The day we were bribed by a cop…

We’ve been told from the beginning that the law enforcement system here is corrupted, but it wasn’t until last Saturday that we actually figured this out firsthand. Sean, Lauren and I were stopped at a stoplight when we noticed someone knocking on the driver’s side window. Sean rolled it down and the cop immediately asked for his license, so he handed over his Washington State license. The cop studied it for a moment, not understanding much I’m sure, and then promptly began yelling and spitting everywhere. As far as we could tell, his main gripe was that Sean was not allowed to drive in Honduras because he didn’t have a Honduran driver’s license… which isn’t completely the truth. We’d been stopped before and no one had ever said anything about it, plus we’ve always been told that we could use our driver’s licenses from home until we’ve been here 3 months. And yes, we’ve been here slightly more than 3 months, but there’s no way the cop would know that unless he saw our passports which we didn’t have on us or our residency cards which we didn’t offer up... because we knew what his intent was anyway. So we tried explaining what we had been told, and he just kept yelling. He kept talking about some building we had visit to get the licenses, but we understood little of what he was saying because he was talking so fast and loud… trying to intimidate us and making no attempt at helping us actually understand. He asked where we were headed, and we said “the bank,” which probably wasn’t the best answer in retrospect, but the truth… and we were less than a ½ block away. He took Sean’s license and told us he’d meet us in the parking lot. We drove over, got out of the truck and waited. Before long he was there, yelling where he’d left off. He didn’t have anything that he was going to write us a ticket with, but he did have a pen which he used to write $7000 on his hand-making sure we were completely clear on how much money he wanted us to give him. We weren’t sure if it was in dollars or lempiras, which would have been $350 anyway, but either way it was a completely ridiculous request. At this point, he looked down at his watch to see it was almost noon and asked if we were going to the bank because it was closing. He’d been harassing us in the parking lot for about 15 minutes by this point, so we walked up to the bank to find it closed already. So he kept asking what we were going to do about this “problem” that we were no longer allowed to drive our truck without the proper license. We explained we were volunteers and had no money, especially at this point because he hadn’t allowed us to go to the bank in time. Realizing his mistake he tried telling us about other banks we could visit, but we only go to the one, and he also asked if we had a bankcard that we could use to get money from an ATM, which we don’t have anyway. We told him he could take us to his office and show us where this law he was referencing was written, but he didn’t want to do that. And we said he could talk to our “bosses” on the phone, with the idea we’d call Father Miguel or Father Daniel from our church for him to talk to, since they’d understand his Spanish rantings better anyway, but for some reason he didn’t want to do that either. But apparently our only option was to pay him then and there… with the money we didn’t have. At some point, he even lowered his asking price to 500 Lempira, or about $25… but we didn’t even have that much money on us even if we wanted to pay him because we had been counting on going to the bank. Anyway, this guy’s plan into freaking us out until we paid him off pretty much fell through. We like to think we out-witted him, and we definitely outlasted him after standing there letting him yell at us for what seemed like an hour. He never actually threatened us with anything substantial, like throwing us in jail- which probably would have scared us into paying him somehow, nor did he write us a ticket, which we would have gladly paid had it been valid. He only had Sean’s driver’s license, and had he insisted we couldn’t drive, we could have left our truck at the bank and taken a bus home, but he finally returned Sean’s ID and told us we could go. It’s funny to think about how we had done something so wrong that we deserved all that yelling and owed all that money, but in the end we were left with no punishment besides the loss of about an hour of our lives we will never get back. It was an incredibly frustrating experience, but not really surprising since we had been warned about the police here. The most irritating part is that there’s nothing really that can be done about it… it’s not like we’re going to report them to the police... they don’t even wear any sort of identification even if we wanted to. It´s also strange to think that we´ve been discriminated against, but it´s definitely the case. It´s not something I´ve experienced before coming here, but it is something we have experience here... not everyday, but occassionaly when people assume we´re tourists who don´t know what is going on or the language (which is sometimes true). As frustrating as it is though, I think we can embrace it as a good lesson.