Ross Halperin on BEAR WITNESS: Fighting Gang Violence & Restoring Justice in A Violent Land

Today, a gripping story of courage, faith, and friendship in one of the most dangerous countries on Earth. Journalist joins us to talk about his extraordinary book Bear Witness: The Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land. It’s the true story of two men — an American missionary and a Honduran teacher — who took on the gangs, corruption, and impunity that plague Honduras, one of the most violent nations in the world. Together, they built a radical experiment in justice that dared to succeed where governments failed.

“They didn’t want to be hypocrites. They didn’t want to be like these other gringos that come down here and live behind gates and have drivers and security guards. They wanted to live with and like the people they wanted to help.” — Ross Halperin

Then, we air a clip from our 2023 interview with Jeff Sharlet about his book The Undertow, which examines the spread of rightwing ideology among the masses and the new fascist movement it’s spurred.

What is Writer's Voice with Francesca Rheannon?

Writer’s Voice is a weekly national radio show and podcast, on the air since 2004. Each week brings in-depth conversation with writers who challenge, inspire and inform. Check out our archives with journalists like James Risen and Jane Mayer, novelists like Joyce Carol Oates, Barbara Kingsolver and Louise Erdrich, poets like Richard Wilbur and Maxine Kumin, and many more notable guests.

Ross Halpern, welcome to Writers' Voice.

Great to be here.

Thank you so much for having me.

Well, this was a thrilling read, a really fly-on-the-wall account of this incredible project in Honduras, one of the most, if not the most violent country in the world, Bear Witness, a crusade for justice in a violent land.

Ross, first I just want to ask you, how did you get into this story?

Because you really had to be there in order to do it.

I know, I know.

Yeah, it really was kind of came out of left field a little bit.

I had never been to Honduras before.

You know, I was working for these criminologists back in 2015, 2016, 2017, and around the summer of 2017, we all got really interested in the problem of impunity in the United States.

So this might surprise some of your listeners, but whereas in places like Asia and Europe, other sort of comparable wealthy democracies, upwards of 90% of homicides are solved, here in the United States, it's more like 60%.

And the solve rate for non fatal shootings is even lower, shamefully low.

So we were studying that problem, why it was, what can be done about it.

And the capstone of that was sort of a small symposium that this criminologist organized in New York City to discuss the problem.

Like the New York City chief of detectives was there, someone from the Detroit department was there, there were academics who specialize in ballistics and other things related to solving shootings, murders.

And one of the people he didn't come in person, he just videoconferenced in from Honduras was Kurt Verbeek, who ended up being the subject of my book.

And in like a very sort of bland, almost academic PowerPoint presentation, he talked about the work that they had done in this very dangerous, marginalized neighborhood in Honduras.

And just talked a little bit about himself, his charity, his life journey.

And it was one of those moments where you're just like, holy crap, I can't believe what I'm hearing.

I'm so fascinated.

It seemed like he had potentially come up with a solution for the impunity problems we were interested in.

And he was just such a fascinating person to me.

I couldn't stop thinking about it.

And pretty soon thereafter, I sent him an email and was like, hey, can I write a magazine article about you?

And I wasn't a journalist, I had never really written anything, you know, outside of school.

But I was so fascinated and just wanted to share this story.

So maybe two months later, I was in Honduras for my first time.

That was a shorter trip, maybe about two weeks.

But when I got back from that and sat down to write said magazine article, I was like, boy, this is too much for an article, it really needs to be a book.

And that's when, you know, that's the beginning of this project, really.

And I just have to congratulate you because you're a terrific writer.

I mean, it's not just a thriller with the content that it has, but you really portray things, you know, with such immediacy and eloquence that it's really a terrific read.

So thank you.

Thanks for saying that.

Yeah.

I mean, it took me a long time to get it right.

You know, this was a seven year project.

So the writing was challenging and the reporting was really challenging as well.

As you might imagine, Honduras is not an easy place to get information in general.

And especially when you're looking into gangs and homicides and assassinations and corruption, it makes it even trickier.

So it was a long time coming.

And such an important story for us, not only because of what you started out with talking about how this can shine a light on impunity everywhere, and we are, of course, a country that is sinking deeper and deeper into impunity.

But also because so much of what is going on in our politics here and worldwide even is the growth of this kind of criminality that, you know, just is destroying societies.

So let's get into the meat of it.

