Graft and Corruption in Central America

A Tale of Three Cities

I now interrupt your regularly scheduled chronological programming to bring you a tale of intrigue, greed, and my complaining. Before this trip, I’ll admit to being a complete stranger to blatant corruption of public officials. Sure, I’d heard stories, and had always been prepared on my previous visits to Mexico to shell out some pesos if I got pulled over and was threatened with some sort of BS. But, despite going there a few times, the most recent of which (this trip) spanning nearly 3 weeks and 2,000 miles, I was neveer so much as pulled over by Mexican cops. The last few days, however, have been a wakeup call that the corruption is still very much alive, but it may have just flown south for the winter (or hopefully: permenantly).

Welcome to Honduras

And what a welcome indeed. Every border since Belize has had people milling around, offering to help you for a fee or tip, but the border between El Salvador and Honduras was different. So different that miles from the border, people tried to flag us down, and when we didn’t stop, they jumped in a truck and layed chase. Upon reaching the first border checkpoing for leaving El Salvador, things really got… intense. No longer was it a few people kindly offering to cut through the border BS, it was a full-on assault. Running along our bikes, pushing through a crowd of one another, dozens of shouting, waving, over-the-top “helpers” faught for our loyalty. Some had friends vouching for them, some had badges, some spoke english nearly fluently, some sounded like cartoon characters, but all were highly interested in our business, and none of them would accept our insistance that we weren’t interested in any help.

We made it though the exit steps in El Salvador without much trouble, and proceeded to the first checkpoint in Honduras, crowds of flailing men running to catch up in our wake. While we waited in the hut for the border official, who in traditional central-american border official fashion was spending about 1/10th his time doing his job, Joe began to crack. “Maybe we should hire one of them so they’ll just leave us alone!” he remarked. My frustration with having to deal with both border bullshit and “helper” bullshit leaving my resistance sapped, I finally agreed we could hire one as long as he promised to dislodge us from the mob. You won’t hear me say it again, but in this regard he helped, and away they went.

It started with a typical ridiculous claim: we were supposed to have the titles for our bikes. Oh, we don’t have the titles? Seemingly a “big deal,” and not something they must deal with every day, the first guard insisted he needed to speak with his boss. Our “helper” assured us this was serious. “Another American who tried to enter without a title got worked up and they said ‘No!’ and he had to turn around,” he said. Then he added a phrase he’d use a dozen or more times throughout our ordeal: “I speak for you.” This sounded warning bells in my ears, but I’m afraid it was too late.

The border guard went to speak to his boss at some unspecified location – with all our papers – and our “helper” rushed us to another parking lot to wait out the forthcoming fun. At this point, I got to assume my role of trying to sort shit out since I can handle myself with Spanish a bit better than my Dad. We park, our “helper” runs off to “speak for” us with the guard and his boss, and once we get settled, I take my radio, leave Joe with the bikes, and try to find the guard, our papers, or our “helper,” in hopes of not being stuck forever. Now inside the border zone, I really got to take in the sights. The immigration building, which had two inside structures on either end with a covered road through the center connecting them, had been turned into a shanty town. Hundreds of people milled around. There were women cooking food, trinkets hawked, money changers shouting, children demanding coins, people on phones, passed out on the floor, begging and bustling around in every direction, most obviously not actually trying to negotiate the border. I managed to spot my “helper” off to one side outside a building.

He assured me he had everything taken care of. He’d speak for us. He didn’t strictly tell me to leave, but he told me not to talk. More warning bells. Eventually the guy came out, gave us whatever ridiculous paperwork we needed, including our passports back, and we’d jumped through our first hoop at the border. So far so good.  We proceeded to ridiculous window number one for some unknown document processing. Ridiculous window one worked as follows:

• “Helper” and I arrive at a building with a sliding window that’s closed. Inside is a desk with no one at it.
• “Helper” opens the window and shoves our paperwork onto the empty desk.
• A woman shows up at the window, and a mass of people who’d been sitting around jump up and rush the window, waving papers and yelling. “Helper” is part of this mob with our passports which he hasn’t, thank god, left unattended on the desk.
• “Helper” says he’s going to go “speak for” us to the police so we can get past the border despite not having our titles and leaves me at the window. We’re beyond warning bells at this point. There’s no trust between me and “helper.”
• The window opens and closes every 10 minutes or so, each time with a mass of people shouting and waving. A guy tells me the woman has told him that by some stroke of luck, we’re next in the non-existent line.
• “Helper” comes back and, like the guy said, she ignores the masses and processes our paperwork for a fee of $11USD per set of paperwork.

