Marlene Banegas: A Honduran Prosecutor Seizes Life
On Tuesday, March 16, an anonymous Honduran accountant testified in the Southern District of New York that in 2013 he’d recorded two videos of the current President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández. In one video, Hernández accepted bribes from the defendant, a major drug trafficker, in exchange for protection from the police and military. In the other, Hernández discussed how he’d stolen money from the national health service. The accountant gave a copy of the first video to a man named Christian Ayala, and a copy of the second one to a prosecutor in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, named Marlene Banegas.
There she was again, Marlene Banegas. I knew Marlene Banegas. Maybe.
In 2007, I was on a long bus ride across Honduras with nothing to read, so I decided to entertain myself by getting to know everything inside my passport. After I had exhausted the joys of the Travel Warnings from The Department of State and the muted background paper with the seals of all fifty states, I moved on to the entry permits. In those years, the passport stamp you got when you entered Honduras included the name of the immigration official who’d admitted you. I discovered that the same woman had stamped my passport in the San Pedro Sula airport two different times: Marlene Banegas. I loved her name, in my passport among other beautiful evocative Honduran names like Alcides, Arquimides, Lizardo, Xiomara. For years afterward, I thought about who she might be. Of course this was all just a silly private thing, and not important enough to ever mention to anyone else.
At that point I’d been traveling in and out of Honduras for several years, first working with the Coalition of Honduran Banana Unions to develop a potential union label for the US market, then writing a book about women’s projects in the banana unions. On June 28, 2009 a military coup deposed democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya. It was huge and and destructive earthquake that devastated the entire country. Now all my Honduran friends and colleagues threw themselves into the enormous resistance that rose up in response. Now all of them faced ever-more terrifying repression from waves and waves of assassinations, tear gas, and military and police roundups. As it became clearer and clear that the Obama Administration was backing and soon promoting the post-coup regime, I threw myself into trying to challenge US policy — writing opeds, feeding information to journalists, and, increasingly, lobbying Congress — and kept it up.
When I passed through immigration every six months or so in the years after the coup, I got only men agents, so there was no Marlene Banegas to be seen. In any event I was now more worried about whether I’d be denied entry or admitted or detained (or worse), given my very public denunciations of the regime, published in the Honduran as well as US media. (Once, the agent swiped my passport, looked close at something on the screen, walked over to another office to discuss something, then came back and stamped me in, without ever making eye contact.)
Then, in 2011 or `12, Marlene Banegas’s name flashed by me in a Honduran newspaper. She’d been quoted; she was a government prosecutor in San Pedro Sula. Was this the Marlene Banegas in my passport? I remember wondering if her job meant she was a loyal member of the National Party, because a government employment in Honduras is very often a patronage job, disbursed to loyal members of one of the two right-wing political parties who had traded off in power for a hundred years. In November, 2009 the National Party had claimed victory over the Liberal Party in a completely bogus election controlled by the coup perpetrators. I wondered vaguely if Marlene Banegas’s position meant she had supported the coup, and hoped it wasn’t true.
Of course I had no way of knowing if Marlene Banegas the prosecutor whose name I saw in the paper was the same Marlene Banegas who’d stamped my passport.
* * *
On October 10, 2014, I clicked open El Tiempo, then the big daily newspaper in San Pedro Sula, and read that two prosecutors in the city had been assassinated: the prosecutor for environmental crimes, Olga Patricia Eufragio, and the coordinator of the homicide division…Marlene Banegas.
They had been driving on the Avenida Circunvalación at 5 p.m. waiting at a light. Another car had crossed in front of theirs, stopped, and two men jumped and pumped 52 bullets into Marlene Banegas’s body and nine into Olga Patricia Eufrago’s. The presumed target was Banegas.
I’d never told anyone about my imaginary friend. And now she was dead. With 52 bullet holes. One more Honduran body floating in what I had come to call by that point the River of Horror. How could I explain to others — or to myself — what she meant to me? I’d been reading and writing about murders and assassinations almost daily in the Honduran papers for over five years by that point, and was only one degree of separation from dozens who’d been killed. Why did this one get to me?
