Itz’ana Resort

Belize

Opening in April, Ìęis a perfect base camp for exploring the best of Belize. Night-hike the world’s only jaguar reserve in search of the nocturnal cats? Check. Swim with whale sharks during their annual migration? Check. Sail to empty isles for private snorkeling sessions? Check. Float in the waters of the iconic Great Blue Hole? Check. Cast for wahoo lurking beyond one of the planet’s largest barrier reefs? Check. But good luck prying yourself away from Itz’ana’s lush 20-acre property. The 30-suite resort sits on the Placencia peninsula, a 16-mile-long finger of perfect white sand that separates a mangrove-lined lagoon from the Caribbean. It’s all too easy to spend your days bouncing from the , offering one of the largest rum selections in the country, to the , which serves reef-to-table snapper and conch on a deck over the azure water. From $325 —Graham Averill

Ìę

Guatemalan Highland Tour

Guatemala

In 2014, Vermont native Brendan James was working for a nonprofit in Guatemala when some locals loaned him a hardtail mountain bike and led him along ancient Maya paths weaving around Lake Atitlán. He found fast trails flowing through cool, alpine forests and a homegrown zeal for the sport that’s only flourished since. Today, Guatemala is becoming Central America’s premier fat-tire destination, with newly built singletrack and bike parks opening across the country. James now spends 150 days a year scouting those trails and leading trips for his guiding company, . This year he’s launching the , a seven-day, 96-mile cross-country epic with 29,000 feet of downhill. Along the way, you’ll follow livestock trails and old agricultural paths past 14th-century ruins, crash in small-town posadas, and relax in natural hot springs. From $2,375 —Tim Neville

Mukan Resort

Mexico

Reaching this Ìęin the Riviera Maya requires a 45-minute speedboat ride through mangrove canals, so it feels far removed from the region’s hot spot of Tulum. But there are other reasons this luxurious property stands out, namely that its ten suites, bungalows, and villas are among the very few accommodations nestled inside the 1.3-million-acre , a Unesco World Heritage site containing Maya ruins, a section of the 620-mile-long Mesoamerican Reef, and a jungle filled with diverse wildlife including 356 species of birds and 318 species of butterflies. Ìęin search of sea turtles, scout the biosphere and add threatened birds like the reddish egret to your life list, or fish for tarpon, permit, and barracuda with local guides who have plied these waters since childhood. The day’s catch is served on a dock over Sian Ka’an Lagoon. From $420 —Stephanie Pearson

Isla Palenque

Panama

Want to play out a castaway fantasy? Newly revamped , located on the pristine Gulf of ChiriquĂ­, along the country’s Pacific coast, ticks all the right boxes—with some rather exquisite enhancements. More than half of the 400-acre private island is a nature preserve that neighbors Coiba National Park, a 38-island, 673-square-mile expanse filled with dolphins, leatherback turtles, and whitetip reef sharks. First envisioned as a safari-style camp in 2012, the resort owners reinvented it last summer by constructing eight thatch-roofed casitas just steps from seven gloriously empty beaches. Spend your days exploring reefs and nearby islands like Las Piñalitas by boat, kayak, or paddleboard, or hike to archeological sites full of pottery shards and stone tools left by the island’s pre-Colombian inhabitants. Come evening dine on local favorites like °ùŽÇČÔ»ćĂłČÔ, an Afro-Caribbean coconut stew, while keeping an eye out for breaching humpbacks. If you book through our travel partner , you’ll get four nights for the price of three. From $770 for two people, all-inclusive —T.N.

The Maya Experience, Ka’ana Resort

Guatemala and Belize

Tikal, the capital of Central America’s ancient Maya civilization, was discovered in Guatemala in the mid-1800s, and its stone temples have been a popular tourist destination for de-cades. But the extensive system of roads and canals that connected Tikal to thousands of previously unknown Maya structures wasn’t uncovered until 2016, when researchers began using planes and lasers to pierce the dense jungle canopy and map what’s been dubbed the Maya Megalopolis. Fernando Paiz, whose Foundation for Maya Cultural and Natural Heritage spearheaded the research, also owns the plush Ìęin neighboring Belize. Last spring he blended his two passions to create Ka’ana’s new , a deep immersion into the ancient culture. You’ll follow guides into the jungle on the way to the 77-foot-tall temple of Cahal Pech, learn to cook traditional dishes like the citrus-marinated pork known as poc chuc, or ride in a helicopter with Paiz and marvel as he recounts how the network of structures below is just beginning to be understood by archeologists. From $1,117 for two people —G.A.