We’re through hoop two. At this point, we’ve been at the border a good 2 hours. I believe the paperwork we’ve processed now would get us through the border if we didn’t have vehicles.

“Helper” rushes me towards a bank where we’re supposed to pay for the enterance fee for the bikes. He stops at a money changer and tells me to change $70 USD to Honduran funny-money. I ask why and he says the bank won’t take dollars. I say I want to see for myself and we go to the bank. He speaks rapidly to the woman behind the counter. I can’t figure out what he’s saying, but she shakes her head and he practically drags me back to the money changer to change the money. I oblige, we return, and we get two receipts by giving them the result of all the $70 worth of funny money. Three hoops, and the fun has just begun!

Next to the photocopy place to get copies of the receipts. Then to a window inside the shanty-town built into the customs building where we process the receipts to receive our vehicle permits. We get to the front of the line (an excrutiating 20 minutes), and we’re still somehow, in my stack of photocopies and papers an inch thick, missing some relevant document in triplicate, so I run back to the photocopy hut, and back to the window. Despite the fact that the window has taken our documents, among them copies of our vehicle registrations which, everywhere else in the world are adequete for bringing one into a country, “helper” insists he’s spoken to the customs agents to “help” us get through without titles. He abandons the window with an armful of our documents, and we head to the back of the customs office, to a window facing the parking lot, and opening to the office behind the window we’d left. He attempts to shove our papers at the agents inside, and they brush him aside. We wait. 30 minutes or so pass. They then take the documents and tell me to bring the bikes to the office.

Off to the parking lot our bikes our in. I grab my dad and we ride back to the office. They check the VINs against our documents and stamp some more random paperwork and give it to us. “Helper” pats himself on the back, regaling me with how he’d “speak for [me]” and made them let us through. We photocopy the latest documents because that’s what you do when you get an official paper in Honduras. Hoop number four is done, and I’m now quite certain we had everything we needed to exit the border zone, “proud” tourists of Honduras, but “helper” disagreed. He insisted the he’d spoken with the jefe for us (go figure), and we needed to go see him for our passage criteria to finally be met. Foolishly, I complied and we were off to another building off to the side, and without any labels. Staffed by people in border patrol uniforms, a man at a computer proceeded to retype the information from the paperwork from hoop four into a computer, in seemingly-official fashion. His price upon completion? $25 USD per document – $50 more down the drain. This time, there was no receipt, and obviously no point. Further internet research has proven this is a very common scam. Hoopfive completed, the bonus hoop.

I briefly get to speak with the Japanese man riding a Honda to Argentina. He’s been swindled out of all the money he has in his attempt to negotiate the border, and I have no idea what he was going to do to escape. Meanwhile, “helper” is insisting the customs agents we’d handed documents to through the back window had done so because he’d spoken for us, and they needed their share of the bribes, which he listed as $20 per officer, of which there were two. He’d also attempted to raise his price, originally negotiated at $5, to $10 per bike. We gave him $10 because we’re idiots, and no money for his guards. He protested briefly before accepting. What choice did he have? We finally entered Honduras with our stamped, signed, ridiculous permissions slips in hand. Our reward for nearly $160 (including photocopy fees)? Paperwork granting us literally two days passage in Honduras, and a bad impression of Honduras that will last a lifetime… or at least until
Let us out of Honduras!

