Reporter finds story in Honduras

“Returned” is a multipart series launched by the Union-tribune this year that investigates the U.S. asylum system.

The first installment, published in February, told the story of a Nicaraguan who is still waiting to find out whether the United States will give her refuge.

The second installment explored disparities in asylum outcomes through an analysis of immigration court records.

This third installment looks at what can happen when the system doesn’t protect someone who had a legitimate fear of death.

Immigration reporter Kate Morrissey discusses her reporting trip to San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and what it took to bring together this latest part of “Returned.”

Q:

How did you find Yovin Villanueva, and why did you choose to tell his story?

A:

I wanted to understand what it looks like when the system doesn’t protect someone who is in danger.

With the help of our summer intern Celina Tebor, I searched for newspaper articles about deportees who had been killed in Honduras and El Salvador.

When I saw Villanueva’s story in an article in Contracorriente by Catherine Calderón that mentioned him as a bboy, I knew I was onto something.

I am a bgirl — I’ve been breaking since 2005. Telling an intimate story about someone I have never been able to meet or interview is difficult at best, but through our mutual interest in hip-hop, I felt that I would be able to access a different layer of Villanueva’s story and to tell it more completely.

Q:

What do you think Villanueva’s participation in hip-hop brings to this story?

A:

When I think about what I’ve learned as a participant in hip-hop culture, about its origins and what I learned on my reporting trip in Honduras, there are elements of overlap. In the 1970s, the government in New York had basically abandoned much of the South Bronx, as evidenced in deep reporting by journalists like Jeff Chang.

It was children growing up there, told by society that they didn’t matter, who created a movement to assert that yes, actually, they did. That movement was hip-hop.

The Honduran government, plagued by corruption, is absent now for most of its people. The fact that young people there are latching onto hip-hop’s teachings and message is not surprising. And yet, the conditions of hip-hop’s impoverished origins are often romanticized in a way that is both inaccurate and unhelpful.

Many of the culture’s pioneers are still coping with the traumas they experienced as children. These young people in Honduras are also facing ongoing traumas that are not likely to go away in their lifetimes unless conditions in their country change dramatically.

Q:

What was it like reporting in Honduras?

A:

I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t afraid before I left, knowing that we were headed to neighborhoods to report on a story that the gangs in control there probably would not want us to tell. But with the help of two very knowledgeable “fixers,” and the numerous resources available through groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists, photographer Nelvin Cepeda and I were able to safely navigate and learn even more than I had hoped.

Fixers are invaluable for reporting trips like this. For example, our fixers knew to roll our car windows down so that the gang could see that we were not a threat when we entered its territory.

One of our fixers, who worked for years as a journalist in San Pedro Sula, told us his own story of getting kidnapped.

Over dinner with Calderón, she shared how difficult working as a woman journalist in Honduras can be.

These experiences, along with what we witnessed in Nicaragua, further solidified for me just how privileged I am to be a journalist based in the United States.

Q:

Did anything surprise you on your trip?

A:

The level of dysfunction we witnessed in the criminal justice system surprised me.

I knew there was corruption, and I knew that cases were rarely solved.

But still, when a detective told us that a pair of shoes that a homicide victim had been wearing should still be available at the morgue as part of the case, only to have the morgue tell us they were likely thrown away, was a surprise.

It seemed like a detail that someone investigating a case should know.

Q:

For many of the quotes in this installment, as in the first one, you kept the original Spanish and put the English in italics. Why is that?

A:

Writing for a region where many in our audience also speak Spanish, it felt more honest to print the person’s words as they said them.

It also acknowledges that I as a White, U.s.-born journalist am coming to this story as an outsider. I am the “other.”

And so I’ve put the English translations for any Spanish used in the story in italics, rather than the more traditional italicizing of the Spanish itself, as a way to acknowledge that dynamic.

Q:

What can readers expect from the next installment of “Returned”?

A:

The fourth — and final — part of the series will look more at solutions to the system’s shortcomings, as well as how the U.S. asylum system fits into the bigger picture of how the world has decided to grapple with forced displacement.