Nazario writes: "Understanding what is going on in Honduras is crucial to understanding, and solving, what is going on at the United States border, where 268,044 migrants were stopped in the first five months of fiscal 2019, nearly twice as many as in the same period last year."
Honduran migrants joined a caravan for a journey to the United States in January. (photo: Victor J. Blue)
05 April 19
he murder of Sherill Yubissa Hernández Mancía explains why Central American women are fleeing north.
Ms. Hernández was a 28-year-old agent for the Agencia Técnica de Investigación Criminal, or ATIC, Honduras’s F.B.I., the agency charged with investigating the killings of women. She was having an affair with Wilfredo Garcia, who was the head of the agency’s office in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second-largest city. According to people involved in the case, at some point Ms. Hernández seems to have come to believe that instead of working to take down MS-13, the nation’s largest gang, her lover was married to the sister of an MS-13 leader, and was aiding the criminals.
On June 11, 2018, Ms. Hernández was found dead in her bed. Karla Beltrán, who works at the San Pedro Sula morgue, told me that in an unprecedented move, ATIC barred Forensic Medicine officials, along with the police and the prosecutor, from the crime scene. ATIC officials went alone and pronounced the death a suicide.