Kurt Verbeek, who is he?

Why did he go to Honduras?

And tell us about how he came to move to this barrio Nueva Ciujapa.

Yeah, so Kurt grew up in suburban Chicago, but it was a very unusual part of suburban Chicago.

It was this little almost rural seeming town that was really religious.

A lot of it was really part of this broader Dutch Midwestern culture.

So he's of Dutch descent.

He's part of the Christian Reformed Church, which is a Calvinist tradition.

And he went to Calvin University, which is a Protestant college in Western Michigan, where he met his wife, Joanne van Engen.

And you know, they're these people who like right out of college were very idealistic, very religious, and wanted to help poor people in a very abstract sense.

And a charity affiliated with their church offered them jobs in Costa Rica.

They had never left the United States before.

Joanne had never been on a plane before.

Kurt had only taken one plane ride, and it was to Florida.

So and at the time, I mean, Central America, what was a war zone, I mean, Costa Rica was relatively safe, but Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador were at war.

So, you know, it was a pretty bold thing for these young people to do.

And you know, like a lot of young idealistic people, they start doing charity work kind of somewhat missionary tinted, but you know, mostly just like community development, water, land titling, forestry, protecting forests, stuff like that.

And like, there's a few important turns in their lives.

So like, first of all, like, they pretty quickly decide because they get transferred from Costa Rica to Honduras, and they just fall in love with the country.

And they say, this is where we want to spend the rest of our lives, because we love it, we love the people.

And also, it's a great people, great place, obviously, to help the poor.

I mean, Honduras is besides Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

And the first really bold and radical thing that they do is they say, look, we don't want to be hypocrites.

We don't want to be like these other gringos that come down here and live behind gates and have drivers and security guards.

We want to live with and like the people we want to help.

So they move at this point.

They have two kids to Nueva Suyapa, which is one of the poorest and most dangerous barrios in Tegucigalpa, which is the capital.

And you know, it's one of these mountainside communities.

The water very rarely runs, there's dirt roads.

It's a place of pretty extreme poverty.

And they elect to move there.

And that's a pretty radical thing to do.

I mean, it's something that the other gringos in Honduras don't do.

And it's something that I think people sort of frowned at, especially since they were bringing their kids there, not just bringing their kids there, but also electing to send them to school there.

And it's really there that Kurt forges this best friendship with the other protagonist in the book, Carlos Hernandez.

And maybe maybe we can talk a little about him before I circle back to like, what is the really crazy, wild, groundbreaking thing they do, you know, in Nueva Ciudad.

Yeah, so let us talk about Carlos.

He begins a school there.

Now, I think even his kids go to a private school, so the notion that Kurt and his wife would have their kids go to the local school is even shocking to them.

But so tell us about Carlos.

Yeah, so Carlos is Honduran.

He grew up in sort of rural Honduras near the Caribbean coastline, banana country.

His parents got separated at a young age, so he kind of bounced around to different relatives in order to always be within walking distance of a school that educated kids his age.

And, you know, he ends up graduating from high school, which is quite a feat in that area at that time, and he ends up going to a vocational college to become a teacher, which is also quite a feat for someone who grew up like he did at that time.

But he wants more than this region can offer him, and as a young man, sort of, he disappoints his family and surprises his family, and he says, I'm going to move to the capital, I'm going to move to Tegucigalpa and try to help people there.

So he does that, and, you know, he is very religious, he's an evangelical Christian, but from a very young age, he feels a strong sense of rebellion against what he sees as the evangelical church's focus on the afterlife, what's going to happen after we die, do we go to heaven or hell, we need to convert people, we need to pray more.

And he thinks his church, which is a huge part of his social life, it's, you know, where he spends time, he's the director of the choir, he feels that his church isn't doing enough in the here and now on earth to help people.

So he ends up saying, look, I want to establish a charity within the church, and I want to work in the place that is most needy.

And that is Nueva Suyapa.

So as you say, he moves there, he builds a school, and it's not just a school, there's a micro lender, there is a health clinic, there's a dentist, it's an amazing institution that helps people.

And he almost becomes like the unofficial mayor of this area.

When people need help, they go to him.

And by this point, him and Kurt are next door neighbors, they're best friends, they talk every night, and they are very focused on how do we improve this area, how do we improve this community, and they have founded a charity together called the Association for a More Just Society, ASJ.

