When a mudslide wiped out the town of La Reina, Friar Leopoldo Serrano arrived like an answer to the villagers' prayers -- ready, it would turn out, to make a deal with the devil to help them.
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By nightfall, La Reina was gone, buried in an epic mudslide, its families among nearly half a million Central Americans displaced by the hurricanes. Bathed in tears and shaking with cold, the frightened and disoriented residents of La Reina wandered the main road at the bottom of the valley looking for help.
In any case, they would need more than tents. To rebuild their houses and replant their crops, the villagers needed land -- and Serrano knew that much of that land was in the hands of drug traffickers. But the cedar and cinnamon trees high in the surrounding mountains were as valuable as coffee, and outsiders started cutting the trees. Those who complained -- “whoever had a long tongue” --were killed, Ríos said.
No snake was responsible for what happened in La Reina. When the Earth gave way, humans were at fault.Serrano arrived here in 2009, after spiritual missions in New York and the Mosquitia region of Honduras. He found himself in a cursed and disputed land where violent drug traffickers ruled with impunity. In the area around his first house, corpses appeared hanging from trees.
Serrano surveyed the landscape from a lookout over the valley. “Half of all the land and businesses you see from here belong to drug traffickers,” he said. But Serrano’s message is not widely popular. He has sought protection for his mission, which is routinely observed by men passing by in oversized SUVs with tinted windows. Honduran police and military units also stop by several times a week, and Serrano’s complaints to the prosecutor’s office led to the installation of surveillance systems.
When capos are arrested, the government confiscates whatever land is in their name and holds it in a byzantine bureaucracy. Heirs fight for control over hidden assets -- land that has been put in the name of front men and women, sometimes without their knowledge. “The land itself is not worth that much, but the message of who is in control is everything,” Serrano explains.
Garcia, who ran away from home at the age of 12 and became a drug addict, is a street-smart survivor. At 16, he got a job cleaning floors in a discotheque frequented by traffickers, where he met Jose Luis Valle. Garcia left Valle’s orbit and entered Serrano’s rehab center for seven months. Over the next few years, he became Serrano’s right-hand man in the mission. He largely kept his distance from Valle until December 2020.Valle agreed to give them the land, but he didn’t have the titles. “He had to put pressure on those who occupied it, they were usurpers. He would go there with weapons. There were deaths,” Garcia recounted, cryptically.
“We know that the father has put his life at risk for us,” Varela said. “One reaches a limit where one cannot lose any more. We have lost everything, even fear.”Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández visited the area in February, promising that his government would build “2,500 houses, a whole new town on a piece of land confiscated from traffickers.” Construction companies had been hired, and they’d start in May, he said.
Now they promised to build in 100 days -- which would be in mid-October, the middle of the next hurricane season. “He obtained the land and has guaranteed the order of the process” Raudales said. “Without him, without his pressure, without his daily phone calls, without his presence, this would take twice as long to happen, at least.”Each morning now, Serrano goes out to inspect the mission construction sites. A few men and women from La Reina have already begun to build three new homes and a group of apartments for widows with funds donated by churches.
Ivan Varela, who is camped out at his parents’ house, is debating what to do. He spent eight years working two and three jobs a day in West Palm Beach, Florida, to earn the $16,000 he needed to build a house in La Reina and buy a bit of land to process his family’s coffee beans.One thing’s for sure, he said. If he goes again, this time he will take his 2-year-old son, and this time he will plan to stay for good.
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