Origen Escapes

Costa Rica

This country’s pura vida energy and epic surf spots aren’t a secret. But Costa Rica still has plenty of untapped terrain. , a no-expenses-spared bespoke outfitter, specializes in taking clients to the country’s untouched corners. In December, Origen’s four owners—including Ofer Ketter, a former lieutenant in the Israel Defense Force, and expert waterman and Costa Rican native Felipe Artinano—used their years of expertise to launch the Transformational Travel Series, a group of one-to-two-week itineraries highlighting environmental responsibility and local conservation efforts. Adventurous travelers can Ìęor raft 16 miles of jungle-shaded rapids, while citizen scientists can head off the grid with top naturalists to document new species or track migrating hammerhead sharks. From $1,200 per night —Jen Murphy

Sansara Surf and Yoga Resort

Panama

While parts of Central America sometimes feel overrun with surfboard-toting gringos, Panama has maintained an undiscovered vibe, especially along the southerly Azuero peninsula. The country’s cultural heartland, this region features Spanish colonial churches, biologically diverse national parks, and some seriously great waves from December to May. Located in the sleepy village of Cambutal, Ìę11 cabanas are just steps from the Pacific Ocean, and with nearby beach, point, and reef breaks, you’re sure to find the wave you’re looking for. Choose from all-inclusive weeklong , or create your own Ă  la carte trip filled with offshore tuna fishing, snorkeling, and afternoons spent lounging in the natural pools of a nearby waterfall. No matter which you pick, the use of bikes, SUPs, and kayaks is included in your stay. From $199 —J.M.

Yemaya

Nicaragua

Political unrest in this country over the summer and fall—during which protesters clashed with security forces over government corruption—scared away so many travelers that numerous lodges and tour operators had to shutter their doors. Now, as the turmoil appears to be calming down, traveling here will help these businesses get back on their feet, and resorts that were never near the unrest are enticing visitors with deals. Consider , a 16-bungalow hideaway on the northern tip of Little Corn Island, a carless, 1.2-square-mile dollop of sand 45 miles off the mainland in the Caribbean. The property was revamped in 2017 with five remodeled luxury suites, and it’s slated to reopen in time for the winter holiday season with cut rates of $95 per night, leaving you to splurge on sundowners from the beachside bar, in-room massages, and Ìęon its 40-foot handcrafted sailboat. —T.N.

Acantilados

El Salvador

The surf-focused Salvadorean town of La Libertad has never seen anything like . The sleek 19-room boutique hotel, which opened in November, sits cantilevered over a cliff, exponentially amping the drama of the infinity pool. Surf the classic right-hand point break of El Sunzal in the morning, with or without an expert instructor, then stave off gnawing hunger at El Casco, a renovated century-old colonial house on the property that serves pupusas, tamales, quesadillas, and ČԳܱđČ”Čč»ćŽÇČő—sweet Salvadorean dumplings. In the evening, soak your tired muscles in the saltwater pools, then head to the hotel’s craft-cocktail bar for a Martini Albahaca y Sandia, a mix of watermelon, basil, and vodka. Hikers should make the 90-minute drive northwest to Ìęand summit 7,812-foot Santa Ana, the country’s highest volcano. The view of turquoise Lake Coatepeque is worth it. From $159 —S.P.

Honduran Coffee Route

Honduras

Even though crime has dropped by half over the past five years, Honduras still gets a bad rap. Wandering around the city of Tegucigalpa alone at night was never a great idea, but don’t judge a country by its capital. This fall, Central America’s second-largest nation has made it easier than ever for travelers to check out one of the things Hondurans do best: grow delicious coffee. The new Ìęisn’t a single road but a network of sustainable farms, regional tasting labs and research centers, and more than 60 lively cafĂ©s in six distinct growing regions. The maps and resources on the route’s website will help you craft your itinerary. Keep it simple by focusing on one region—like CopĂĄn, home to a magnificent tenth-century Maya city and seed-to-cup coffee varietals with hints of chocolate, caramel, and orange. Get a room at (from $124), which once catered to archeologists, and spend a morning taking a hike around Finca Santa Isabel, a 200-acre family-run coffee plantation with 85 species of birds, like white-breasted hawks and bushy-crested jays. If you’d prefer to have a guide, CopĂĄn’s Xukpi Tours can take care of housing and transportation. —T.N.

