“cobwebs on clothes,
tigers on the balcony,
scorpions in the mouth
fear in the heart.
Damn you satan, take off your mask.
“There is no room for both of us in this mirror.”
(fragment of the song
Delirium Tremens.
Fito Páez and Joaquín Sabina)
This chronicle is part of the Dromómanos project
Return to Narcoamérica.
The last opportunity
It's almost three in the afternoon and at the entrance to the OASIS shelter, Ezequiel knocks tremulously on the tin door.
The inmate in charge of the door reluctantly opens the lock and Ezequiel enters, crestfallen.
He is on crutches and his skin has turned pale gray: he looks like a black and white man.
He supports a crutch where one leg should go, he wears gauze soaked with fresh blood on the right side of his neck and another on his abdomen.
He is skinny and moves slowly, as if he were walking on the bottom of the sea.
—No, no, too much.
Last time they let Ezequiel in, last time.
This is not a game.
He tells the person in charge of the door, with a thunderous and hoarse voice, Pastor J, the owner of this compound.
—Next time he doesn't come in.
Last chance.
The pastor insists without looking at Ezequiel, who has already sat down on a piece of bench and is fighting to get some oxygen into his lungs.
—Look Juan, this boy is a problem.
He has kidney failure and cirrhosis, we give him the chance to go out to the hospital for dialysis, but every time he gets lost and goes to smoke stones.
When he can't stand it there he comes, just like today, already very emaciated.
Pastor J turns and addresses the inmate who is acting as the doorman this afternoon.
—Wow, if he's going in, check him out.
I don't want what happened last time to happen.
Last time, Ezequiel!
Last time!
The place that Ezequiel tries to enter, apparently for the last time, is the OASIS shelter, located in one of the poorest and most populated neighborhoods in the Sula Valley, Honduras, a shelter that he intends to treat, through extremely precarious, the addictions to certain substances of people from this region of the country.
It is a 180 square meter place divided between a dirt space with several single-story brick and cement boxes, and a double-story construction with wooden divisions.
On one side there is a shack that serves as a kitchen: four wooden pillars, a dirt floor and a leaky roof made of rusty tin.
When it rains it drips on the stove, extinguishing it and producing white smoke.
The best-equipped part of the place is a gallery with a cement floor and a zinc roof, which is used for evangelical services, as a dining room, meeting room, and for watching television, which is turned on in three shifts of approximately two hours.
The entire grounds are fenced off by pieces of rusty tin and topped with barbed wire to prevent people from getting out.
No one has ever wanted to sneak in here.
In February 2023, approximately 100 people with addiction problems live in this space.
This place is your last chance.
If this fails, all that remains is destitution and begging on the streets of San Pedro Sula, El Progreso or Choloma.
If this attempt to cure themselves does not go well, according to the pastor, death awaits them at the hands of cocaine delirium, liver cirrhosis or delirium tremens, the demons from which the inmates of this place try to escape.
Dan, one of the OASIS inmates, sitting on his cot, in front of the bed where he saw Christian, his younger brother, die.Juan Martínez d'Aubuisson
The shepherd has stopped yelling at Ezequiel.
He says that last week when he left for dialysis he came back with crack cocaine and smoked it sneakily at night.
His ferrous smell does not go unnoticed in a place like this and he was about to create a crisis.
That time the pastor took the drug away from him and forgave him.
—They gave him barely three months to live in the hospital and he's already on six, so I let him stay.
He has nowhere else to go.
But this time it is the last,” says the pastor, still angry.
But from what I would see later, it seems that for Pastor J there are no last opportunities.
Ezequiel stares at the ground with his pupils dilated and glassy, like those of corpses, fighting for every breath of air.
He seems oblivious to all this, as if he were somewhere else.
The other inmates observe the scene from the main gallery.
Perhaps they see themselves in the example of Ezequiel, and like him they lower their gaze.
Nobody says anything.
One of them approaches me, his name is Raúl.
He looks different from the others and definitely very different from Ezequiel.
He is fat, he is white, and his clothes do not have that charcoal color that homogenizes the inmates.
His repertoire of words is much broader than even Pastor J's, and he walks through the yard as if he were in the park of his neighborhood.