And through that charity and through Carlos' school, they spend a long time doing all the normal things that humanitarians and missionaries do to help.

So education, healthcare, micro-lending, water, and they're doing it all to a very commendable and impressive degree.

But as you know, and this is really where the book starts, they hit a point where they say, look, all that stuff is great, but it's only going to have a minimal amount of impact if there's violence and impunity, and in their case, there's a gang that is hurting people, killing people, extorting people, scaring people, that has to be dealt with.

And unfortunately, the police, the prosecutors, the criminal justice system in general was not dealing with it.

So they say, we are going to shift focus.

We are going to do something very radical.

We are going to figure out how to stop gang violence in our neighborhood.

Sisyphean task, it appears, and yet they had some real success.

But before we get to that, let's take a little wider view.

You write in the book about an almost apocalyptic rise in homicide rates during the 2000s and early 2010s in Honduras.

And I don't think a lot of people understand the role of the United States in creating this.

I wonder if you could tell us that.

Yeah, I mean, it's really amazing the extent to which Honduras, this little small country most of us don't think about, is intertwined with us here in the United States.

And you could really see that in the ways that violence rose there over the past decades.

So there's been a number of factors.

And the first one to point to is the Maras.

So a lot of people are probably familiar with MS-13.

They have a rival gang called Barrio 18.

And those gangs were founded not in Central America, but actually in Los Angeles in the 1980s.

There were Salvadoran refugees there, people who had fled the Salvadoran Civil War.

And at the time, you know, LA was a place with a lot of gangs and inevitably the Salvadoran people there, the young men formed their own gangs.

And that became MS-13 and the Barrio 18.

It eventually included Latinos of other national origins.

And then in the mid to late nineties, there was a very large and bipartisan deportation effort where people with criminal records were deported from the United States.

And a lot of those gang members were sent back to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

And these were weakly policed countries where the sort of preexisting gangs were very JV.

And in short order, these two gangs essentially commandeered every poor urban neighborhood in Honduras and sort of ruled them to a certain extent, extorted people, scared people, controlled the streets, et cetera.

And that was a major contributor to violence.

And the other one I will mention is narco-trafficking.

So the original way that cocaine got to the United States was it would be manufactured in the Andean region, so like Columbia, and then it would hopscotch across the Caribbean Sea on either boats or planes to the United States.

In the mid 80s or something, the United States anti-narcotics apparatus decided to do a major operation to wall off that route.

And it succeeded, but as sort of seems to be the golden rule of the war on drugs, it had no impact because all that happened was the narcos shifted their routes westward.

And this was something that built over time, but by the time you get to the events in this book, the vast majority of cocaine that is getting to the United States is starting in Venezuela or Columbia where it's manufactured.

It's taking this sort of westerly journey to the coast of Honduras, which is very large, and then it's moving overland up through Mexico into the United States.

So you have this small war country where there is an absolutely gargantuan amount of contraband passing through it.

And that is just such a corrupting force to the political system, to the police, and it contributes to violence.

So when you add that to a criminal justice system, which is weak, underfunded and corrupt, you have a country which certainly during the events of this book consistently ranked as one of the most violent on earth.

Now back to Kurt and Carlos.

They witnessed this violence.

They want to do something about it.

Talk a little bit more about the impunity that makes it so difficult to prosecute and control any of this violence.

And give us some examples too, how the jails are run, how the prisons are run, how the courts are run, how the police operate.

Yeah.

This is something that's really, I think, would be hard for Americans to grasp, like how poor this place is and how under-resourced these institutions are.

I mean, these are police units and prosecutor's offices where you'll see, especially back then in 05, 06, 07, you would see desks without computers, printers without ink.

You'd see a homicide department covering an entire very violent city like Tegucigalpa.

Maybe there's 18 detectives and maybe they only have access to two cars and maybe one of them is broken and maybe they have barely any gas money to fuel it up.

So there was a huge under-resourcing problem.

The other thing at this time was the United States promoted a change in the justice system.

So it used to have a sort of more Spanish style justice system where trials were written, where it was inquisitorial.

And in the early 2000s, around 02 or 03, they switched to a system with live trials, a confrontational system like we have here in the United States.

And that system is better, but it takes time to learn how to do all that stuff and it takes resources to do it.

And it was just kind of a huge mess in the early years of implementation.

And as you say, it's live.

You have the right to confront your accuser, which is the problem.

