A perfect crime?

Carlos Mejía Orellana, the sales and marketing manager of Honduras’ Radio Progreso, was murdered on April 11. Nobody has been punished or even tried for the crime. What was the motive? Who was behind it? Who actually stabbed him? It appears to be a perfect crime because the probable political motive is hidden behind the smokescreen of Carlos’ homosexuality. With this article, envío, a sister of the Radio Progreso project, joins in the condemnation of this crime.

Envío team

He left in a hurry, waving goodbye. “I’m off on holiday and I’m not here for anyone!” But he stopped before he closed the door to add: “…except for the radio; I’m always here for the radio! See you!” Hours later, the radio began receiving calls to say that Carlos Mejía was dead. It was April 11, the day the Catholic calendar calls Friday of Sorrows, the start of Holy Week.

A key person

Carlos Mejía Orellana was 35. He had been the marketing and sales manager at Radio Progreso, the popular Jesuit radio station in the city of El Progreso, for 14 years. Everyone on the team considered him “a key person to the project.”

It was already late when he got home. He lived alone, in a residential area of the city. Shortly after he arrived, a neighbor knocked on his door to ask him for the corn she was going to grind for the tortillas he would take on the seaside outing he had organized for his family and friends on Sunday. “He told me he would give me the corn later because he was expecting a visitor and wanted to talk uninterrupted,” she said.

A couple of hours later the alarm on his car, parked at the door of his house, went off. The neighbors went out to see what was happening. The gate to Carlos’ house was open as was the door to his house, but neither had been forced. A robbery...? They went into the house with that combination of anxiety and fear that hangs in the atmosphere so many people breathe these days in Honduras, the most violent country on the continent and perhaps the world.

When they entered Carlos’ room, they saw him stretched out on the floor next to his bed, his chest pierced by three stab wounds. They ran out to call the police and the team at the radio station. Whoever killed him had moved the TV
set and several other things in the house, making it look as though there had been a robbery, like so many others. But nothing was missing, nothing had been stolen.

A “crime of passion”

A statement by Roger Murillo, head of the National Department of Criminal Investigation, was reported in the next day’s edition of the Honduran newspaper La Prensa: “Preliminary investigations indicate that only minutes before being murdered, he went out to buy two chickens for himself and other people who were at the house, apparently chatting with him.” Murillo announced that in the hours after the crime, as a result of the investigative work, agents arrested a youth who’d said he was Carlos’ “partner.” Murillo thus reached this conclusion: “We believe this crime may be linked to relationship problems and not to political issues, as those who are responsible for Radio Progreso would like to make out.”

Hours before his statement the Radio Progreso team had called a press conference to report what had happened and set out their position. The station director, Jesuit priest Ismael Moreno, envío’s correspondent in Honduras, categorically demanded a “serious, diligent, precise and thorough investigation that will lead to the material and intellectual authors being punished,” adding that “we don’t accept baseless rumors about motives.”

Rumors were already spreading through the streets by then, and they appeared to make it easier for the authorities to close the case with the verdict of a “crime of passion.” “All faggots end up this way,” many people said, just on hearing the news, without taking time for any further reflection or compassion.

The screen was erected. Carlos’ body was found half naked. The scenario mirrored the modus operandi of many murders of homosexuals. “Naturalizing” the motive also takes away their dignity, detracting importance and attention from the crime.

“A death waiting to happen”

Carlos was gay. “I talked about it with him years ago and he wasn’t afraid to accept it, to recognize his orientation, and he didn’t hide it from his family or his colleagues; he was a free person,” Father Moreno, “Melo,” told us.

After a few hours, the youth they’d arrested was released. There wasn’t a shred of evidence to implicate him. The case wasn’t closed, but continued to be seen as a “crime of passion.” Could there not have been another motive, even one that took account of the “crime of passion” scenario set up so well by the perpetrators?

“We understand it as a direct blow to the radio station’s work, our work and our organization,” Father Melo and his colleagues insisted right from the start. “It leaves us more vulnerable and defenseless.”

Other voices using the radio station’s microphones started pointing out another probable motive. One of those voices belonged to Silvia Heredia, from the station’s “Step by Step” program on prevention of violence. “No, this isn’t just one more death; it was a death waiting to happen. All murders are unjust, but this one was meant as a warning for ERIC [the Jesuit Reflection, Investigation and Communication Team] and Radio Progreso.”