In the months that followed, every time stories about her assassination popped up in the papers something flowed through me and I’d spontaneously cry. The police followed leads, tracked down alleged culprits using footage from local businesses’s surveillance cameras, compared bullet casings from a subsequent shooting, and eventually arrested two members of Barrio 18 — one of the two biggest gangs in Central America, with tentacles up and down the continent as far as Canada. According to the police, Barrio 18 leaders had ordered the hit from inside prison. Earlier, Banegas had successfully prosecuted three Barrio 18 members for a massacre of 17 people in a shoe factory, and she’d reported receiving death threats from them. The police had provided security protection, but it had been withdrawn two years before, after she’d stepped down from being chief of the prosecutors for the northwest region.
Who knew though, if it was Barrio 18 that actually killed her. No one trusts the Honduras police, who are famously and fabulously corrupt. Marlene Banegas worked on a long list of volatile cases, any one of which could have elicited her assassination: She’d investigated a stash full of heavy arms including uniforms and license plates from the Mexican police, 17 AK-47s and 29 grenades, that allegedly belonged to Los Zetas, the major Mexican drug cartel. She’d convicted a fellow-prosecutor in San Pedro Sula of money laundering for drug traffickers — although a judge quickly set him free (she got death threats about that one, too). She’d investigated the bald disappearance of an airplane seized from drug traffickers, that had been stolen while it was parked in the Honduran Armed Forces’ section of the San Pedro’s airport.
On the day she was killed, Marlene Banegas was reviewing the case of four people who allegedly died because of corruption at the Instituto Hondureño de Seguridad Social (IHSS), the national health service — part of a broader scandal in which at least $300 million was stolen from the IHSS, bankrupting it. Confirmed documents have since established that at least $90 million of the funds were diverted into the ruling party’s election campaign, including the election fund of President Juan Orlando Hernández, who, thanks to the Southern District of New York, we now know accepted millions of dollars from drug traffickers — including El Chapo Guzman, Geovany Fuentes, and the brothers known as the Cachiros. That was why the accountant chose her as the recipient of his video.
In 2017 two former Honduran policemen were convicted of “illicit association” and sentenced to 13 years each for the killings of Marlene Banegas and Olga Eufragio. One of them had worked alongside Banegas. According to the charges, they had been in cahoots with the famous transnational gang Mara Salvatrucha, MS-13 — not Barrio 18 its great rival, as originally postulated — and had adulterated, diverted, and slowed down reports from the crime scene to erase evidence of MS-13’s guilt.
Alexander Mendoza, a famous MS-13 leader known as “El Porky,’ was also charged with killing the two prosecutors. This past February 2021 he was absolved of the crime by the spectacularly corrupt courts. His whereabouts are unknown, though, because a year before, in February 2020, he staged his dramatic escape from a prison in El Progreso, Honduras, where he was being held for other crimes. At least 29 men in military and police uniforms took part, in an operation observers noted was far beyond the capacity of the gangs themselves.
* * *
In June 2015, eight months after Banegas was killed, I was serving as an expert witness in the deportation case of a Honduran man named Samuel Flores. He had been kidnapped and tortured for a month by the Honduran police right after the coup, in order to try to extract information about his famous mother, Margarita Murillo, a prominent activist with the campesino movement and the post-coup Resistance. She herself was later assassinated outside San Pedro Sula in August, 2014, five years later, while Samuel was in detention in the U.S. As I waded through a pile of documents about the deportation case — testimonies from Samuel and his family members, interviews by Homeland Security, news clips about his mother’s killing — I turned the page to find an affadavit from the public prosecutors’ office in San Pedro Sula, attesting to the circumstances of Murillo’s death. Signed by Marlene Banegas. Two months before she herself was killed.
Long after her death, there she was again; in my study at home. And here, too, was yet another volatile case that could have prompted her assassination.
I told my story about Banegas to Samuel’s lawyer, who told me that before she was assassinated, Banegas had dreamed she was killed by gang members on a motorcycle. I dug up the story. “Marlene Banegas Dreamed That She Was Machinegunned,” read the headline in El Tiempo two days after she died, under a picture of a woman with a classically round, flat Honduran face, wearing wire-framed glasses and a long tan photographer’s vest.
