Jungleland by Christopher S. Stewart Read Free Book Online Page A

friends—that he had hurt them with things such as raising the minimum wage and opposing the privatization of certain lucrative industries—and was scheming to rewrite the constitution in order to extend his term. Now his old friends felt he had to pay.
    As days passed, I kept hearing reports about how hazardous the situation was becoming. The State Department warned travelers to stay away, and some observers worried that the country was on the verge of civil war.
    The reckless, danger-seeking part of me grew more excited on hearing such news reports. I kept thinking, perhaps selfishly, how the backdrop of the coup would make for an even better story—not to mention a more intense personal journey. But I also wondered if I simply had a death wish.
    When I reached Chris Begley on the phone, he said, “You should be okay getting down there.”
    “Should?”
    “Well, you never know.” Then he said, with a laugh, “Very little is ever certain when it comes to this place.”
     
    HONDURAS—ABOUT THE size of greater Philadelphia, with a population of about 7 million—is one of the least developed countries in the Americas. After Haiti, it is the second poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Only about 18 percent of its more than 9,000 miles of roads are paved. It is a rough and volatile place, bursting with desperation: Transparency International ranks it as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and frequently there are reports agonizing over the country’s rising levels of violence.
    With nearly seven thousand killings in 2011, averaging about eighteen bodies a day, it is the most murderous country in the world. Many of the murders go unsolved, including most of the 108 Americans killed there over the last seventeen years. As one local man would later say to me, “It’s cheap and easy to kill a guy in Honduras. Who is going to catch you? Not the police!”
    Honduras borders Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, all of which have suffered through civil wars during the past thirty years. There hadn’t been a coup in the country since 1982—though there had been almost half a dozen over the course of the previous twenty-five years. The United States has cast a long shadow over the tiny territory for the last century, mainly once the American banana companies arrived and immediately began to dictate how the country would be run. As the former head of United Fruit Company once said, “In Honduras, a mule costs more than a congressman.”
    During the 1980s, in the midst of the Cold War, the U.S. military set up encampments in the jungle, where they trained the rebel Nic-araguan contras to fight the socialist Sandinistas. Some believe the Americans never left and even today wield influence over Honduran politicians and military. The degree of U.S. involvement in the overthrow, if any, was impossible to know. But in public, the Obama administration was firm in its disapproval of the coup and called for Mel to be returned to power. The United States didn’t acknowledge the new president—few countries did—and in fact placed him and his coconspirators on a blacklist, barring them from ever coming to the United States.
    I sneaked in moments to continue monitoring the situation online. By the second week, the streets and town squares were brimming with angry Mel supporters—labor union members, teachers, and especially campesinos, or peasants. Tanks prowled the cities, and there were photographs of tear gas exploding in clouds around protesters and police wielding clubs and machine guns that fired rubber bullets.
    In the end it was impossible to hide it from Amy. One afternoon, I walked into the living room and saw her reading the New York Times . The front page chronicled the drama. “This is insane,” she said. “You know this, right?”
    “It’s not that bad,” I assured her.
    “It’s turning to war.”
    “It probably won’t,” I said.
    “But you’re still going?”
    “The flights are still