At the end of the day, in addition to the technical support, there has to be political will, so there have to be some Honduran champions, ideally at the political level and at the leadership level.
At the same time we find in a country like Honduras, as in other countries, that when you're dealing with 600 prosecutors, a lot of them are deeply committed and put their lives on the line. We work with them. Those are the people we draw our hope from, because those are the people who want their society to be safe, and that's where my hope comes from.
We build these relationships. We get to know the people. Of course they're the movers and shakers and they're the ones who have to build their institutions. Part of what we're trying to do is work with them hand in glove to ask how you do that in the best way.
For me what has to happen is that ATIC has to succeed. Then ATIC has to be replicated, because even with 100 investigators, ATIC is only going to cover the two major cities and not even do all the work of the two major cities. It's only going to do the major cases. It covers 21 crimes but it will not have the capacity to handle the volume, so it will have to be expanded.
The investigative model has to be consolidated. The crime scene model is being consolidated. Then I think we have to work on the mind piece around trials. If that can happen....
My vision for Honduras is that in 10 years you'll have a system that understands what we talk about when we talk about presumption of innocence, that understands in a much more dynamic way how to engage in an adversarial examination of justice. That does not yet exist, but my hope is that it will.
The other thing we have to realize is that.... I talk a lot about the murders, but for most common people, the most serious problem is all the extortions that are going on, and sometimes that takes the form of express kidnappings. It's really the poor and the middle class and all those who are being extorted all the time by these gangs. For most people, aside from their concern about their own lives, the biggest issue is they're being told to pay money or else they're going to be killed.
Along with building the justice system, they will have to deal with disarticulating the gangs. That has to happen.
Part of that is there are some skills they need to do that. We've been working on that primarily in Guatemala where you have to.... When you're dealing with a barrio, if a gang is controlled by, say, the Mara Dieciocho or the Mara Salvatrucha, they're very violent gangs. They take over the territory. The biggest problem of the youth fleeing from Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador right now is youth trying to escape being pulled into the gangs. That's the problem the U.S. has where they have these 60,000 youth.
I was just down there and I was talking to a taxi driver and he said he was sending his kid out of the country. I asked how he was doing that and he said it would be underground. I asked why, and he said because the gangs are on him. That is a serious problem. They have to deal with disarticulating these gangs. We have to build functionality, but then they also have to have a strategic capacity.
This is happening in Guatemala now where, for example, they brought down one clika in one barrio where there were 20 members. They killed 32 people in two months. The issue was that they were extorting people and if they didn't pay, they killed them. They united all the cases and they brought down the whole clika.
Honduras is not nearly there, but part of the process has to be in addition to this functionality, the creation of an ability to do this analysis, because otherwise they'll never dismantle. We see that as part of the agenda as well.
My hope would be that in 10 years they'll have this functionality, and at the same time they will have disarticulated some of the structures and there will be more safety.
The other piece on this that is really important is, when you live in a country where the justice system doesn't work, people don't have hope that it can work. Part of this is that we have to create belief within the people that it can work. In our country people believe it can work. When you believe it can work, you do everything and you make it work. But if you're sitting on a caseload of, say, 50 murders, and you know that only one of them will go anywhere, well, what does that do to your confidence and your attitude? This third piece I'm really interested in. It's really important to us that we deal with that piece.