—I am a refrigeration technician, I had a company that fixed all types of refrigeration devices.
"I don't even know how I ended up here," she says, and does something very difficult to imitate or describe: he laughs sadly.
Raúl came here 20 days ago, he has not yet overcome the most critical stage, he is still in what is considered withdrawal syndrome.
His addiction, unlike the majority who claim to have started smoking crack in their adolescence, began just ten years ago - he is 53 - when some friends from the neighborhood with whom he drank beer introduced him to crack, they told him that by smoking it he could scare drunkenness, and that the beers came in much easier and you could drink more without falling asleep or passing out.
It was true.
Yes, he could take more and even later.
From there his life went to hell.
For two years he has been in and out of homelessness and says that this place is his last chance before committing suicide.
His teenage daughter beat him to the task.
21 days ago she tried to kill herself, she took a whole bottle of pills and ended up in the hospital where they barely managed to save her with stomach pumping.
Raúl visited her there, and promised that she would be cured of her illness and that once cured he would return to being her father.
From the hospital he came to confront the crack in the shelter.
If he fails again, it's not his first inning, he says it will be the last time for him too.
Raúl is also an artisan.
He builds replicas of Harley Davidson motorcycles with pieces of CocaCola cans.
His handicrafts are impressive, he sells them for 300 lempiras (12 US dollars) and with that he intends to make a small fund that will allow him not to return to his family empty-handed.
She gives me one, it's fucking perfect, and shame overcomes me, I feel like I'm cheating him by taking it without leaving him anything.
I tell him that I rather want to buy it.
I give him a 500 lempira bill (20.31 US dollars).
It's almost 6 in the afternoon.
In the kitchen, Hernán stirs what will be dinner with a stick.
In a metal container, blackened by smoke and wood fire, an amalgam that is difficult to decipher is cooked.
—It's a beef bone that they give to the shepherd at the slaughterhouse.
We cook it.
The market vendors also give him the vegetables that have already been ruined and he buys rice and tortillas.
Says Hernán, who sweats profusely over his companions' dinner without stopping moving the mixing stick.
Hernán is also an inmate, he has been fighting his crack addiction for seven months.
Five meters from Hernán, Ulises beats a bright blue liquid in a huge plastic container with both hands.
Pastor J has found a cheap recipe to make floor disinfectant.
Every day Ulysses stirs about five chemicals with his hands and breathes the humors of that formula for several hours, without even a mask in between.
When I ask him about security measures he looks at me with mocking condescension: “For the shit you've gotten yourself into, buddy,” he tells me.
Another group, those who have been incarcerated for more than 6 months and are in a more controlled phase of their addiction, go out to sell the disinfectant in the markets and with the profits they pay for electricity and water and buy food and the medications that are used. in the hostel.
Each gallon of disinfectant is sold for 50 lempiras (2.03 US dollars), earning 10 lempiras (41 cents) per gallon.
According to Pastor J, on a good day they sell 50 gallons.
Ulises was a hitman for a very powerful criminal structure in Honduras.
He was imprisoned for murder and, according to his story and according to what the pastor
knows about that story, that structure paid a judge to free him, but Ulysses no longer wanted to continue killing for them.
So he fled and started using crack in a neighboring city.
He even ate out of the garbage and slept on the street until he heard about this shelter and came on his own.
He hides here from crack cocaine and the mafia.
If he's not careful, either of them could kill him.
Ulysses is not his real name and this hostel is not called OASIS.
7 at night arrives.
Several inmates arrange the main gallery to listen to the day's sermon.
They clean the old and lame tables, place a bouquet of flowers and those who have dress in their best clothes, those who do not have tuck their shirts into their pants or shorts, and those who have their shoes put them on.
In anthropological code it would be said that they turn a secular place into a sacred one: what was previously a gallery where you watch television is now a church.
Hernán, one of the inmates, prepares a stew based on beef bones that they give to Pastor J in the market.
On the right, Ulises prepares disinfectant for the floor.Juan Martínez d'Aubuisson
The preaching is given by another inmate, it has been entrusted to him by Pastor J, who only preaches on Sundays.