A warning about what?

Radio Progreso was born over 50 years ago to evangelize the Sula Valley, economically Honduras’ best developed region and the one that attracts the biggest migrant population from other areas of the country. The station started broadcasting in Santa Rita, a tiny municipality close to El Progreso, but wasn’t owned by the Jesuits. In 1970, one of those years marked by the option for the poor proclaimed by Latin America’s bishops in Medellín, Colombia, the same era Paulo Freire put forward his idea of grassroots education as a way to raise consciousness and the Christian base communities were growing, the Jesuits acquired the station’s AM frequency then got hold of equipment to broadcast on shortwave too.

When hurricane Fifi caused a disaster in the region in 1974, Radio Progreso broadcast the news to the world. Other tragedies resulting from the coups that characterized that decade also passed through Progreso’s microphones. It was Radio Progreso that reported the massacre at Los Horcones (June 1975), in which landowners and the military plotted and executed 15 people, among them 2 priests, then threw them down a well and dynamited their bodies to cover up evidence of the crime.

By 1976, the station had transformed itself into a grassroots station at the service of the people’s just struggles and causes, of which there were many in Honduras. No strike, demand, complaint, demonstration, mobilization or organization was ignored by Progreso’s microphones. Time and again this turned it into a target of the political and economic powers: warnings, threats, closures, negotiations to reopen it… year after year always in the cross hairs. Right up to today.

In 1980, after one of the closures of the station and with Honduras under a repressive military dictatorship, the Jesuits created ERIC to complement the station’s work. It would be a space in which to reflect on reality, to “see, judge and act.” Over the years, ERIC’s political, social, economic and cultural investigations and, since 2010, also its surveys of public opinion, made it a credible reference point throughout the country. Right up to today.

Another coup d’état:
More risks and more influence

In June 2009, with the coup d’état against President Manuel Zelaya, Radio Progreso and ERIC once again graduated with honors in their defense of human rights and denunciation of the repression unleashed against people who were mobilizing in resistance to the coup, reclaiming rights that had been deferred.

Given the nation’s worsening crisis, the station itself began to be a reference point for international human rights organizations and authorities. Evidence of this are the two international awards Radio Progreso received: one also given to Radio Globo and Cholusat Sur by the Human Rights Association of Spain (APDHE) for the defense of human rights in the context of the coup; and the other the 2011 Peter Mackler Award for Courageous and Ethical Journalism in countries that have perpetual violations of freedom of expression, given by Reporters Without Borders and Global Media Forum to Radio Progreso’s communications area coordinator.

The risks increased with the coup. The radio station’s premises were raided during it and some of its journalists and its director received serious threats and were harassed. The Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights granted precautionary measures to protect the life of 15 team members. In May 2011 the measures were extended to Carlos Mejía, who had also received threats.

The Honduran State, responsible for fulfilling these measures, never took them seriously. “It never had the political will to fulfill them, even though the government had agreed to them on innumerable occasions,” members of the radio station’s team explained in the press conference following Carlos’ murder.

In a violent country

Honduras is believed to be the most violent country in the world. According to the National Autonomous University of Honduras’ Observatory on Violence, 109 massacres and 6,757 homocides were committed in 2013, a monthly average of 563 murders and a daily average of 19.

A report released by Casa Alianza revealed that 9,291 youths under 23 years old were murdered between February 1998 and March 2014, an average of over 47 per month in that 16-year period. During the four years of the Porfirio Lobo government (2010-2013), the monthly average was 81. And in the first quarter of this year, Casa Alianza had already recorded 270 deaths of young people under 23 in acts of “extreme violence.”

Neither purging the security forces years ago, nor the more recent militarizing of society with successive “iron fist” campaigns have had any result, among other reasons because finding authentic solutions to deep economic, social and political inequalities is always beyond these initiatives.

One such initiative, dating from June 2011, was the Law of Public Security, which stipulates that a tax should be charged on deposits of a certain amount in the banking system for fast food restaurants, mobile phone companies and slot machines. The resources thus raised should be invested in public security. It is calculated that since the creation of this tax more than 1.5 billion lempiras have been raised, of which around a billion have already been invested discretionally, without knowing in what. What we do know is that the investigative police are working in precarious conditions, without enough transport, agents or basic tools to undertake the serious, thorough, specific and exhaustive investigations such as those demanded by the Radio Progreso team after Carlos Mejía’s murder.

