Powered by RedCircle
Summary
On May 11, 2012, a passenger boat was traveling on the Patuca river in a remote region in eastern Honduras. The 16 passengers were headed to the village of Ahuas. Right as they were about to dock, they were attacked by DEA agents & Honduran police that were involved in an alleged drug interdiction operation.
This episode describes what happened that night and shares extensive testimony from the survivors and eyewitnesses themselves.
This episode is Part One of a three episode series: The Drug War Cover Up.
Transcript
Karen Spring:
At approximately 8:30 p.m., on May 10, 2012, a passenger boat left the coastal fishing village of Barra Patuca. On the boat were 16 passengers. Among them were Clara Wood and her 14-year-old son Hasked, who were moving back to the village of Ahuás, where the boat was headed, after living several years outside of the region. Another passenger, Lucio Nelson, was coming from the same fishing town where the boat departed. He was going to visit his mother and pick up native seeds that he hoped to plant in his own community. The passenger boat was coming back from the coastal fishing village after dropping off several lobster divers who were headed out to sea.
The trip on the Patuca River would be long, but the river was peaceful and quiet that night. The moon illuminated the water, and for several hours the passengers could only hear the sound of the boat’s small motor. Most of the 16 passengers except the driver and his copilot fell asleep. The boat was headed for the Indigenous Miskito village of Ahuás, located in the remote Mosquitia region of Honduras.
Everything seemed normal. But, little did the people in the passenger boat know, there was another boat on the Patuca River that night. The other boat was the focus of a DEA drug interdiction operation that would cause a wrongful, violent, and deadly attack against the innocent people in the passenger boat. The peaceful ride to the village of Ahuás was about to turn deadly.
Welcome to the Honduras Now podcast. I’m your host, Karen Spring. In each episode I will be sharing human rights stories from Honduras and connecting them to global issues and North American policy. Thank you so much for listening.
As the boat made its way down the river, the passengers started hearing helicopters in the distance. The sounds got closer and closer.
At approximately 2:00 a.m., on May 11, 2012, the boat was close to the small docking area on the river known as the “Landin” in the village of Ahuás.
Hilda Rosa Lezama Kenreth (interpreted):
When we felt that the helicopter was right above us, all of us were looking at it. And because it was right above us, we thought it wasn’t going to do anything.
Karen Spring:
The sound startled them, and they didn’t know what was going on. This is Vera González, who was traveling in the boat with her two daughters. One was 11 years old, and the other two years old.
Vera González (interpreted):
As we came close, I was scared, and so was my daughter. She said to me, “Mom, look at the helicopter circling, and if it shoots bombs, we, here in the canoe, we won’t survive. They will kill us.” So my daughter told me to tell the boat driver to hurry up because we were close to the Landin.
Karen Spring:
In the confusion, the passengers didn’t know what was going on. Then, out of nowhere, several passengers on the boat were struck by bullets.
Vera González (interpreted):
After, the helicopter fired on us, and when they fired, I ducked in the boat with my son, I grabbed him, and I used my body to cover my daughter. I grabbed a blanket and threw it over us and ducked down. I didn’t know at that point who was in the boat or who had fallen out, but I was screaming.
Karen Spring:
The passengers sought cover from the bullets, but it was impossible. They were in the middle of the river in a boat, or a pipante, as the locals call that style, the long, thin type canoe. There was nowhere to hide. This is Hilda.
Hilda (interpreted):
I don’t know, I managed to jump into the water, and that’s when a bullet hit me. I tried to hide underneath the sacks on the boat, but I couldn’t, and that’s when the bullet must have hit me. I had to jump into the water, and the boat was already close to the shore. I can’t swim, but at the time, I don’t know how I swam, but I went to hide and grabbed onto some grass at the side of the river. And all my wounds were under the water.
Karen Spring:
Hilda, like others, was shot by the rounds of bullets. Others, like Clara Wood, desperately searched for their children or tried to protect them. This is Clara, speaking in broken Spanish, since Clara, and the majority of people in the boat that night, speak the local Miskito indigenous language.
Clara Wood (interpreted):
I heard the shots from above, and I started yelling. I was calling out for God, yelling. The helicopter shot two rounds. I saw that my son wasn’t in the boat anymore, and I was calling out for him. But he wasn’t there. Then the helicopter stopped shooting, but it kept circling above us. I jumped into the water and swam to the shore where the Landin is.