This man talks about the lack of commitment of some.
He seems upset.
He walks around like a caged lion, as if challenging them.
He says those who give up don't believe God.
That they are cowards.
Ezequiel, the black and white man who walked at the bottom of the sea, no longer hears these words.
He is already gone.
He has given up.
He remained wheezing on that table for a while after Pastor J's scolding and then directed his anemic steps and his opaque body towards the street.
He did not want to be checked, according to the pastor, because he still had a dose of crack to smoke at night.
According to the doctors' diagnosis, Ezequiel should have been dead for three months.
At the shelter they believe that he will die on the streets this week.
A paradise for cocaine trafficking
Honduras is a paradise for cocaine trafficking: it has a double coast, on the Atlantic and on the Pacific;
It has the Muskitia, a jungle with access to the Caribbean Sea, almost virgin, full of clandestine landing strips and full of rivers that enter the country;
It has a very weak democracy and institutions that are easy to co-opt.
This privileged territory was governed for 12 years by Juan Orlando Hernández, who since last week has faced trial in New York for drug trafficking.
Cocaine from Colombia and Peru has been transiting here since the 1980s, when Ramón Mata Ballesteros, who like Amado Carillo Fuentes and Chapo
Guzmán
, has a role in the Netflix series
Narcos,
was the drug lord in Central America. .
A State Department report published in March 2023 estimates that about 300 tons of cocaine pass through Honduras each year on their way to the United States.
According to different international entities, in 2014, 79% of all cocaine entering the United States already passed through Honduras.
This, and other reports prepared by different North American agencies, suggest that Honduras is no longer just a transit place, but has taken the step, although on a very low scale, to a producing country.
A consequence of these processes is that more and more drugs stay here.
Regarding the latter, the figures are scarce, but one of the senior officers of the Honduran police who asked not to be named, assures that there are two phenomena that have put cocaine and its derivatives into massive circulation in Honduras.
On the one hand, the method of paying drug transporters in product, who do not have sufficient connections to export this product to the north and end up selling it in Honduras, and on the other hand, the corruption of the authorities, who by doing so drug seizures manage to resell them to their original owners or to any structure that is willing to pay the price.
This senior official assured me: “The strategy of the previous government, that of President Juan Orlando Hernández, was to create an air and maritime shield, with support from the Americans, so that drugs would not pass through in those ways.
What stay?
Well, it would pass over land.
We now know, from intelligence information and from the evidence against the former president presented in the New York courts, that he directed a cartel that was precisely in charge of transporting drugs through the land corridor.
The problem is that if it passes over land it is more likely that a lot of drugs will stay here.
And that is what is happening.”
Pastor J and five other evangelical pastors who are dedicated to serving people with addiction problems say that in recent years the number of crack addicts has skyrocketed in Honduras and that their shelters are overflowing.
Two cocaine and crack sellers from the city of San Pedro Sula, always within the Valley, and almost all the inmates of the shelter tell me the same thing.
In fact, the OASIS shelter, as well as most of its type in the country, originally emerged as a way to serve alcohol addicts, but have been transformed, given the growing avalanche of addicts to cocaine derivatives.
According to these last three groups of sources, crack has already completely replaced glue, and other products for industrial use, as the drug par excellence of the lowest sectors of the Honduran social pyramid.
The doctor in anthropology Phillippe Bourgois, probably one of the academics who best understands the sociocultural dynamics that surround drugs, and specifically crack, wrote in a scientific article that to understand the dynamics of addictions it will necessarily be necessary to link them to “the great historical structural forces that create vulnerable social groups.”
Dr. Bourgois knows the subject, he spent more than ten years doing in-depth ethnography among crack users and sellers in Harlem, New York, and is the author of one of the most important works of urban anthropology in recent years:
In Search of Respect: Seling crack in the neighborhood
(Cambridge University Press, 2003) has studied the phenomenon since before the great epidemic of the eighties and has known the devastating effects of this drug before crack was even called crack.
This anthropologist further wrote: “Crack, as a preferred drug of abuse, is only attractive to desperate population subgroups who are victims of extreme forms of structural violence.”
