TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras // From the dusty football pitch, 11-year-old Maynor Ayala can see two ways out of the gang-controlled slums: on a professional football team, or in a cheap coffin.
Maynor is euphoric after scoring a goal for the first time in weeks, and he briefly allows himself to imagine going to the World Cup one day.
But then his boyish smile fades into hard talk.
“My cousin was shot here on the field,” he says, miming a pistol with his thumb and index finger.
“Remember the taxi driver they executed here a while ago?” says his friend, Marvin Cruz, 14.
“We also went to see a body cut in pieces over there by the bridge,” Maynor says.
Their coach listens with despair. Luis Lopez, 45, who uses a wheelchair because of a bicycle accident more than a decade ago, is working the children hard, hoping the discipline of sport will keep them out of the gangs that dominate much of Tegucigalpa. His threadbare football programme is modest compared to the challenges these children face: the pull of the streets, violence, poverty and drugs.
But as for slum children from Brazil to Botswana, the game is also a lifeline.
Maynor, Marvin and others on the pitch give Mr Lopez hope against the reality of marijuana smokers on the sidelines of the pitch and lost souls like 14-year-old Antony who do not stay in school.
Mr Lopez is teaching boys and girls to play football, knowing that the real game is to stay alive.
Maynor may not know the statistics – that a child his age is shot to death every four days in Honduras, and that the odds only get worse as you get older. But he knows that violent death is common, and that the corpses offer a glimpse of his future if he moves towards the gangs.
He goes to see the bodies, he says, “because you think that next time it could be you there”.
Graveyard pitch
Maynor’s neighbourhood is called Progreso, a name that mocks its dirt roads, open sewage canals and crowded houses. It is surrounded by gang territories and an iron fence its 100 families put up to keep out criminals.
Even so, children hide inside after dark.
The football pitch is built on a graveyard of neighbours who were buried alive when Hurricane Mitch collapsed the hills in 1998. Jose de la Paz Herrera, known as “Chelato Ucles”, the godfather of Honduran football, stepped in with funds to help equip it.
Now 74, he managed the first Honduran team to reach the World Cup – to Spain in 1982 – and he still combs the slums in search of talent like Emilio Izaguirre, 28, one of just five Hondurans playing for a European league.
Izaguirre, who lived in a neighbourhood like Progreso, one of the many battlefields between the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 gangs, competed in the World Cup four years ago and will be on the pitch for Honduras again at the Cup starting in Brazil next week.
After his accident, Mr Lopez first began coaching adults. But his attention was drawn to children on the sidelines. Either they already belonged to a gang or they would soon be recruited, he thought.
Last June, Mr Lopez proposed a youth football programme, telling parents, “training and practice have to defeat vice, and the violence of the gangs”.
Days later, about 40 boys and girls turned out to sign up.
He tells the children football will keep them out of trouble, and they say that is what they want.
“A boy who becomes a gangster ends up killing,” Maynor says. “Violence is the bad road, something that leads to your own death.”
Mr Lopez and the children are careful when speaking of the gangs, and do not talk about them by name.
“The neighborhood over there is controlled by one gang,” Mr Lopez says. Then turning the opposite way, he adds, “and over there it’s the other side”. Neither gang has taken control of Progreso.
When Antony arrived some months ago, he signed the roster with only his first name and age, 14. The other children told Mr Lopez he smoked marijuana. Instead of going to school, he spent his days on buses dressed as a clown, begging for spare change.
“When he came to the field, we teased him and threw rocks,” Maynor says.
Lessons in death
On a recent day, football practice ended with a sense of anticipation. The following night Honduras had a match against Venezuela, and the boys were looking forward to watching on TV. Their spirits fell that evening, however, when word spread that a boy had been found dead, beaten and shot in the legs. Before bedtime, Maynor learnt it was Antony.
The next morning, Maynor and his friends went to see Antony in an open casket. “He was really purple,” Maynor says. By that night, Antony was all but forgotten. The children yell and jump up and down when Honduras scores, then grow anxious when Venezuela ties. They are on their feet when Honduras wins.
If life offers lessons, so does death. Mr Lopez is not about to let Antony’s killing pass, any more than he would miss the opportunity to herald Izaguirre’s success.
He was able to ferret out some details about Antony: he apparently got involved with the Barrio 18 gang and ran into trouble crossing into Mara Salvatrucha territory.
“No one wants to end like Antony, right?” Luisito says to the boys.
The coach will continue to use Antony as an example until there is another corpse with a different name to take his place. Not two weeks pass before the next one: a young man killed on the football pitch. He was not a player, but this time the children are too scared even to speak his name.
Mr Lopez wants them to believe there is an alternative to professional football or death, and Maynor begins to imagine a third option.
“I would like to travel and sell cars around Honduras and even outside of Honduras. That would be a fun job,” he says on a recent afternoon.
That gives Mr Lopez hope.
“On this field, there are 40 boys and girls playing football and only three or four smoking. For now, I am winning. I am giving them a choice. Before, they had no choice.”
* Associated Press
