Avoiding Narcos and corruption in Central America
A while back, my then-girlfriend, her friend, and I went to El Salvador to visit some friends they made during their semester abroad in Chile. While there, we decided to take a road trip from El Salvador to Guatemala to see the Mayan pyramids at Tikal. What followed was a crazy trip narrowly avoiding danger even while making mistakes here and there.
But on the way there, our Salvadoran friend’s mother called, frantically telling him that we shouldn’t go, because a day or two prior, the Zetas, a notorious Mexican drug cartel, came down and massacred a bunch of people in the area. Hearing this, we decided to go to a nearby town, Livingston, to stay the night and see how conditions improve in the morning.
That night at the town, some people tried to sell us drugs, and we met a group of tourists who had been held hostage but then released by the Colombian terrorist group FARC. All in all, an interesting experience.
The next day, we open the newspapers to check the situation, hoping to see it cleared up and getting a green light to go to our original destination: Tikal. Unfortunately, this was not to be. Instead, the entire state was now under martial law, all civil liberties had been suspended and you could be detained indefinitely while the military was called in to stabilize the situation and hunt the narco-gang. So we decided to leave Guatemala to Honduras.
Well, when we got to the border to leave Guatemala to Honduras, the border guards told us slyly that we didn’t get our passports stamps and would now have to pay 30 USD to stamp when exiting. They were extorting us. If we didn’t pay, we could be held there indefinitely.
Being young(er) and stupid, we argued with them, and eventually they invited our Salvadoran friend into the office and closed the windows and doors.
For a brief moment, we we were worried that he was being beaten up or something bad was happening to him, but after a short while he came out, and said they were willing to give us a discount, and they lowered the ransom to 14 USD. We paid it and left the country
Finally we got into Copán, Honduras, and saw ruins of some sort.
It was good experience overall, but you know what the best thing was? I did this all without realizing that I was visiting three of the top five countries for homicide rates that year!