Everything indicates that the key to the problem is not in the chemical components of the drug, nor in the cellular effects it generates in the human body, but in the sociocultural characteristics of the populations that consume them.
Summarizing this to its simplest state, we could say that the drug becomes a problem when it is consumed by a population that suffers systematically.
At the OASIS shelter, everyone, except Raúl, the refrigeration technician and author of the tin motorcycles, is poor.
At the OASIS shelter, without exception, everyone suffers.
The “extreme delirium”
It is mid-afternoon on another day at the end of February 2023 and Héctor, despite having told him that I would arrive at this time, has been waiting for me since 12. He is eager to talk.
I have known him since 2021, when he first came to this center, but he says that until now he is prepared to tell me his story.
He has put on his best outfit: black sweatpants and a clearly counterfeit, second-hand Adidas shirt.
He has worn the blue badge that the Pastor gave him and accredits him as the manager of the clinic and part of the staff there.
Héctor is an inmate, but one who has responsibilities and power within the microworld of the shelter.
—I started in this when I lost my family.
That's where I started using, because of the pain I felt,” says Héctor, his eyes already wet.
He does not choose this verb, to lose, capriciously or as a synonym for not finding something or someone.
Héctor's wife was shot in the head in 2010;
He killed her the lover she had in one of the cities of the Sula Valley.
A year later they killed her eldest son, 21 years old, to steal her murdered mother's inheritance.
The murderers, family members, threatened Héctor and he had to sign some papers for them to keep his house, his car and some land.
The cheap cane liquor made the pain shipwreck for a few hours or a few days.
It worked.
But then he became addicted and after several absences he lost his job as a forklift driver at a construction company.
An intern appointed by Pastor J gives the sermon in a gallery used for watching television, now converted into a church.Juan Martínez d'Aubuisson
“When he came, he was already in extreme delirium,” says Pastor J, who mercilessly interrupts our conversation and shows me a video where Héctor is on the ground drooling, trembling and repeating incoherencies starring the devil and herds of small animals. that chase him and climb up his body.
Héctor looks down and says almost to himself: “Yes… that's right, that's how I came.”
Héctor is now the official manager of the clinic, which is why he wears the badge that certifies him as such on his neck, and is in charge of anything related to health in this facility.
In practical terms, Héctor is the shelter's doctor.
Héctor has never studied medicine or nursing, and because he did not study, he did not study beyond primary school.
He barely knows how to read.
The clinic is a room measuring ten meters by four with a cement floor and a tin roof.
There are nine beds there, one facing the other.
There is also a small room where they keep the donations and where Héctor sleeps, next to his patients and jealously guarding the box with medicines.
The most important job and the one to which he dedicates the most energy is fighting against the terror of all addicts in the Sula Valley:
extreme delirium.
It is actually the psychiatric condition delirium tremens that, due to the impossibility of being correctly named by its victims, ended up being tropicalized in this word in Honduras.
Historically it has been called by other, much more descriptive names such as “barrel-Fever”, “blu horrors”, “bottle pain” or “drunken horrors”.
This condition has been studied and diagnosed in addicts since the early 19th century, but it is as old as liquor itself.
It is associated with severe intoxication of the nervous system, resulting from excessive and prolonged intake of a substance.
It is considered one of the most advanced and dangerous stages of withdrawal syndrome, and is associated with tremors, erratic behavior and hallucinations.
The Latin translation literally means “shaking delirium” and according to several specialists consulted it can cause death.
A typical characteristic of delirium tremens, in addition to a generalized depression of all systems, a prolonged involvement of the central nervous system that ends up generating paralysis and extreme tremors, severe cardiovascular problems, among other physical problems, are visual hallucinations microzoopsias.
That is to say, those who suffer from it usually see herds of miniature animals harassing them or climbing over their bodies.
Added to this is also cocaine psychosis, directly related to intense and prolonged exposure to cocaine and its derivatives such as crack.
Héctor gives me a tour of his clinic and shows me his medications.
There are not many, just nine medicines, of which two are to control diarrhea, three for flu symptoms and the rest are psychiatric medications such as diazepam or lorazepam, which Héctor prescribes and applies to his patients at the discretion of his own knowledge. .