Yeah.

So, I mean, that's kind of the punchline here, which is like you add up all of these problems and you're getting to the biggest one, which is ultimately these cases.

If you want to convict someone who's committed a violent crime, physical evidence, CSI evidence rarely comes into play, even in places like the United States where there's money to do those types of tests.

It usually just comes down to witnesses and versus a written trial, a live in-person trial forces witnesses to come into a courtroom where they have to testify against a dangerous person whose liberty is at stake based on what that person says.

So you know, as maybe in places like Maine or Iowa, people are happy to do that.

But in a place like Honduras, it was very hard to find witnesses.

And the consequence of that was an absolutely extraordinary level of impunity.

I mean, I think I show a statistic where like maybe less than 10% of serious crimes are even investigated, let alone solved.

So people in Nueva Ceutapa, where Kurt and Carlos lived, were not only seeing violence, but they were seeing this gang get away with violence.

And there's so many ways that this happened.

You know, it was a lot of times there were arrests, but then a witness wouldn't show up to the initial audience.

So the judge would have to let the person go, even though they were clearly guilty.

Then there was another phase of this where, okay, maybe the judge did agree to hold the person in jail until the trial.

But these jails were very easy to escape from, especially the juvenile jail.

So it was just throughout the entire system, there were a thousand and one ways that a case could collapse.

And that just happened over and over again to the point where if someone lost a relative, if someone's husband or child had been killed, it would be very common for them just to say, you know what, leave it in God's hands, because I know that there's not going to be justice in the here and now.

So what was the response then?

What was the project that Kurt and Carlos began to deal with this?

Yes, I think it was quite ingenious and quite daring.

Basically what they said is, if we want safety, there has to be justice and consequences.

So we are going to start solving homicides and other serious gang crimes.

And you know, that is something that we all typically associate with the government doing and only the government doing.

But once you realize that the key to closing a case is witnesses, you realize that that is actually something that really anyone can do.

You don't need a badge to find a witness, to convince her to testify, to keep her alive.

And while yes, they can legally make the arrests themselves, the bigger issues were that the cops didn't know who the culprits were, what their legal names were, where they lived, and they didn't have a vehicle that could transport them to that location.

So Kurt and Carlos hired a private eye, a lawyer, and a psychologist who together found and cultivated witnesses, collected actionable intelligence about gangs, delivered those two things to the police and prosecutors, and then gave police and prosecutors the resources and the arm twisting that was needed to actually close cases.

And that was the idea.

As you know, there were lots of problems and moral gray areas that came along with it.

But to a remarkable extent, it did work.

And pretty quickly, they started getting people arrested and winning convictions.

Yeah, it is remarkable.

Now you mentioned a psychologist as well as a private eye.

Why?

Yeah.

So as you know from reading the book, it actually doesn't start with a psychologist.

That's something they add a little bit down the line.

And I think what happens, well, the program suffers a tragedy.

One of their closest informants does something very rash and kind of out of character and gets himself killed.

And it's really at that point that they realize that solving a murder isn't just an investigative and legal challenge.

It's also a psychological and emotional one, because these witnesses and informants are under enormous strain.

They are taking responsibility for getting some dangerous criminal arrested and convicted.

They're afraid for their lives.

They're typically doing this in complete secret, so they don't get to share it even with their families.

And they're often having to testify, talk about something terrible.

Maybe it was a murder they witnessed.

Maybe it was someone they loved who got hurt.

So you don't really get to move on from it in a way that I think most of us do.

So I think part of the magic of this program was recognizing witnesses' needs, recognizing that there was this psychological and emotional component.

And once they introduced the psychiatrist to the trio, I think that's when things really started clicking.

You know, the psychiatrist would do formal therapy, like we're used to seeing here in the U.S. with some of these witnesses and informants.

But more than that, I think she was just like a person to talk to and sort of commiserate with and share with.

And it proved to be very helpful.

Now, with this level of violence in this society, I wonder, were you surprised at the level of support for vigilantes against these gang members?

Because that really becomes part of what creates some of the moral dilemmas in this book.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So one thing you learn when you spend time in Honduras and neighborhoods like this, and I think this is true throughout the world, is that when there's a lot of violence and a lot of impunity, something you get is vigilantism.

And there's a lot of that in the story.

There's different flavors of it.