After our 3.5 hour border crossing, as I’ll explain later in standard chronological order, we had no choice but to give up on passing through to Nicaragua the same day. After a night in Honduras – the only one granted us by our paperwork – we proceeded to the border. Throughout the country, we were subjected to random, silly, spot-checks, whereupon police standing on the road with a traffic cone for a marker would pull over every motorist and ask to see their “papers.” We passed through these with no incedent until we were less than 10K from the border. There, we the policemen who stopped us took my license, took no interest in our supporting documents, and insisted we were in violation of one of their most critical of laws: we didn’t have fire extinguishers.

Mind you, we were never asked where our fire extinguishers were. They seemed quite keen to the knowledge we were without such a requisite adventure motorcycle riding item. But, they’d taken my license, and insisted they wouldn’t return it until we’d returned with fire extinguishers. To emphasize the point, they showed me their ticket template, where code 037 or so corresponded to the lack of a fire extinguisher (obviously a necessary item for all motorcyclists, most of which have no baggage at all). Given they’d taken my license, and we were but minutes from the border, we were up the proverbial creek. They attempted to take Joe’s, but he protested, and it was obvious they could care less. Why make a stink over his when they had mine?

To make the cherade complete, these officers had been provided a small hut in which to conduct their business, and invited me into it to straighten matters out. There, I had the honor of paying them the equivalent of about $15 to return my license. They then insisted they wouldn’t let us by without our fucking fire extinguishers, which they insisted could be obtained at the last town for around $3 at the local hardware store. Disgusted and incredulous, they eventually backed down and told us we could get them in Nicaragua, which we couldn’t get to fast enough, both of us then being thoroughly disgusted with Honduras.

Our Nicaraguan Welcome

Again to be more fully explained in future posts, we’d had a decent time in Nicaragua. Things were relatively cheap, the people were friendly and waved, and we expected to be on our way out on day 2, after leaving Esteli. With an early start and what seemed like an easy path, we’d grown accustomed to regular spot-checks by officers waiting on the side of the road pulling us over and asking for our papers, hearkening to cliche world-war era Germany, when the cops suddenly didn’t content themselves with a cursory inspection of our permission slips. South of Tipitapa, we were in a mass of cars, the car in front of us waving at the police at the barricade, but as was the usual for us, we were stopped by the officers.

Unlike in other incidents, they began by showing us the number on a radar gun, which despite the fact that we may have been speeding, was very very likely not from a measurement of our speed. Next, they told me we hadn’t been maintaining proper distance from the car in front of us – the one in front of us that had been far closer to the car in front of us. Once again, they took our licenses, and one of the three officers even went so far as to say it would cost us $400 Cordobas ($20 USD) to clear up the situation.

By then though, we were sick of corrupt officials. Instead, we decided to go the insane route of blatently defying them, and copied down their badge numbers. Needless to say, hey weren’t pleased. One of the officers – one Roxana Tellez, Nicaraguan Transit Police number 8983, and who’s information I plan on repeating throughout the remainder of this article in hopes that it comes back to haunt her one day – in response to our defiance, began writing us tickets. We quickly regretted our decision to stand up for ourselves and our desire to no longer be cheated by such graft when Roxana Tellez, badge number 8983, placed our drivers licenses into marked envelopes corresponding to tickets for not “guarding” our distance she’d written for each of us. The tickets amounted to a fine of $200 Cordobas, or half the bribe they’d originally solicited, but the added bonus was that they were keeping our licenses. The tickets were numbered, and thus prevented them from ignoring them once they’d been written, and so we were thusly required to go to the next town to pay our illegitimate tickets, and were instructed by the cops to return to the scene of the “infraction” to retrieve our licenses, insisting they’d be there when we came back.

We managed to find the bank at which we needed to pay our fees, about 12 miles from the scene of the lack of crime, and proceeded back to where the’d promised they’d meet us. The policemen who’d stolen our licenses were, of course, nowhere to be found. Beginning to be discouraged, we continued back to the town and parked a block from the Transit Police Headquarters, where once again I was put in charge of straighening out the situation while my Dad watched the bikes.At the front of the weathered blue building, people were plastered up against one another in a line that stretched out the door. An officer intercepted me before I’d waited long, and asked me why I was there – ah, the occasional joys of being a tall pale redhead in Central America. I explained to him about our licenses, and he motioned for me to follow him.