—The cure for extreme delirium is sleep.
That is why I inject them with a dose of diazepam, if that man does not want to sleep I give him the other dose of lorazepam, so that he is no longer in that delirium, saying things that have nothing to do with anything, and he falls asleep, if possible up to 12 hours.
I also take the opportunity to inject them with a “thiaminet”, that suits them too.
(…) Sometimes the inmates have to be tied to the bed because they want to leave, they want to get away and they even want to kill themselves,” says Héctor while he shows me his first aid kit and his syringes and his ties.
The inmates who come to this clinic are the privileged ones.
Only those who can pay three thousand lempiras a month (121 US dollars) can enter here.
It is the only paid place in this hostel.
Those who do not have that money will not be able to access even Hector's harsh treatment.
They will have to deal with the withdrawal syndrome and delirium alone, lying on a dirty mat, under some rusty sheets that the pastor has prepared expressly for this purpose.
The center does not have the financial capacity to apply these medications to all the inmates, nor does it have enough beds to put more than one hundred people to bed for 15 days, which is the time determined by Héctor to get out of “extreme delirium.”
So even here, at the bottom of the social pyramid of Honduras, one of the poorest countries in America, there are social strata.
Those who have 3 thousand lempiras suffer less than those who do not have them.
Today, February 24, Henrry, a young man, arrived looking for help, but he does not have the three thousand lempiras, in fact, he has nothing: he used up even the little money he made after selling his shoes.
So he wallows alone on the dirty mat, under those boiling sheets.
The first few days they are not allowed into the rooms because they vomit and defecate in their beds.
For that there are beds without mattresses, only with metal cables.
But they hardly use them.
They prefer to leave them in that small galley, almost outdoors, until they manage to control their sphincters.
The hardest part of the withdrawal syndrome has not yet begun, it has only been a few hours since the last crack and liquor cocktail, but Henry is already pushing as if his stomach had been hit very hard.
He only lasts a few hours, this time he won't be able to.
He stands up and asks for the exit.
He's going to fight extreme delirium with liquor and crack.
He says he doesn't want to use, and I believe him, he really says he doesn't feel like having a drink or a hit of crack, but the pain is unbearable and the fear of extreme delirium makes him run away.
If he quickly gets a drink or a piece of crack he may be able to delay his arrival a few days.
If he doesn't get them in time, he may be left stranded, lost and useless on some sidewalk, speaking incoherently and devoured by a pack of imaginary animals.
Honduras, an addict in denial
Honduras is going through a public health crisis.
The problem of crack and cocaine addiction is becoming a large elephant that will end up exposing its presence by destroying glassware.
Part of the problem is that Honduras does not know that it has one, or in any case, it is not interested in knowing.
The information available, both from private and government organizations, on addictions and treatments is very scarce, and what little there is is very difficult to find.
The most recent document on additions is the report of the Inter-American Commission for the Control of Drug Abuse (CICAD) from 2019. This report basically exposes a series of elements that Honduras does not have.
The report emphasizes the little or no willingness of this country to generate data regarding consumption, prevalence and addiction care strategies.
It is full of paragraphs like this:
“CICAD sees with concern that since the first round (1999-2000), the country has not carried out some priority studies on demand reduction.
Furthermore, Honduras does not have any information on supply reduction, illicit trafficking and related crimes, nor does it have studies to evaluate drug programs or interventions in demand reduction, supply reduction and control measures.”
In a previous document, one of the few that exists, the Honduran Observatory on Drugs, in its National Report on Drugs, despite having been prepared by the same government, contains information such as this:
“…Likewise, consultations are made about the consumption presented by users of the treatment centers, unfortunately, not all of them send this information given that in Honduras it is not mandatory to provide it;
Additionally, clinical records in hospitals are managed by different health professionals and a way of collecting data has not been approved.
It is important to highlight that Honduras does not have a centralized database for the area of demand reduction, which prevents collecting data from all the treatment centers that exist in the country.
Studies on risk perception, consumption patterns, attitude towards drugs, surveys in the general population, among others, have not yet been developed due to lack of budget.