There's the sort of people whose backs are up against the wall, and they feel threatened, and they get guns, and they start doing kind of neighborhood patrols, and maybe they are willing to be violent, but they kind of clearly don't want to.

There's other people who say, screw it, I'm fed up with these kids.

I am going to go out there and kill as many of them as I can.

And then, as you know, there's one in the book who seems to do that with a certain amount of pleasure, and seems to be a truly sort of evil person who just likes to murder teenage boys.

I think that's quite a disturbing part of the book.

And it's part of the reality here.

And I think in many ways, it's important to understand Kurt and Carlos' idea in that context, because the alternative wasn't just letting these kids get away with it.

It was letting them get killed by vigilantes, because sooner or later that happened, whether the vigilantes were affiliated with the police or were affiliated with just themselves, there was going to be a response.

And that itself contributed to the violence.

It created this tit-for-tat cycle, these kind of warring camps.

At the end of the day, I think from Kurt and Carlos' perspective, most of these vigilante groups were really no different than the gangs.

They were just another flavor of it.

So they end up trying to get a number of those people arrested as well.

And especially as the moral grays of their program sort of rear its ugly head.

For example, as you know, the prison they're sending a lot of these juveniles to is truly horrific, and it's as all prisons are bad, but this is as bad as a prison could get.

Explain what you mean by really bad for these.

This is a juvenile prison and to emphasize that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, that's another crazy thing about the story.

A lot of these gang members are juveniles, you know, some as young as 12, 13 years old.

So they're sending these kids to juvenile prison and at a certain point they go out there and take a look at it and what they find is extremely disturbing.

The guards are abusing the inmates.

Some of the inmates are sexually abusing other inmates.

There are, there's a lack of food.

If one of the inmates makes a complaint against the guards, the guards might withhold food as punishment.

There is the bathrooms barely work.

There's water seeping through the roof, sometimes through the ground.

A lot of kids have to sleep on the floor because the stronger kids will hoard the mattresses.

It's a grotesque place, frankly.

And it really forces Kurt and Carlos, who are Christian, who really spent their lives trying to help kids like this before they became administrators of law, like, are we doing the right thing here?

And sort of the moral alibi that they land on, which I think is quite convincing in a lot of ways, is look, this place is terrible, but A, we're going to do everything we can to make it better.

And they do.

B, we're going to take on prison reform as another challenge midway through the story.

But B, the alternative is that these kids are going to get killed.

And they saw that happen over and over and over again.

These gang members who, a lot of whom were kind of these wayward teens, some truly kind of seemed like bad, borderline sociopathic people, but a lot of them were kind of just marginal guys who got involved with it as sort of a teenage stupidity mistake.

And they saw a lot of those kids get killed.

So they thought, okay, sending them to prison is better than that.

So that's part of the moral calculus that they were dealing with here.

And why is it so much these teenage kids who are involved in these, do you have any thoughts on that?

You know, rather than the kind of Mexican gangs that are older?

The cartels?

Yeah.

Look, I think the narco trafficking groups in Honduras are probably more akin to the Mexican cartels you're referring to.

But look, I think there's an element of recruitment.

I think this is a country where there's not a lot of opportunity, economic opportunity.

And a lot of these kids maybe see their parents in a place like Nueva Zuyapa working like the lowest wage jobs for barely any money scraping by.

And then there's a point in time where, you know, maybe the ones who don't like school so much or a little bit rebellious, there's these guys in the corner.

And, you know, part of the sort of exportation of the L.A. based gangs was also the exportation of like American counterculture, which was sort of cool and appealing.

And these guys were dancing and drinking and having parties and having fun in this otherwise very poor and pretty pious country.

And I think for a lot of teenage boys, that was quite a draw.

And as you know, like in the early part of the story, Carlos is trying so hard to battle that with his school.

He's trying to make it appealing and fun.

He's trying to teach the kids values.

He's trying to keep them there late at night, playing soccer, playing volleyball so they don't go out in the street and make bad decisions.

And it's such a valiant effort that he puts his heart and soul into.

But unfortunately, some kids slip through the cracks.

And I think part of what makes the story so interesting is a lot of these gang members, they're not strangers to Curt and Carlos.

They're people that they interacted with, you know, really through Carlos' school over the years.

If you've just joined Writer's Voice, we're talking with Ross Halpern about his terrific book, Bear Witness, A Crusade for Justice in a Violent Land.