The Whole Shebang

For cyclists who want to see it all—Mexico’s Maya ruins, Guatemala’s volcano-ringed Lake Atitlán, El Salvador’s sublime surf breaks, Nicaragua’s colonial cities, Costa Rica’s jungle, the Panama Canal, and the unsung spaces in between—sign up for the Mexico City to Panama City leg of . For 2019, this 2,467-mile, 40-day van- and chef-supported portion of the 9,013-mile journey has been rerouted so that all but eight miles are paved (though paved is a relative term, so bring a comfortable bike with beefy tires). From $8,000 —S.P.

The post The 11 Best New Reasons to Visit Central America appeared first on čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏ Online.

Hot, humid, and remote, Guanaja, along Honduras'sÌęMosquito Coast, isn’t all that inviting. But that hasn’t stopped American fly-fishingÌęguide Ìęand , who grew up in Mangrove Bight, fromÌędeveloping one of the world’s most productive bonefish and permit fisheries there. Beyond the Horizon, from the filmmakers at , chronicles their adventure.Ìę

The post ‘Beyond the Horizon’ appeared first on čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏ Online.

Just before two o’clock in the morning on Thursday, March 3, 2016, the phone rang at TomĂĄs GĂłmez Membreño’s home in La Esperanza, 70 miles west of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. Membreño, a leader of the (COPINH), the country’s most prominent environmental-activist group, groped for the receiver. The organization’s attorney was on the line, and the news he had was grim.

“The first thing he said was, ‘Tomasito, are you OK?’ ” recalled Membreño, a short, muscular man in his late thirties wearing cutoff jeans and a green T-shirt emblazoned with the words NO IMPUNIDAD—no impunity. “It scared me, because I knew that something must have happened. I said, ‘Yes, I’m fine. I was asleep.’ He said, ‘They shot Berta.’ ”Ìę

Berta Isabel CĂĄceres Flores, Central America’s most renowned environmentalist and a 2015 winner of the prestigious for grassroots activism, had been leading a campaign to stop the construction of the Agua Zarca dam on the Gualcarque River, which the Lenca, the largest of Honduras’s nine indigenous groups, consider sacred. The 44-year-old CĂĄceres had organized protests, road blockages, and other acts of civil disobedience against Desarrollos EnergĂ©ticos S.A., or DESA, the large Honduran hydroelectric firm that is building the dam with funding from a consortium of development banks. Over the previous two years, the campaign had spiraled into violence. Honduran security forces shot and killed several demonstrators. Two major international backers pulled out of the project under worldwide pressure. CĂĄceres was harassed, threatened, and forced to defend herself against charges of inciting violence. “People from the dam company would meet us at the river and tell us that we would be killed,” Membreño told me.Ìę

In January, at a staff meeting in the same conference room where I was now speaking with Membreño, CĂĄceres had shared with her colleagues a recent nightmare: a giant snake had leapt out of the ground and pounced on her, suffocating her to death. “The conclusion that we drew,” Membreño told me as we sat at a battered wooden table in the luridly decorated room, which was covered with murals of Amazon-like peasant women, giant ears of corn, indigenous battles against conquistadores, and newly painted portraits of CĂĄceres, “was that this would be Berta’s most dangerous year, and her enemies would want to kill her at any moment.”Ìę

On that March night, Membreño drove through the deserted streets to CĂĄceres’s home, a small lime green box two miles outside town. The police had already removedÌęher body by the time he arrived. Inside he found Gustavo Castro Soto, 53, a fellow activist from Mexico who’d been staying with CĂĄceres while he attended a COPINH workshop.Ìę

The gunmen had arrived between 11:30 p.m. and midnight, Castro told Membreño. Hearing noises, CĂĄceres had gotten out of bed and gone to the back door. “Who’s there?” she called out. At that moment, the attackers kicked their way inside and fired four shots at her at close range. One gunman then entered the guest bedroom and fired on Castro. The bullet tore through his hand and took off part of his ear. He fell to the ground and lay still, playing dead. Then the assassins left. A few minutes later, Castro heard CĂĄceres calling to him weakly from the next room.