Karen Spring:
During and after the two rounds of shots, some passengers threw themselves into the water. Some were injured. Others hid in the water, in the weeds, and others swam to the shore to look for help.
Hilder Izempa heard the shooting from his home. And after he received a call from someone close to the Landin that night, he immediately went with his sister to the river to look for his mom, Hilda, and his father, Mileño. Hilder describes interacting with “gringos” who had arrived at the scene by a helicopter. It was hard to see their uniforms. Some say they were dark blue, or dark black, and others tan camouflage uniforms with a US flag on the arm. Eyewitnesses aren’t sure where the gringos, or the Americans, had come from, but some suspected they had propelled down from the helicopters.
We now know that the “gringos” that Hilder and others say they saw that night were agents from a US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)-led mission, which was part of a broader operation called Operation Anvil. In this particular case, in Ahuás, some of the security forces were US DEA agents from the DEA’s Foreign-Deployed Advisory and Support Team, or FAST, and others were part of the US-vetted Honduran National Police Tactical Response Unit. It’s possible that military soldiers from the US’s permanent JTF Bravo Mission, stationed in the Palmerola airbase in central Honduras, were also assisting in the mission. The State Department-owned helicopters were piloted that night by US-contracted pilots working with a big US private military contractor called DynCorp.
What many of the locals and passengers in the boat didn’t know at the time was that they were in the middle of a botched DEA drug interdiction operation.
At first Hilder hid, and then he approached the US men to ask them if he could look for his mom, who he believed had been injured.
Hilder Izempa (interpreted):
We asked the security forces if we could go out and talk to them. And one of them said yes. So we went closer to the river. And he told us to sit down on some stairs, me, my sister, and Sandra. We were there for a while. And then they called me over, told me to go over to them, closer to the river. I went to them and they asked me “who I worked for.” And I responded that I didn’t work for anyone. I was there for my mom, because my mom had been shot and she had jumped into the river and was lost. When I explained that to him, one of them hit me hard on the chest, and didn’t say anything. So I asked him, Why did you hit me? And he said that I was talking too much.
Karen Spring:
Similarly, Celin, who is Clara Wood’s nephew (Clara was in the boat that night), was waiting at the Landin to help his aunt with her cargo once she arrived. He was sleeping in a parked boat and was woken up by the helicopters. Startled and scared, Celin went to try and hide.
Celin Corbelo (interpreted):
I was on the other side of that house by the river, by the road. Then the police stopped me and said, “Put your hands in the air!” And when I lifted my arms in the air, I got down to lie on the ground, and they grabbed me from the back and took me closer to the river.
They handcuffed me, and the whole group of police took me to another place closer to the river, and they hit me from behind. They pointed three guns at my head, one on either side and one at the back of my head.
And they started to ask me questions: “Where are the drugs? Who is the boss? What is his name? Where does he live?” But because I didn’t know anything, I couldn’t answer them. I just told them that I was innocent, and that I was waiting for my aunt who was coming with divers in a boat and they were going to arrive at the Landin. I was waiting for my aunt and my cousin and they were coming. They kept asking me again and again, but I said the same thing. One said to me, “We’re going to throw you in the river with those handcuffs. Speak the truth!” But I kept saying the same thing. I couldn’t say anything else. “If you kill me, I’m innocent,” I told them.
Only one of the police spoke to me in Spanish. The rest were speaking English. Only one spoke Spanish, but there were six police in total. One Spanish speaker and the rest English. They were Americans.
Karen Spring:
Meanwhile, by this time, Clara Wood had swam to shore from the boat. She was frantic. She couldn’t find Hasked, her 14-year-old son who had been sitting at the front of the boat before the helicopters started shooting. She feared that he had been killed. She confronted the armed police, who she also saw had handcuffed her nephew Celin, close to where she had come to shore.
Clara Wood (interpreted):
When I got to the shore, the helicopter was parked at the Landin. When I got out of the water, the police grabbed me and asked me where I had come from. “You killed my son! You shot at us!” I told them. Then I heard my nephew. He was yelling at me, “Aunt! Aunt!”, and I turned around and saw him. He was handcuffed with a plastic thing, and my nephew was yelling, because they were holding him by his neck, very hard. Then one of the police yelled, “Everyone put your hands up! Everyone get in a single line!” And I put my hands in the air as they pointed at me with their weapons.