So let's now talk about the central murder case in this book, which was the murder of Dionisio, the lawyer of the poor.

Talk about that case and why was it so emblematic of this situation?

Yeah.

So after Curt and Carlos and their charity really do a great job of cleaning up their neighborhood and ultimately taking down these two gangs that were tormenting it, they move on to other things.

And this takes a little bit of explaining, but I think it's actually quite interesting, so I'll go into it.

But one consequence of impunity, I think, in a lot of places is you have the rise of private security.

So when the police and the government aren't providing protection, people look for other ways to do it.

So if you go to Tegucigalpa or Honduras, one thing that will really stand out to you is how the number of private security guards everywhere you look, in front of gas stations, hotels, parking lots, more than you're even used to seeing here.

And Kurt and Carlos see this, and, you know, being a security guard is really one of the only jobs that people in Nueva Zullapa could get.

So they knew a lot of people who worked in that, and they knew how terrible the job was.

A lot of these guards were forced to work 24-hour shifts.

They were typically paid less than the minimum wage, which at the time was $115 per month.

It was a very dangerous job because if gang members wanted guns, they would often just come up behind the guard, shoot him in the head, and take his gun.

And a lot of these things were violations of the law.

So there were labor protections that these guards were supposed to benefit from, like the minimum wage, that were completely disregarded.

So just as Kurt and Carlos wanted to bring law to Nueva Zullapa, they wanted to get the security guard companies to abide by labor law.

Now there's two sides to the security industry in Honduras.

So there's the outward-facing side, which I just described.

But then there's another side, kind of a dark side.

And a lot of these companies were founded by former military officials.

And it was kind of an open secret that a number of them were involved in arms trafficking and narco-trafficking.

And they had a lot of scary people involved with them that you kind of didn't see day to day.

And that was part of the reason why everyone was scared to try to get them to play by the rules with these sort of mall cop type guys.

Yet lo and behold, Kurt and Carlos, who really have this sense that they need to be extremely brave and put their lives on the line, say, we are going to try to identify the worst of the worst company in this industry and get them to pay their, they have a thousand guards.

So it's a thousand people.

We're going to try to force this company to pay the minimum wage, give them all the benefits they're due.

And this would really be transformative to those people's lives.

They take on that company.

They end up having some early success in through, through the court system and through the labor ministry and getting them to play by the rules.

But and it's not just that company.

It's a number of other companies as well that they're going after.

And there's really two people on their staff who are focused on this.

It's a lawyer named Dionisio Diaz Garcia, and it's a journalist named Dina Mesa.

And as they're going, the threats start coming, the scary incidents are coming, the warnings start coming, and Dionisio eventually is assassinated.

And at that point, Kurt and Carlos have to decide whether or not they're going to try to solve his murder.

And why would they question that decision?

I think first of all, it's just the danger.

So at that point, they were painfully aware of what they were up against.

And it was sort of a succession of super-duper-duper scary things happening, and then the assassination.

And you know, they were people who had gotten away with doing wildly dangerous things over and over and over again, and finally paid the price.

This was very painful for them.

And they were warned not to investigate the murder.

It was too dangerous.

They have a sort of, at the time, they had a larger international charity, which was a funder and sort of a mentor to them.

And that charity said, this is too dangerous, don't do this.

And the other thing I'll mention is like, you know, they have a murder-solving operation in-house.

That's what we just talked about before.

So they had the capability, but in the past, it was more about they're doing that to make an entire neighborhood safe.

So they kind of have to ask, what would be the point of doing this?

Is it just about revenge and retribution?

And look, they end up doing it.

And I think it is about something bigger than just fairness and retribution.

And it's the fact that in places like Honduras, human rights defenders, whether they're lawyers or journalists, whoever, are often killed.

People who are fighting for indigenous rights, people who are fighting for water rights.

There is a lot of those killings and assassinations that happen in Honduras.

And you want to talk about impunity.

They're almost never solved.

The assassins are never arrested.

The masterminds are never arrested.

And there's this huge history and succession of these heroic people who were defending the rainforest, who are defending, who are exposing corruption in this industry.

They were killed and there were no consequences.

So Kurt and Carlos say, look, we want to change that.

We want to show that you can't hurt people who are fighting for other people's rights.

And it's quite a journey, as you know, to solve that case.

And I'll let readers see how it turns out.

But I think that's a really interesting part of the book.