“He was a born entrepreneur”

We talked to the person who remembers and weeps for Carlos as his best friend, who told us what he was like: “He loved dogs and he loved people. He was a very generous guy. I admired the fact that he went every Sunday at midday to give classes in the Honduran Institute of Radiophonic Education. He wanted all those hardworking youths who longed to get on in life to have at least some decent education and, because of that, he didn’t rest on the only day he had off. He liked teaching and had a degree in education. He was sharp and wise when it came to analyzing Honduras’ reality. He was hurt by corruption, injustice and the brazenness of politicians and religious leaders, and people’s passivity made him despair.”

Still others describe him this way: “He was bold, penetrating, always wanting to innovate, try new things, a born entrepreneur. He had a Master’s in marketing and business management, but he developed his abilities as a child because he needed them to contrive of ways to help his family. One day he told me about his first test. When he was six years old his mother, Salvadora, sent him to the town square to sell the tamales she’d make. He felt tremendously responsible with his load of tamales. When he had almost sold them all, an old man came up to him saying: “Let me try one and I’ll bring you the money in a minute.” Carlos believed him, gave him the tamale and ended up waiting a long time for money that never came... He went home in tears, scared of the beating he’d get because he hadn’t got all the money. Nothing of the sort: his mother praised him on his successful sales and also because he let that poor old man try one of her tamales. He stopped crying.”

The radio station’s rapid expansion

The murder of Carlos Mejía deprives Radio Progreso of a person who, with extraordinary skill and dedication, ensured 60% of the station’s income. He was torn away from this task at a moment in which the station, a tool for social mobilization known and recognized throughout the country, was experiencing a growth period in which Carlos took an active part.

In 2005, Radio Progreso began increasing its coverage in the west and north of the country. Then after 2009, the period ushered in by the coup, the station’s communication proposal expanded significantly, strengthening alliances with various organized social sectors: women, indigenous peoples, environmentalists and community, human rights and anti-corruption organizations. Those alliances were consolidated by providing these organizations increased radio space, awareness-building campaigns done in coordination with several of them and the training and support requested by more and more organized movements around the country.

Radio Progreso was growing “in wisdom and grace,” and its influence was increasingly apparent. In 2012 it expanded its coverage in the department of Colón and the city of La Ceiba, the country’s third largest city after Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, thus covering almost the entire northern corridor of Honduras.

At the end of 2013, Porfirio Lobo’s outgoing government granted it a frequency in the capital. This meant new challenges, and the team was already taking them on: increasing the content of the news programs and participation strategies, taking even more seriously the street radio model and intermediation journalism.

When Carlos was murdered, the station was about to increase its coverage in Bajo Aguán, a region in which the accumulation of capital in the hands of a few families can be seen most clearly. It’s an extremely violent region in which the most serious agrarian conflict of the past 15 years, not just in Honduras but the whole of Central America, has developed with respect to the degree of violence against the peasant population. During the Lobo government, 105 peasant leaders were murdered, many of them in this region.

A perfect crime

In this context, it’s neither prejudiced nor premature to think that the motive behind Carlos Mejía’s murder was to send a bloody message to the team to limit the radio station’s expansion and influence.

The timing of the message was well chosen. So was the victim, both because considerable financial resources depended on him and because his homosexuality made it easier to dismiss his removal from the scene as a “crime of passion.” A perfect crime.

In a homophobic country

One day someone provocatively graffitied “being homosexual is a man’s thing” on a wall in Tegucigalpa. It was quickly removed, but the person who expressed it was right. Enduring the discrimination of homophobia is a task that requires great courage, and courage is culturally assigned to men. Carlos had that courage.

Homophobia remains one of the more deeply embedded prejudices in people’s mentality. Like all traditional conservative societies, impoverished by inequality and poor-quality education, Honduras is a homophobic society. It has many people with confused ideas who call homosexuality a “sin” when the sin is homophobia because it involves discrimination, rejection and hate, a betrayal of the God of whom Jesus of Nazareth spoke.

