Award of Excellence: How a Rural Community in Honduras Dominates San Francisco's Open Air Drug Markets
This Premier category recognizes a photographer’s extended story about the everyday life of people who make up a community. The purpose is to encourage attention to the small events in life that are often overshadowed by news and celebrate images that reflect the experiences and dreams of humankind.
A “community” may be defined as a neighborhood, a town, a commune, a rural agricultural area, a city subdivision, or socioeconomic region.
A woman and her 1-year-old twin boys walk on a dirt road passing by a newly built mansion with several San Francisco logos on display in the village of El Pedernal, Honduras on Sunday, July 2, 2023. The house is owned by a 26-year-old man who has been convicted of drug charges multiple times in San Francisco and is still living and dealing drugs there. The mango-colored mansion is an homage to the city: a Golden Gate Bridge sculpture on the garage door, a San Francisco Giants logo on the balcony’s ceiling, two 49ers logos on the front gate and the words “Civic Center” -- which references the plaza in downtown San Francisco where people deal drugs, splayed across its security bars. Oscar Estrada, a Honduran author who wrote a book on drug trafficking’s impact on the country was astounded by the architecture in the villages. He said “I have seen remittance architecture in the 90's which was very obvious and they have a very clear design and usually it is related with aspirations of the immigrants to the United States, But this is not that. This looks more like a typical Narco house. The one you see in places like … Colombia (where) you see the kind of architecture totally over the top of the community. That’s very clear.”
How a Rural Community in Honduras Dominates San Francisco's Open Air Drug Markets
Thirty-five hundred miles southeast of San Francisco, a dirt road in Honduras shared by pickup trucks and oxcarts cuts through abandoned farmland.On the outskirts of a small village, a jewel-toned mural appears like a mirage:the Bay Bridge,sparkling at night, stretching across a 10-foot-high wall.In a nearby town square, a child in a Steph Curry T-shirt climbs a tree. A few blocks away, a taxi whizzes by, a SF Giants sticker affixed to its bumper. More extravagant emblems of San Francisco appear unexpectedly and often.Handsome new homes rise behind customized iron gates emblazoned with San Francisco 49ers or Golden State Warriors logos. This is the Siria Valley, a cluster of rural villages in central Honduras. The valley is the hometown of a high concentration of people who, fleeing poverty and one of the world’s highest murder rates, migrate to San Francisco, where some of them sell drugs. In the early 2000’s a Nevada gold mining company came in. Their project, the San Martin mine, contaminated the valley sickening residents, killing livestock and accelerating villagers to seek employment elsewhere. Most Hondurans reaching the Bay Area find legal work. They often hold jobs in restaurants, cleaning homes or gardening. But more than 200 Honduran migrants have been charged with drug dealing in San Francisco since 2022.A longtime Honduran dealer estimated that 1,000 migrants from Honduras are dealing drugs at any given time, with most of them from the Siria Valley, which has a population of 20,000. This community, which spans across two countries makes dangerous decisions as the search for wealth has unintended consequences: death on both sides. While some dealers said they struggled make a living, others said they can make $350,000 a year or more if they help run a local operation. Some of that money is sent back to the villages, where it is fueling a real estate boom. While Honduran migrants dominate the street dealing, the narcotics they sell come from Mexico and are controlled by cartels. Since the pandemic, overdose deaths skyrocketed, taking more than 2,500 lives in three years and street dealers have become more brazen than ever. They peddle drugs at all hours of the day, often in large groups, in some of the most centralized areas of the city.Now one of the most progressive cities in the nation is fracturing over concerns that it has become too permissive.What to do about the Honduran dealers is a key political issue as a major citywide election approaches in 2024.
