No matter the time of day or night, morticians stand guard by the gate of the city morgue, waiting for the next body to be released so they can offer their services to grieving families.
In the most violent city in the most violent country in the world, they never have to wait for long. Last year, an average of 20 people were murdered every day in Honduras, a country of just 8 million inhabitants, according to the Violence Observatory at the National Autonomous University of Honduras NAUH.
That's a murder rate of In San Pedro Sula, the rate is , reportedly the highest in the world outside a war zone. The city is the country's manufacturing and commercial hub. Dozens of maquiladoras β export assembly plants β churn out New Balance T-shirts and Fruit of the Loom boxer shorts for markets abroad. It should be a bustling place, but there is little movement on the streets and the air is tense. At newsstands, headlines cry out details of the previous day's grisly crimes.
Few cars have number plates; most have black-tinted windows. The small number of police patrolling the streets breed more fear than security among residents, given the extreme levels of corruption within the national force that reportedly go all the way to the top.
Honduras is caught in a vortex of crime β drug trafficking, gang wars, political upheaval and fierce land disputes matched by equal doses of impunity and corruption. The same mix of factors has helped make Latin America the world's deadliest region. According to the Mexican thinktank Citizen Council on Public Safety and Criminal Justice, all but one of the 20 cities with the highest homicide rates in the world are in Latin America. The exception is New Orleans.
