San Pedro Sula

Sunday 24th January 1988

We got up at 08:30 hrs. and had breakfast at the restaurant opposite, which offered fried bananas with everything. Then we met the two Americans and loaded our gear into their green Ford pickup. We were then comfortably installed in wooden bucket seats for the journey to San Pedro Sula.

San Pedro Sula is the capital of Cortés Department in Honduras. It is located in the northwest corner of the country in the Sula Valley, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) south of Puerto Cortés on the Caribbean Sea.

Before the arrival of the Spanish, the Sula Valley was home to approximately 50,000 native inhabitants. The area that is home to the modern city served as a local trade hub for the Mayan and Aztec civilizations. The Spanish conquest brought about a demographic collapse from which the native population would never recover.

We didn’t know then that San Pedro Sula was to become the "murder capital of the world" until early 2016 when Caracas, Venezuela, surpassed its homicide rate. According to the Los Angeles Times, in recent times "the homicide rate is stoked by the rivalry of the brutal street gangs, mostly descendants of gangs formed in Los Angeles and deported to Central America in the 1990s, including Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and the 18th Street gang. Their ranks are fed by the disastrous economy of Honduras and emboldened more recently by alliances with Mexican drug traffickers moving cocaine through the country."

By 2019 San Pedro Sula had dropped to number 15 (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate#:~:text=List%20of%20cities%20by%20murder%20rate%20%20,%20%2080.74%20%2042%20more%20rows%20Top). The top 5 on the list of cities by murder rate were Rank City Country Homicides (2019) Population (2019) The top 5 were in Mexico followed by 6 Caracas Venezuela 2,134 2,858,933 7 Acapulco Mexico 600 837,914 8 Cape Town South Africa 3,065 4,488,545 and 9 St. Louis United States 194 300,576 42).

The road was smooth and tarmacked and there was a pleasant breeze. We stopped early on to clamber across an Indiana Jones style swinging wire and wood bridge across a wide river. The sort of bridge that Indy get across and cuts the wires to leave the baddies swinging and dropping into the gorge below.

Back in our seats in the back of the pickup truck we continued through a green rolling landscape where all accessible land was cultivated. The scenery was reminiscent of the English Lake District and the road twisted and turned like a snake. We stopped for a couple of beers on the outskirts of Sula, at a restaurant with a panoramic view over the valley.

The juke box played loud reggae-orientated music. When we arrived in the town centre, we bid farewell to the Americans who had been good company. We booked into the Hotel San Pedro which looked expensive, but we got a double room with communal toilets for 14.70 Lempiras.

We had a snack in the hotel restaurant and went out to find the Bus Station. We kept to the shadows as we had sunburn from being roasted in the sun in the open back of a pickup, the strength of the rays being masked by the breeze.

The town seemed quite modern with a few towering bank buildings amongst the square, coloured tiendas (shops) that we had become familiar with in Central America. At 17:00 hrs. we went to the flics (cinema) and paid 2.5 Lempiras each to see “Fatal Attraction” at the huge Cine Tropicana.

Fatal Attraction is a 1987 American psychological thriller film directed by Adrian Lyne from a screenplay written by James Dearden, based on his 1980 short film Diversion. Starring Glenn Close, Michael Douglas and Anne Archer, the film centres on a married man who has a weekend affair with a woman who refuses to allow it to end and becomes obsessed with him. At one stage she kills his pet rabbit and gave rise to the phrase “bunny boiler” for a female stalker.

The film quality was good, and the film was entertaining, and several bats flitted about in the darkness, clearly visible as they flashed across the path of the projector.

Above: Scarlet Macaws at Copan Ruinas.

Back at the hotel we had a good meal followed by orange cake and strong black coffee. A rat scurried down the stairs, ferreted around behind the counter, and scampered back upstairs without any show of concern from the other customers.

At 20:30 hrs. the cafeteria shut and we went back to our room. San Pedro Sula is a very modern, almost European-looking city, a bit like Athens, with white and black-skinned people as well as the usual brown-skinned inhabitants.

Our hotel is big and it looks as though it should be a lot more expensive than it is. We went for a brief walk around the surrounding area but everywhere was closed. There were people sleeping on the pavement and a few loitered on street corners, many wearing machetes.

We had a coca cola and watched television in the hotel lobby before turning in at 22:15 hrs.