Absolutely.

So then, after reporting on this book, what is your perspective on whether Honduras can achieve a higher level of justice, as you title one of the sections?

And I'm going to backtrack a little bit.

Yesterday, I was having a conversation with a friend who is from one of the Andean countries.

And I was asking him about what it was like in his country, and he talked about not quite to the level of Honduras, but the same kind of predation, constant predation.

If you have a little, you know, if you manage to scrape together something to make a living on, he had been a fruit and vegetable seller in a market, you're going to get targeted.

And he said, you know, it's so nice here, you can walk down the street and not be afraid to be attacked or killed or whatever.

And you know, that's changing already, but it did really highlight this.

And I asked him, you know, almost rhetorically, because I don't think he had the answer and neither do I, how do you get back?

How do you restore justice?

How do you restore a society after it has devolved to this point of criminality?

Yeah, I think one of the qualities that distinguish Kurt and Carlos and that they're very proud of is optimism.

And I think so many people see a place like Honduras, a situation like Honduras, and kind of feel it's hopeless.

And that I think is part of what they're trying to fight within themselves.

And they're trying to always bring that attitude and, you know, they've had a lot of successes and, you know, taking a step back, there's all sorts of places that used to be very violent, used to be very lawless.

And that changed.

I mean, even in our country, if you were to look at the condition of a lot of cities in the 80s, there's been this incredible drop in violence, which is worth celebrating and things can change.

And look, throughout the story, I mean, at the end of it, I think I kind of end maybe on a bit of an ambivalent note and point that, like, despite the accomplishments that Kurt and Carlos have done, the country is still poor and violent and corrupt, but that doesn't mean it hasn't gotten better.

I mean, even just looking at the national homicide rate, you know, in the third part of the book, they start to focus on trying to improve violence across the whole country.

And I'm going to get the numbers like roughly wrong, but at, you know, when they started in 2011, Honduras has the highest homicide rate in the world.

Maybe it's like 80 or 90 per 100,000 people.

And fast forward to today, there's been a huge improvement.

It's 22 or something per 100,000 people.

So it's gotten better, still has a long way to go.

And look, I mean, like even the police force, one of the things that Kurt and Carlos's charity does is purge the police.

And that was something that people have been wanting to do in Honduras for a very long time.

And kind of no one really had the cojones to actually do it, the power to do it.

And by a sort of crazy series of events, Kurt and Carlos's charity gets the capability to do it.

And they actually follow through.

And am I saying that the police force was fixed?

Am I saying that the police force is now exemplary?

I'm not.

But I do think it's gotten better.

And I think that's one of the things that has helped improve the violent situation in the country.

And then even like corruption, I mean, like they expose a number of scandals in the education system and the healthcare system.

And once again, those institutions are still bad, but at least the medical storehouse that is supplying the public health system in the country isn't giving people fake medicines like they used to.

There was this horrible scandal where they were giving people counterfeit medicines with no active ingredient in it.

And that was exposed by ASJ.

So there's a lot of wins.

I wouldn't even call them small wins, a lot of medium to big wins.

But I think it can be very frustrating for people working down there because even once you do that, put your life on the line, you bring all your creativity, you still have to reckon with the fact that it's not, not only is it not Switzerland, it's not even Costa Rica.

But one of the things I really admire about Kurt and Carlos is that they keep trying, keep fighting, and I suspect that'll be true for the rest of their lives.

And what do you think makes them tick that they can do that, confront that level of risk and still persist?

I think it's their bond.

I think it's their friendship and this alignment to a few core values.

And that's extreme faith, extreme optimism, and extreme bravery.

And I don't think they would have been able to do it alone.

I think there's something in their partnership, in the fusion of their two lives, in the fusion of frankly two cultures, American and Honduran, that has allowed this all to happen.

And it's a pretty amazing thing.

I mean, they've been at this together for like 30 years now.

And you know, they were best friends and they became work partners.

They operate sort of as co-heads.

They fight sometimes, but I think they're mostly pretty well aligned.

So I think in many ways, this is a story about the power of friendship, and especially friendship, you know, from people who grew up thousands of miles away in completely different places.

And I think that's quite beautiful and inspiring.

And this book is quite beautiful and inspiring.

Thank you so much, Ross Halpern, for talking with us here about Bear Witness, a Crusade for Justice in a Violent Land.

Thank you so much.