Karen Spring:
Once the officers allowed her to leave the area, possibly because Clara had managed to convince the agents that she and her nephew were harmless, Clara went into a nearby house close to the side of the Patuca River at the Landin. This is the house where two young boys that had been in the boat would take refuge. Twenty-three-year-old Lucio Adan Nelson had been badly shot by the helicopter in his arm and back, but had managed to swim safely to shore and hide inside the house. Fourteen-year-old Wilmer Morgan Lucas was shot in his right hand and had been sitting next to Clara Wood’s 14-year-old son during the boat trip. Shortly after Clara came ashore from the river, Lucio and Wilmer were taken to the hospital by people from the village.
Shortly after they left for the hospital, two helicopters landed. The first helicopter landed at the Landin, and a group of what eyewitnesses say were Honduran police got out. Then a second helicopter landed and several security forces wearing tan camouflaged uniforms with US flags on their shoulders got off the helicopter.
This is Hilder explaining what happens after the two helicopters land.
Hilder Izempa (interpreted):
After the police told me to start walking, and when I was walking, he hit me again. I asked him again, “Why are you hitting me?” After I told him that, he asked me where Dolly lives, and I told him, “Dolly lives there.” He asked me if he sells gasoline there and I told him that he did. Then the police told me, “Let’s go there.”
Karen Spring:
The security forces were looking for Dolly’s house. Dolly’s house was located steps away from the Landin. And, like Hilder said, Dolly sold gas to boat drivers and had a small storage shed next to his house with barrels of gas.
Dolly would report that a tall man that spoke fluent Spanish approached his home, followed by two white men, likely US soldiers or police. He watched as the security forces came near. The Spanish-speaking agent threw Dolly on the ground and handcuffed him. Suffering from a serious chronic heart condition, Dolly would report later that the treatment that day damaged his pacemaker and would cause significant health problems.
The soldier then kicked down the door of the storage shed. This is Hilder describing what happened next.
Hilder Izempa (interpreted):
And after they got to Dolly’s house, they broke into a storage shed without permission. They broke the door open and took a big container of gasoline for [boat] motors. The police brought it over to where I was and asked me if it was gas for motors, and I told him it was. Then he said, let’s go over to that boat over there, you’re going to drive. Because he demanded that I do it, I had to. They took me to the boat. I was driving, and three of them got in. And we went to where the drugs were, the boat where the drugs were. And when we got there, there were already two of them, two gringos in the boat. They were already there. And after they told me to get close, they threw the drugs into our boat, all of that, they threw the drugs in. And then they told me to go the Landin. They themselves brought the drugs here, unloaded it, and loaded it into the helicopter.
Karen Spring:
Apparently the focus of the DEA operation that day was to recover a shipment of drugs, not the passenger boat or the people that had jumped into the river or who had been killed, but a boat that had been stranded at the side of the Patuca River. Inside that boat, like Hilder mentioned, was a huge shipment of cocaine.
While Hilder worried about his missing mother, the security forces and the DEA agents would force him to take a bunch of trips between the Landin and the boat stranded on the river filled with cocaine. Everyone around the Landin that night would be handcuffed, held at gunpoint, or threatened, all while the DEA-led security forces secured the drugs, loaded them into their helicopters, and left the scene.
It was about the crack of dawn, around four hours since the passenger boat had been shot, when the helicopters finally left the Landin.
It wasn’t until after the DEA teams left when many of the villagers, the families of the passengers, and the passengers themselves, like Clara, could begin to look for their loved ones. This is Hilder, describing how he searched for his mother Hilda.
Hilder Izempa (interpreted):
After the police left, I took a boat to go look for my mom. When I left the Landin, I saw my passenger boat at the other side of the river, and on the other side was the boat where the drugs were. And when I went, there wasn’t anyone. I went close to the passenger boat. And there were two people that had died, my brother-in-law and the woman from Patuca. I moved my brother-in-law, and he didn’t respond, and that’s when I saw that he was dead. I picked up his body and I put it in my boat. I went over to the woman. I moved her, but she didn’t respond either. So I left her there. I felt really badly. I just brought my brother-in-law to the Landin.
When I brought my brother-in-law to the Landin, I saw the helicopter in the air. One of them was watching me from the air. But the helicopter left. After, people started coming to help me to get the body out of the boat. Then a bunch of friends came to help, and they brought other boats. We went out looking at the shores of the river, calling out to see if someone answered. And when we came, we heard someone, and it was Vera, who was with two kids. We put them all in our boat. After, we went back to the shores to keep looking and calling out, and, finally, we found my mom. She was there the whole time, on the side of the river, holding on to some sticks, and she was shot. We got into the water, we lifted her up, got her out of the water, put her in the boat, and got her to the Landin, and then took her to the hospital.
