title: Bear Witness: The Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land
author: Ross Halperin
publisher: Liveright
date: 2025
author: Ross Halperin
publisher: Liveright
date: 2025
The setting is the mountainside barrio of Nueva Suyapa in the Honduras. The area is under the control of a gang known for their cruelty. But this is where Kurt Ver Beek, an American sociologist, and Carlos Hernández, a Honduran schoolteacher, chose to raise their families. Kurt and Carlos had committed their lives to helping the poor, recognizing that no one else: police, prosecutors, NGOs, were going to protect their neighbours from the incessant violence they suffered.
Ross Halperin chronicles how these two became quasi-vigilantes and charged into a series of life-and-death battles, not just with this one gang, but also with forces far more dangerous, including a notorious tycoon who commanded about a thousand armed men and a police force whose wickedness defied credulity. Kurt and Carlos would eventually get catapulted from obscurity to being famous power players who had access to the backrooms where legislators, ambassadors, and presidents pulled strings. Their efforts made some of the most violent neighborhoods on earth safer and arguably improved a profoundly corrupt government. But they were forced to compromise their principles in order to make all that happen, and furthermore, they acquired a large number of outraged critics and precipitated some heartbreaking collateral damage.
The way Halperin tells the story, it would make a great action film.
But behind all the drama, action, political, economic, and social conflict is the real-life hardships of poor Honduran citizens who are taken advantage of, abused, and killed by gangs, police, prison guards, and politicians. Even sadder is that churches, including those that call themselves evangelical, are complicit.
Change is hard. Change takes a long time. Change without compromising one's beliefs, morals, standards, principles, is hard - very hard.
Places like the barrios of Honduras are rife with the violence that often comes with being poor. In many of these hard places, criminals are often seen as heroes. The story of this violence and lack of justice can be repeated in hundreds of places around the world.
Their organisation tackled many issues rooted in the poverty and the abuse that affects the poor - from violence to education and health care.
A former student of Kurt and now a therapist
"hypothesized that what was really behind Peace and Justice was Kurt and Carlos's 'need to prove themselves strong and courageous in the face of a threat they have internalized as threatening their own identity and sense of control.'... She seemed to be suggesting that Kurt and Carlos were motivated not by radical selflessness or credos from an ancient age, but by a juvenile hero complex and a garden-variety machismo."
In some senses this book is frustrating... there is so much pain, violence, fear, corruption, lying and manipulation, electioneering abuses, lack of justice... and so little in the way of real solutions.
Near the end of the book, Halperin writes:
... their two-plus decades of all-in altruism, all-in courage, and all-in faith have not gotten them anywhere close to a satisfying conclusion... Maybe all Kurt and Carlos can ever expect is more toil, a lifelong climb that, instead of bringing them higher up a ladder, keeps them pinned to the side of a spinning wheel.
I would highly recommend this book for anyone who is involved in any type of charity work, whether directly or as a supporter. It reveals not only the associated messiness and complications, but also makes real the faith, bravery and persistence required.
#BearWitness
DISCLOSURE:
I received this book free through the Speakeasy blogging book review network.
I received this book free through the Speakeasy blogging book review network.
I was not required to write a positive review.
The opinions I have expressed are my own.
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