Through the line we went, squeezing into the building. There I saw the extent of the insanity. Inside the two sets of doors was a single large room utterly jammed with people, most of which were a part of a single line that wrapped from a window around the room in traditional zig-zag patterns. There was another window in the far corner, and I bumped and squeezed my way through the sweating masses after the officer to this one. I was labled “Infraciones and Licensias.” The cop departed, and I surveyed the window. Unlike the long line, this one made no attempt to look orderly. People were jammed up against each other, though no one was at the window doing anything. I waited there about 10 minutes, and a woman showed up at the window asking for receipts for people’s licenses. The mob then surged to life, arms waving identical stapled receipts in the air, pushing to get them into the hands of the woman. The guy in front of me helped me get to the front, and she gave me a weird look when I tried to pass her two forms. She shook her head and said she could only handle mine. She disappeared into the back, where I had little hope she’d find my license. Another 10 minutes later, she was back. She called one other name and gave back a license, then she called mine…

I came forward and instead of handing me back my license, for that would be far too easy, she started asking me questions. Where did the infraction occur? When did it occur? I answered her and she once again gave that old familiar slow official head shake. No, she didn’t have my license. I’d have to speak to the Jefe. She pointed a finger vaguely and moved to the next name. I followed the finger to the office next door and asked for the Jefe. They said next door, and I went outside to an open office filled with policemen in the building next door. Jefe? Oh no, she was in the closed door at the end of the other building. I just had to go over a knock. I knocked on the door, a few times before it opened a crack, someone inside said some hurried Spanish I couldn’t make out, and the door shut again. The cops from the last office tried to be helpful and, somehow missing that I’d already done so, kept making knocking motions at me while I tried to reason out how to tell them I had. As I puzzled through what to do next, another guy waiting outside the office explained to me that someone was in the office, so I just had to wait. Well, I was getting pretty good at that, so I took a seat.

Another 10 minutes passed, and a throng of people walked up to the door, a couple in plainclothes and a couple in officers uniforms. The guy who’d explained to me that the office was occupied started making ridiculous gestures at me, grabbing his chest repeatedly and waving his eyebrows. Then he put two fingers on each of his shoulders and I figured out he was trying to tell me the woman in the uniform with two bars on her epaulets was the Jefe. I guess occupied didn’t imply she was actually inside! I stood up and loomed at the edge of the crowd trying to make eye contact with her, and hoping my ability to stick out like a sore thumb might come in handy. Thoroughly trained in the art of being the Jefe, she carefully ignored even casually wavering her eyes from her circle of conspirators. It was in this looming stage that who I suspect to be the second in command (he had one bar on his epaulets, whereas everyone else had some number of different symbols) came up to me and asked me what my issue was.

I explained to him about the tickets, where they happened, when they happened, and that our licenses weren’t in the office. He told me to wait while he went off to the license window to confer. Then he came back and had me follow him into another building, down a strange hallway, and to a room filled with radio equipment. This was what I’d been waiting for. He got on the horn and spoke some Spanish I couldn’t decipher, and a familiar voice, not one Miss Roxana Tellez, badge number 8983, but one of her crooked accomplices, badge number 11666 (yeah, I got his too! Unfortunately without his name…). Second in command asked where they were and all I could make out from badge number 11666 was something about Managua. There was more back and forth, most of which was over my head, but it was obvious that the thrust of the conversation was “get the fuck over here.”

Back out of the radio room, the officer told me to grab my Dad and bring the bikes over to the station – our buddies would be back in about 15 minutes. I went back, we grabbed the bikes, convinced the guard to let us bring them into the police parking lot, and waited till our friends the corrupt cops showed up again. They went straight to the Jefe’s office, where they stayed for a little less than 5 minutes, I can only hope receiving new assholes. Roxana left holding the yellow envelopes she’d put our licenses in, had us sign them, and traded us them back for our receipts. I thanked the second in command and asked him his name. Awkwardly, he said his name was “Nicaragua.” I guess for the only cop I’d dealt with who’d made it above grunt level, he was too concerned with his job to let me post his name here in connection with such scandal.