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True stories from the cursed streets of Honduras, the country with the world´s highest murder rate.

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Winner of the 2018 PEN Translates Award for Non-Fiction

Features illustrations by the Honduran artist Germán Andino

Welcome to a country that has a higher casualty rate than Iraq. Wander streets considered the deadliest in the world. Wake up each morning to another batch of corpses - sometimes bound, often mutilated - lining the roads; to the screeching blue light of police sirens and the huddles of ´red journalists´ who make a living chasing after the bloodshed. But Honduras is no warzone. Not officially, anyway.

Ignored by the outside world, this Central American country is ravaged by ultra-violent drug cartels and an equally ruthless, militarised law force. Corruption is rife and the justice system is woefully ineffective. Prisons are full to bursting and barrios are flooded with drugs from South America en route to the US. Cursed by geography, the people are trapped here, caught in a system of poverty and cruelty with no means of escape.

For many years, award-winning journalist Alberto Arce was the only foreign correspondent in Tegucigalpa, Honduras´s beleaguered capital, and he witnessed first-hand the country´s descent into anarchy. Here, he shares his experiences in a series of gripping and atmospheric dispatches: from earnest conversations with narcos , taxi drivers and soldiers, to exposés of state corruption and harrowing accounts of the aftermath of violence. Provocative, revelatory and at time heart-rending, Blood Barrios shines a light on the suffering and stoicism of the Honduran people, and asks the international community if there is more that they can do.

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Map: Routes of cocaine and violence in Honduras

Part I: Red Journalism

1. Inside the Volcano

2. Crime beat Rookie

3. Night of the Chepos

4. Death of a Taxi Driver

5. Four Boards Strapped to the Back

Part II: The Curse of Geography

6. A Little Known War

7. Mosquito Coast

Part III: Houses, Coffins, and Graffiti

8. Refugee Camp

9. One Coffin, One Vote

10. Hallucinations

11. Night of the Fire

Part IV: The Police

12. An Assassin

13. Death Squads

14. Police Reform

15. El Tigre Bonilla, A Culture of Simulacrum

Part V: Storytellers

16. Journalists

17. The Politicians

18. Those Who Imagine

Epilogue: What Am I Doing in Honduras?

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Arce, Alberto
Alberto Arce is an award winning journalist writing for The New York and the Associated Press. In February 2012 he joined the AP as a correspondent in Honduras, where he reported on a prison fire that killed more than 360 inmates his first day on the job. Since then he has ventured into many hostile environments, from gang-controlled prisons to the barrios of Tegucigalpa for stories about gang terror and police death squads. After that, he joined AP´s Mexico City bureau, where he continues to cover Central America. Arce graduated from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain and earned his masters from the Latin American Faculty for Social Sciences in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He won the 2012 Rory Peck award for his coverage of the Battle for Misrata in the Libyan civil war and reported before that from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran or Syria. This is his first book.

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