opportunities afforded by legitimate businesses, the city's prime location astride the major licit and illicit flows into and out of Honduras, and a weak government that could be co-opted for money laundering led to a rapid deterioration in the city's governance institutions, further increasing opportunities for money laundering.

An influx of deportees from the United States is another key driver of violence. In
2012
alone, the U.S. government deported more than thirty-two thousand Hondurans, of whom almost half were violent criminals (many were gang members belonging to groups such as MS
13
and the
18
th Street gang), and all arrived by air in San Pedro Sula. This has been happening for several years, and it creates an enormous inflow of trained, blooded, organized violent criminals who fit directly into the gang structure of the city. In many cases, gang members who have already been deported are on hand to meet deportees as they arrive at the airport, and embed them straight into the local gang system. MS
13
and
18
th Street are United States gangs (both originated in Los Angeles) that were involuntarily transplanted to Honduras through deportations, reconstituted themselves from the flow of deportees, expanded to control drug trafficking routes, and together with Los Olanchanos, the third major gang in the city, have come to dominate the system of violence in San Pedro Sula.

Violence has surged as all these groups—local gangs,
narcos
, and deportees from North American gangs—have responded to the strong incentive of controlling territory and dominating key nodes in the city's flow system, especially transport routes and hubs. Controlling territory is the key to exploiting the city's licit economy (the flow of textiles in and finished clothing out), taking advantage of the city's central position in the Honduran economy, and dominating its illicit economy (the flow of transnational cocaine through the city, as well as the local drug smuggling, money laundering, and extortion rackets). The violence is increasing, in part, because this competition is relatively new, so a pecking order has yet to emerge and gangs haven't yet settled into defined spheres of influence or territorial control. Another key factor is that since this is an open system with a continuous inflow of weapons and fighters, there's no prospect that the competition between gangs will burn itself out. At the same time, the gangs' growing income lets them buy more sophisticated and powerful firearms. As a result, the microhabitats where gangs actively compete—the bloody boundaries of gang turfs—are by far the most violent in the city. Much of this is gang-on-gang violence: apart from kidnapping and extortion, the major risk to ordinary citizens is that of being caught in the crossfire.