BEAR WITNESS: The Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land, by Ross Halperin
For the better part of the 21st century, Honduras has been considered one of the most dangerous countries in the world. As in Guatemala and El Salvador, during the first Trump administration regional gang violence and drug trafficking pushed caravans of Honduran migrants into the United States. This situation is the backdrop to President Trump’s current standoff with the Supreme Court over a mistakenly deported Salvadoran immigrant.
Life in the barrios of Honduras is difficult for most Americans to even begin to picture. When I was the Associated Press bureau chief for Mexico and Central America in the 2010s, seeing bodies on the streets was a daily occurrence. At the time, we were the only agency with a full-time foreign correspondent in the region, and we didn’t know until our reporter arrived with a partner and young child in tow that no foreigners — not aid workers, not anyone — brought their families. Eventually, we moved them to another country for their safety.
Which is what makes Ross Halperin’s first book, “Bear Witness,” so fascinating. Halperin captures the other side of the immigrant crisis — a world that few outsiders see — through the story of Kurt Ver Beek, an American academic and missionary of sorts who several decades ago moved to Honduras with his wife, Jo Ann Van Engen, to minister to the poor. They chose to settle, with their children, in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods of the capital, Nueva Suyapa.
There, Ver Beek and his Honduran neighbor and best friend, Carlos Hernández, began a daring quest via their small charity — first, to lower the local crime rate and, eventually, to do the same for the entire country, attacking the violence and corruption that force so many to flee.
Ver Beek, Halperin writes, “had come to conclude that what impoverished people like his neighbors needed — really needed, right now, more than anything else — wasn’t additional aid, development or evangelism, the standard instruments in the do-gooder’s tool kit; what they so desperately needed, he believed, was protection from violence.”
As to his own security, “Kurt liked to point out that the Bible doesn’t say ‘Be Safe!’”
This is an unexpected thriller starring a mild-mannered Christian from the midwest who teaches study-abroad students and runs an NGO. In their quest for justice, as narrated by Halperin, Ver Beek and Hernández lose neighbors, friends and even their own employee to the violence they are battling, at times as a result of their own tunnel vision or naïveté. They also contend with death threats, depression and serious insomnia.
Halperin tells the story with an immersive narrative voice reminiscent of Tracy Kidder, allowing the reader to peer over the shoulder of people trying to fight the good fight in near-impossible conditions. What’s more, he pulls no punches in describing the compromises, ethical transgressions and shadow activity in which one must engage to make change in a basically lawless country.
The two friends start by taking on local mara gangs and quickly encounter their first ethical dilemma. Their Christian work turns from mentoring teenage boys to working to lock up some of the same kids in heinous adult prisons.
They decide to do the work the police won’t or can’t — but only renegades will sign up for the dangerous assignment of helping them to find witnesses to and gather evidence of murders. Their investigator, a dubious character who goes by several names, describes working alongside cops who steal jewelry, cellphones and cash (though he claims never to have witnessed the extrajudicial killings for which the Honduran police were long infamous).
“Kurt told me to film them doing it,” he says of the crimes, “but I would never. You know why? Because they would have killed me. So what did I do? I saw it happen and let it slide.”
The team moves on to increasingly bigger fish with ever-more-dire consequences. They do succeed in cutting crime in their barrio dramatically, even while the murder rate in the rest of the country spikes as Honduras becomes the way station for most of the cocaine headed to the United States.
But their attempts to address more fundamental corruption backfire; many interpret their pragmatic cooperation with the government as carrying water for Juan Orlando Hernández, a strongman president later exposed as a drug trafficker who is now serving a 45-year sentence in a U.S. penitentiary.
Throughout the book, you never know if Ver Beek, Hernández or their NGO will survive. But Ver Beek is cleareyed about their predicament.
“No official was squeaky-clean,” he tells Halperin. “If you wanted to influence decision-making and change the country, you had a few choices … we tried to be close enough to the government to influence it, but far enough away to tell the truth about it, too. Where was that line? That’s where we lived. It was often very stressful.”
BEAR WITNESS: The Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land | By Ross Halperin | Liveright | 352 pp. | $31.99
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