Honduran society’s high levels of homophobia made international news in October, 2011, when the Evangelical Fellowship of Honduras asked the authorities to cancel a concert Ricky Martin was going to give in Tegucigalpa to benefit a foundation that supports children. Martin had come out the year before. In a letter to the Ministry of the Interior, the pastors expressed concern about “the message and example” the singer would convey, at a time when the country should “raise and cultivate the highest civic and moral values to consolidate and not weaken the essence of Honduran nationality, which is the family.” The concert went ahead as scheduled.

“Hate crimes”

In June 2012, some months after the “scandal” over that concert, 80 US Democratic congress people wrote to Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State at the time, asking her to demand that the government of Honduras introduce measures against the homophobia suffered by homosexuals in Honduras, charged to the aid it received from the United States.

In their letter, they denounced the “hate crimes” in Honduras: some 70 men and women belonging to the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) community had been murdered there between June 2009, the date of the coup, and the date they wrote to Clinton. They also indicated that the majority of these murders had remained “in the most absolute impunity.”

In a country of impunity

Honduras today is not only a violent and homophobic country, but also one in which impunity holds sway. According to its attorney general, 80% of the murders are not investigated and go unpunished. Civil society organizations believe the figure is as high as 90%.

Of more than 30 murders of journalists, only 10% received any sort of investigation. Murders of women are a tragic example: in only 5 of the 300 cases of femicides that occurred in 2013 have the prosecutorial requirements been presented to solve them, according to information from the Women’s Rights Center.

Murders committed by organized crime and drug trafficking in particular go unpunished, as do political murders. Will the murder of Carlos Mejía meet the same fate, its possible motive and its political dimension hidden by both the authorities and sectors of society behind the screen of a “crime of passion”?

Solidarity that demands justice

In the following days messages and letters repudiating the crime and expresing solidarity with Radio Progreso flooded the station.

They came from the IACHR’s Special Rapporteurship for Freedom of Expression; journalists and radio stations in the United States, Canada and the whole continent; Amnesty International; Democrats in the US Congress; clergy in different countries; various European cooperation agencies and Jesuits from all over the world, although some voices from the nearest Jesuits were missing, perhaps due to fear of inspiring more “crimes of passion”...

All grieved for Carlos’ life cut short; demanded an investigation and trial and insisted that the crime not go unpunished.

“What you taught us, dear Carlos”

The Radio Progreso team continues to wait for truth and justice, and while they wait they remember the “colleague with such a young soul” who has left them.

The following moving words are from the message with which they bid him farewell the day of his burial: “You, dear Carlos, left us without even asking for permission...You left us when your presence was most needed here among us, not only to get us out of difficulties every fortnight with your untiring search for well secured resources, but also because your presence always inspired tenderness, helpfulness and friendship... you know very well that your absence won’t be easy to fill. You shared 14 years of your life with us; these do not end like a door being slammed...

“From you, dear Carlos, perhaps we didn’t learn how to lead a work session, since you always fled from meetings, always considered them a waste of time. Nor did we learn from you how to do political or technical analysis for designing a strategic plan. But you know very well that none of these things could be done either at the radio station or in ERIC without your silent but effective marketing work. You taught us by your daily practice what we hear from analysts: that even the most sublime work needs economic resources to survive.

“And there’s something else you taught us with your silent example, which is that while some wrote reflections and others presented the news and others burnt our brain cells trying to write a script, you would buy food every fortnight for a lonely old woman. You never wanted anyone to know about this, because you didn’t want to boast about your acts of solidarity. It was the testimony of this elderly woman who revealed one of your many virtues after the stab wounds of the murderers had torn you from our lives.

“The last thing you said before opening the door to leave on that Friday, April 11, gives us a way to continue keeping you here among us. On saying goodbye you told us you were off on holiday and would only respond if the call was about some advertising for the radio. So, we’re just saying you’ve gone on holiday and while you rest, hopefully lying in a hammock, we’ll call you to consult about what we’re doing and you won’t hesitate to answer our calls, because that’s what you said on leaving us.

So from here on out, Carlos, wait for us to call and ask you advice on how to put together a radio commercial to inform all our people that from the stab wounds that killed you, flowers are springing up that fill our untiring struggle against impunity with energy.”

Print text

Send text