Karen Spring:
Hilder found his mom barely conscious and bleeding out in the water. She had a gaping hole in her upper leg where she had been shot. Hilda had been forced to hide for hours holding onto a log in the water, while the DEA team prevented anyone from going about their rescue operations while their agents secured the drugs.
After finding his mother, Hilder, like he described, went on to find two of the four people that had been killed in the operation. He found Candelaria Trapp, who had died inside the passenger boat. She was the mother of six children, and was five months pregnant at the time of the incident. She was traveling to Ahuás to sell fruit and used clothing, so that she could purchase rice and beans to take back to Barra Patuca, the coastal fishing village where the passenger boat had originally left from.
The second person Hilder found dead in the passenger boat was 21-year-old Emerson Trapp, Hilda’s son-in-law. Emerson was a former military soldier that had left the military a few months prior. He had a one-year-old child. He was traveling with Hilda and her husband Mileño, the boat driver, to help them with navigating the boat.
The third person that was killed in the deadly operation was 28-year-old Juana Jackson. Juana was the mother of two young children, one nine, and the other one and a half years old. Juana was 26 weeks pregnant, according to medical reports, and her family members.
And finally, Clara describes what happened to her 14-year-old son Hasked.
Clara Wood (interpreted):
I was crying. They got in their helicopters and left. Then I went to look for my son, but I couldn’t find him. But I kept looking. I got some gas and a boat and went to look for him. But I didn’t find him until the next day, and he was already decomposing. He had like four gunshots in his head and his legs, everywhere, but I found him. By that time, I couldn’t do anything, because he was decomposing.
Karen Spring:
Four people were killed in the DEA operation, and four were injured. Three gravely injured. Passengers like Clara, and people that by chance of being there, like Hilder and Dolly, were forever impacted by how the event changed their lives and their health.
The DEA operation had allegedly mistaken the passenger boat and its involvement in a drug trafficking operation. Sympathizers of the DEA might say that the passenger boat just so happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But, better put, the DEA was in a foreign country carrying out an alleged drug interdiction operation as part of the so-called global war on drugs. I guess I should say that the DEA was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and for reasons like the drug war, which is constantly questioned by grassroots communities and policymakers alike.
In the hours and days following the operation, two important things happened that would cause the events of the DEA operation to explode, hit the national and international press, and force both the DEA and the US State Department to respond to what had happened.
The first, and most immediate, was the outcry from Ahuás, mostly from the villagers and family members of individuals traveling on the passenger boat. Immediately after the security forces left the area, dozens of villagers from Ahuás gathered at the Landin.
People were angry, and confronted the local mayor and the local justice of the peace about what had happened. Why hadn’t the local authorities done more to stop the drug trafficking going on in the region? Local residents then went and burned the houses of individuals living in Ahuás that were suspected to have been involved in drug trafficking. The unrest lasted for approximately five days.
The mayor of Ahuás also made several statements to the Honduran press, clarifying that the people that were killed were not drug traffickers, like the Honduran government and the DEA claimed. Instead, they were innocent people that had nothing to do with drug trafficking. This is how I heard originally about this incident.
The second important thing that happened immediately after the massacre was the denial and the cover-up by Honduran officials and by the DEA. Their versions of May 11 contradicted what the people of Ahuás were saying about what had happened. Honduran authorities claimed that the individuals in the passenger boat were drug traffickers, and that security forces had fired on them in self-defense. The DEA, on the other hand, said that the US DEA agents were only part of the mission in a supportive role. And, like Honduran authorities, US officials said that the people in the passenger boat had fired on them first.
So what happens when you have two very conflictive narratives about a particular incident? One narrative is that of the local people — poor people, Indigenous people — that certainly didn’t have the power or the platform that the US State Department or the DEA had at their disposal. The outcry from Ahuás and the Mosquitia region was certainly based on serious concerns about what had happened that night.
So what did happen in the aftermath of the botched drug operation that left four Indigenous people, including two pregnant women, dead. Was there an investigation? How long would the DEA and the Honduran government maintain the cover-up about what had happened? Find out in Part II of the three-episode series, The Drug War Cover-Up.
Thanks to our supporters. Show notes can be found at HondurasNow.org. This is Karen Spring, your host. Hasta pronto.