Or this other:
“Over time we have sought to improve the offer of prevention programs;
However, there are few that are based on evidence, at the same time, there are violence prevention programs that have a drug component, but they are not specifically oriented to this topic.”
And concludes:
“The budget granted to carry out prevention work has decreased over the years, causing some programs in the area to be inactive or limited in their development.”
A hole in the sheet metal wall of the OASIS center.Juan Martínez d'Aubuisson
Honduras does not have a national treatment system.
The Honduran government also does not have accurate data on how many private organizations, such as the OASIS shelter, there are in the country.
Only two state centers are recorded, a public hospital and a psychiatric hospital, both in Tegucigalpa, the capital, that can admit people with drug addiction into their programs, but it is not known how many they have treated, nor has it been documented which substances. are dependent or to what degree of dependence these patients are.
It's like asking a doctor to cure a disease, but without telling you what it is or who has it.
In 2015, the Honduran Institute of Alcoholism, Drug Addiction and Drug Dependence (IHADFA), inaugurated the Comprehensive Addiction Care Center (CAI) in San Pedro Sula.
It is an outpatient center, where patients receive talks and counseling, as long as the patient has not consumed alcohol or drugs in the last 48 hours.
These centers have lost budget and, according to the reports cited above, their operations are not based on scientific knowledge.
In early March 2023 I called the phone number listed on the CAI website.
A rather grumpy lady answered me.
She told me that there is a winery there, that she did know that there used to be “one of those centers” but not anymore.
I then asked which State institution I could turn to if I had a family member with addiction problems.
“If you want to admit him, there is no.
At least there is none from the State.
Just take him to the Santa Rosita psychiatric hospital.
From there there is none.
If you don't have resources, what I could recommend is that you look for a shelter called OASIS.
Maybe they can help you there.”
He then hung up on me.
At the end of 2021 I met Christian at OASIS, a young man from San Pedro Sula in an advanced stage of cirrhosis and with a high dependency on crack.
He barely moved.
Pastor J assigned him a cot and they injected him with serum and vitamins even without having paid the three thousand lempiras.
But little else could be done for him in this place.
He barely spoke, he moved like mummies would move if they could.
It is not clear to me whether he was fully conscious.
I greeted him, he greeted me back, but it seemed more like a movement of inertia, an involuntary gesture.
His stomach was a huge, disproportionate ball of gelatinous water and his skin was pale and yellowish, like the mid-afternoon sun.
I asked about him during the visit in February last year, but, as expected, Cris is no longer with us.
He died in his cot a few weeks after meeting him.
Pastor J and his staff buried him in the local cemetery in a mass grave, and we can be sure that his death, and the illnesses and health problems he suffered during his life, will never appear in any report. state.
Dan, el hermano de Cris, estaba también interno por problemas de adiciones en el Albergue OASIS, y al ver a su hermano menor en tal mal estado, aunado a un fuerte síndrome de abstinencia y a todo ese conjunto de padecimientos que acá terminaron llamándose delirio extremes, rompió una botella y se cercenó el cuello. Cuando lo quisieron detener les atacó. Es un hombre grande y fuerte. Tuvo que llegar la policía a despojarlo de aquellos vidrios, pero no hicieron ningún reporte. Lo llevaron a coser a la clínica y lo regresaron. Su intento de suicidio tampoco quedará registrado ni tomará nunca forma de estadística. De los eventos de ese día solo queda una cicatriz zigzagueante, como un relámpago, plasmado en el cuello de Dan.
Hablé con él en febrero del 2023. Dan es un tipo rudo, y cuando le pregunté por aquel día escondió sus ojos negros tras unas gafas oscuras, volteó su cara morena y curtida por el sol y respondió: “El delirio extremes, Juan…el delirio extremes”.
