https://apnews.com/article/business-caribbean-f0306dc68771d5166f918e863de6f185
By nightfall, La Reina was gone, buried in an epic mudslide, its families among nearly half a million Central Americans displaced by the hurricanes. Bathed in tears and shaking with cold, the frightened and disoriented residents of La Reina wandered the main road at the bottom of the valley looking for help.
In any case, they would need more than tents. To rebuild their houses and replant their crops, the villagers needed land -- and Serrano knew that much of that land was in the hands of drug traffickers. But the cedar and cinnamon trees high in the surrounding mountains were as valuable as coffee, and outsiders started cutting the trees. Those who complained -- “whoever had a long tongue” --were killed, Ríos said.
No snake was responsible for what happened in La Reina. When the Earth gave way, humans were at fault.Serrano arrived here in 2009, after spiritual missions in New York and the Mosquitia region of Honduras. He found himself in a cursed and disputed land where violent drug traffickers ruled with impunity. In the area around his first house, corpses appeared hanging from trees.
Serrano surveyed the landscape from a lookout over the valley. “Half of all the land and businesses you see from here belong to drug traffickers,” he said. But Serrano’s message is not widely popular. He has sought protection for his mission, which is routinely observed by men passing by in oversized SUVs with tinted windows. Honduran police and military units also stop by several times a week, and Serrano’s complaints to the prosecutor’s office led to the installation of surveillance systems.
When capos are arrested, the government confiscates whatever land is in their name and holds it in a byzantine bureaucracy. Heirs fight for control over hidden assets -- land that has been put in the name of front men and women, sometimes without their knowledge. “The land itself is not worth that much, but the message of who is in control is everything,” Serrano explains.
WTF with this headline. He's 'an agent of God?' You know that's not a real thing, right?
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