At the bottom of the story were two more close-ups. In the first, she’s wearing a thick bullet-proof vest over a bright blue shirt, a military helmet with a chin strap, yellow goggles, and shiny round earrings. She’s got a strong, clear, look on her face, and stares straight at the camera like a strong and forthright and clear woman who knows exactly who she is and what’s she doing. The caption read: “Her passion for her profession Marlene Banegas made her work from early in the day until the late hours of dusk.” Below that, in another shot, she’s smiling at the camera, seated at some kind of official function with a microphone tilted toward her, wearing a dark blue polo shirt and smallish silver hoop earrings. The caption, at the very end of the story, declared: “She asked jokingly that this picture be placed on her coffin when she died.”
I also found, to my shock, hundreds of Marlene Banegas’s tweets, still posted on line. Right up to her last day, they were full of love for life, dedication to work, and tough clarity about what she was taking on. “You don’t have to ask anything from life, you have to give it everything….Without fears or limits, with enthusiasm, passion, and your whole heart.” “I love my profession so much, that I can say I’ve never worked a single day in my life.” “Those who dedicate themselves to prolonging their lives, can’t enjoy it.” Three days before she was killed, she tweeted: “There are days when one feels the magnitude of the miracle of existence. And one’s thinking becomes deeper, feeling more intense, life more alive.”
* * *
Was this beautiful woman, so alive, so dead, my Marlene Banegas from the immigration kiosk? Maybe, maybe not. She might have worked there while she was in law school, or right after. There are at least three different Marlene Banegases in San Pedro Sula, according to my internet search. And for her part, did Marlene Banegas, the prosecutor who was killed, know who I was? She could have easily read my articles about Honduras that were prominently reprinted in El Tiempo in San Pedro Sula twice while she was alive. She might have heard me on Honduran TV, or radio. She could be a friend of any number of local friends of mine.
This is not a victim story. In article about article about Honduras, journalists tell the same narrative about how unremittingly terrible things are there. `Here I am in the San Pedro Sula morgue,’ they write, `where a sobbing mother identifies the body of her son. No one has any hope.’ You’d never know there is a vibrant grassroots opposition movement alive and well in San Pedro Sula, at the exact same time, right under their noses. You’d never know an enormous resistance movement rose up nationwide to protest the 2009 military coup that deposed democratically-elected President Manual Zelaya. You’d never know that two new brand-new opposition party of the center and center-left, sprang up in the city 2012 and `13, and successfully threw out many of the corrupt incumbents of the traditional parties in the 2013 elections, and that they actually won the election in 2017 — although it was stolen by President Juan Orlando Hernández. You’d never know that day in and day out, in that same Honduran city, Marlene Banegas had been heroically fighting all those cases with all her heart. She looked her enemies in the face, she looked death in the face, and she said: here I am. I love my work. I love life. I am fighting for justice. She knew what she was doing, and she was by no means hopeless.
There are dozens, hundreds, thousands of Marlene Banegases in Honduras — women who fight hard for justice and love life and take incredible risks,. Their vibrant activism full of dedication, joy, and courage is thriving all Honduras all day every day, right now — in the Indigenous, Afro-Indignenous, and campesino land-rights movement, in the movement against domestic violence and anti-LGBTQI violence, in neighborhood associations, in you name it. Many of them, like Samuel’s mother Margarita Murillo, the campesino activist, and Berrta Cáceres, the famous Indigenous and environmental activist, have been assassinated. I’m sure they have all imagined their funerals.
Now, after Geovanny Fuentes’s trial in New York, I’m asking all over again, Who killed Marlene Banegas? just as we ask, Who killed Berta Cáceres? and Who killed Margarita Murillo?
Was it Juan Orlando Hernández, the current US-supported President of Honduras? Did he do it because Marlene Banegas had that tape of him? Or was it Fuentes, the other man in the video, who did her in?
And, I wonder, where is that tape now?
I do know that when the accountant asked her to keep a copy of the damning video for him, Marlene Banegas, my heroine, chose to accept it.
