Honduran army races gangs to reach child trash-pickers

Fourteen-year-old Cristian competes with stray dogs, scavenging birds and hundreds of other trash-pickers for food at a Honduran dump, but when the army offers him a square meal, he warily declines.
Colonel Elvin Corea, whose uniform stands out against the rotting piles of garbage at the Tegucigalpa dump, says the teenager is probably scared of being targeted by one of Honduras's notoriously violent gangs if he takes part in "Guardians of the Nation," a controversial army program to steer at-risk youth away from drugs and crime.
"Signing them up is getting difficult. The youngsters don't want to participate because the gangsters threaten them," said Corea, who heads the program in the capital.
"The gangs feel threatened because the program cuts into their recruitment."
When the program first launched at the dump, where the gangs have a tight grip, police had to provide protection for families that enrolled their children, Corea said.
The gangs are not the only ones who dislike the program. Rights groups say the army should not be trying to fill social policy gaps left by the government.
But Corea aims to sign up 25,000 youths each year -- an ambitious target in this small Central American country of eight million people.
Cristian -- who is wearing a dirty Barcelona jersey, torn pants and the shreds of some old sneakers -- goes back to eating a piece of bread, apparently undisturbed by his fetid surroundings.
Like him, other young trash-pickers shyly decline the colonel's offer to join the program, or nervously avoid the soldiers fanning out across the dump.
Corea manages to find one recruit -- a smiling, skinny 14-year-old who calls himself "El Pocho."
He piles into one of the army trucks in Corea's convoy and is driven off with 86 other 10- to 18-year-olds picked up in poor neighborhoods around the capital.
Like El Salvador and Guatemala, Honduras has been badly shaken by drug gangs that emerged in Los Angeles in the 1980s.
The gangs, or "maras," arrived in Central America when the United States deported thousands of immigrants who had fled north to escape the civil wars that gripped the region in the 1980s and 1990s.
- Government 'failing children' -
Gangs like Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 are known for running the drug trade with gruesome violence, sporting full-body tattoos and subjecting new recruits to bloody initiation rituals that sometimes include killing a rival.
The gangs have an estimated 100,000 members in the three countries and are constantly recruiting.
Gang violence has given Honduras the world's highest homicide rate, at 90.4 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2012.
At an army base in the capital, the young "Guardians" participants are told to take a seat on the ground beneath some pine trees.
A young evangelical Christian tells them how his "encounter with God" changed his life after he fell in with a crowd of drug addicts and was nearly shot on three different occasions.
The recruits then get breakfast before another series of talks on subjects including employment prospects and sexually transmitted diseases.
Participants attend such sessions every Saturday for three months.
The program was launched in 2000 at a base in the north of the country but gained momentum when conservative President Juan Orlando Hernandez took office last year.
It has now been extended to more than 40 military units across the country.
But the criticism has also increased.
"A state does this when it has failed in its responsibilities to help children. Instead of designing a strategy to help them, it has created a program within the framework of military strategy," said Bertha Oliva, coordinator of a rights group called Cofadeh.
Scavengers at the dump meanwhile say the chances of a better future are slim.
"I'm 49 years old and I've been coming here since I was 14. We have to live on something. I'm not going to let my four kids die of hunger," said Santos Sanchez as he picked up cans and bottles to take to a recycling center.