Volver a empezar
Son casi las cuatro de la tarde del último día que pasaré en este lugar y el calor sampedrano parece aplastarnos. En el albergue nadie se mueve, ni las hojas de los árboles, ni las gallinas que pronto se volverán sopa, ni los internos. En una esquina, bajo una sombra, un viejo garífuna cuenta historias maravillosas sobre sus años de marino en los puertos Hondureños y sobre cuándo se volvió pirata y asaltaba lanchas llenas de droga en alta mar, en las costas de la selva de la Muskitia. Canelo, el perro romántico y sin casta del albergue, divierte a los nuevos con su afición por oler las flores y cerrar los ojos mientras lo hace. El Pastor me lleva a su oficina. Va a responderme la pregunta del porqué dedicar la vida a algo tan difícil. Va a contarme sobre su vocación de Sísifo.
La oficina es una caja de madera en el interior de una de las construcciones del albergue. Todo es de segunda mano, todo fue usado ya por alguien antes de llegar acá. De hecho, hago la entrevista sentado en un asiento de automóvil. Del pastor prefiero no dar mucho detalle, de nada serviría entonces la ya de por sí compleja débil estrategia por salvaguardar la ubicación de este lugar. Diré que es un tipo bonachón, dicharachero y sereno.
Mientras tomamos un café ralo, preparado en aquella cocina improvisada, me explica que él también fue adicto, y que sufrió mucho. Cree que Dios lo sacó de ahí con el único objetivo de ayudar a sus hermanos. Así se refiere a los internos de este oasis.
“Todos los que trabajamos con esta población en algún momento fuimos adictos, todos”, dice casi con orgullo. Entiende su trabajo como una especie de último margen que separa a cientos de personas del abismo. Se ve a sí mismo como la última barrera que muchos pueden ponerle a la muerte. A veces la muerte se detiene, a veces no. Ningún muro es infranqueable.
Después de contarme su historia, salpicada de dolor, abuso y violencia, le pregunto por Raúl, el técnico en refrigeración y artesano de motos. Dos colaboradores voluntarios están en la oficina y se miran entre sí. Y repiten la hazaña de Raúl durante nuestra conversación del primer día: sonríen con tristeza.
“Con los 500 lempiras que le dio usted por la moto se fue del albergue. A esta altura ya los convirtió en crack”, me dice uno de ellos, y con eso deja sobre mí fuero interno una piedra pesada que deberé llevar de vuelta a mi casa. Nadie, a inicios de un proceso de estos, debe recibir 500 lempiras de manos de un imbécil.
Una de las réplicas de motocicletas Harley Davidson que Raúl hace a partir de latas de refrescos.Juan Martínez d´Aubuisson
Comienza a morir el día y debo irme. El barrio donde está el albergue no es buena zona para andar de noche. A esta hora los adictos de la ciudad, al menos los pobres, comienzan a juntarse alrededor de un mercado grande, por la séptima calle de una ciudad que no mencionaremos y en un parque central oscuro y sucio del que tampoco diremos el nombre. Es un ejército de sedientos, una manada de hombres y mujeres que buscan una jalada más, un pase de polvo o un trago que les separe del dolor. Es difícil contarlos. Unos se esconden en los portales mientras encienden sus pipas, de rodillas o en cuclillas, como rezándole a la droga que les arrebata la vida, otros, más gregarios, se apiñan en pequeños grupos. La mayoría se vuelven sombras escurridizas, alérgicas a las farolas de los carros. Es difícil contarlos, pero son decenas, cientos. He estado en todas las ciudades importantes de Honduras en los últimos cinco años. En todas ellas la escena se repite.
Algunos trabajaron durante el día jalando bultos en los mercados o pidieron limosna en los semáforos, otros se llevaron de los carros estacionados lo que sea que estaba flojo. Los más osados arrebataron alguna cadena o un celular. Tienen algo de dinero y los vendedores llegarán en breve a cambiar esas monedas por una noche más sin el dolor insoportable que conocen bien. Y así es como la batalla de esa gente comenzará desde cero una vez más.
Tal como lo plantea el Dr. Bourgois, y también el Pastor J, el consumo desmedido por parte de poblaciones vulnerables deja al descubierto algo más profundo, una crisis generalizada de sufrimiento. Esta epidemia es, en esencia, la epidemia del dolor.
Si se atrasan en sus dosis, o si se exceden de ella, quedarán atrapados en la calle, a merced del desamparo de Honduras, luchando por huir del delirio extremes y de aquellas jaurías imaginarias de animales chiquitos.
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