“Gustavo, I’m dying,” she moaned.Ìę

Castro went and cradled her in his arms. “Stay, Bertita, stay,” he said.

Moments later she died.

The murder of Berta CĂĄceres added another prominent name to the long list of environmental activists around the world—from Brazil to the Philippines, Colombia to Thailand, Cambodia to Russia—who have been killed in recent years. At least 767 people died in conflicts against extractive industries and poachers between 2010 and 2015, according to the London watchdog group . Last year alone, 185 were slain in 16 countries, the highest annual death toll on record.Ìę

Almost a third of those 767 killings took place in Brazil, earning the vast South American nation a dubious distinction as the most lethal place on earth to be an environmentalist. Running a close second—and a clear number one on a per capita basis—is Honduras, an impoverished country that forms one-third of Central America’s violent Northern Triangle, which also includes Guatemala and El Salvador. Between 2010 and 2015, 109 Honduran activists were killed. Last year’s per capita rate—eight out of a population of eight million—is about four times that of Brazil’s, which saw 50 environmental activists killed out of 200 million. “Hondurans are being shot dead in broad daylight, kidnapped, or assaulted for standing in the way of their land and the companies that want to monetize it,” says Billy Kyte, of Global Witness.

Few of the murderers are ever caught, and their crimes are becoming more brazen. In August 2013, three indigenous activists in one small community, Locomapa, in northern Honduras, were mowed down at a roadblock as they protested illegal mining and logging. A year later, Luis de Reyes MarcĂ­a, another activist in Locomapa, was found dead with stab wounds in the chest and neck. In May 2015, assailants gunned down MoisĂ©s DurĂłn SĂĄnchez, a COPINH organizerÌęworking on behalf of 25 indigenous families in the Santa BarbaraÌędepartment, one of Honduras’s 18 states. And in July 2016, the body of Lesbia Janeth UrquĂ­a, 49, yet another COPINH activist campaigning to stop hydroelectricÌęprojects in western Honduras, was found in a garbage dump. In perhaps the nation’s bloodiest corner, the Bajo AguĂĄn, a fertile Caribbean valley that was once the fiefdom of the United Fruit and Standard Fruit companies, more than 100 land activists—farmers, union leaders, a Catholic lay preacher—have been killed in the past five years in violence between campesinos and the , owned by Honduras’s wealthy FacussĂ© family, which has amassed 20,000 acres of the valley's arableÌęland to grow palm oil for margarine and food production. A Dinant spokesman says the idea that the company’s security guards or contractors “are killing huge numbers of local farmers” is “utterly absurd.” He also claims that 19 security guards have been killed since 2010 and that a Dinant field technician was tortured and assassinated.

Kyte, of Global Witness, blames the violence on a “collusion of state and corporate actors”—a tight-knit network of oligarchs, corrupt government officials, and high-level officers within the Honduran national police, military police, and army who hire gunmen to intimidate, abduct, and even murder those who stand in their way. Meanwhile, poorly funded, poorly trained, and corrupt public prosecutors fail to investigate the crimes.

Matters have grown considerably worse, Kyte and others say, since a 2009 coup ousted President Manuel Zelaya, a left-leaning populist and wealthy businessman. The three right-wing governments that followed have rolled back land-reform initiatives and pushed hard for the expansion of mining, agribusiness, and large-scale energy projects. These have been especiallyÌębeneficial to the few powerful Honduran families that control as much as 90 percent of the country’s resources.Ìę

Not every clash in Honduras is clear-cut, however. I spent a week traveling the country’s trail of blood, finding myself yo-yoed betweenÌęconflicting versions of reality. CĂĄceres and her indigenous colleagues, some said, were engaged in a heroic struggle to save their river. No, critics insisted, the activists had wildly exaggerated the dam’s environmental impact and bullied any locals who disagreed into submission.

“There are no good guys here,” one foreign diplomat assured me, requesting anonymity because of the political sensitivities of her job. Referring to the Bajo AguĂĄn murders, she explained that while landowners and security guards were killing peasants, much of the violence was being meted out by drug traffickers and other criminals who had infiltrated the land-rights movement to grab property for themselves: “They take over these groups. They have them scared to death. It’s peasant-on-peasant violence.”Ìę

Yet the government’s own human-rights watchdog disputed this view as whitewash. “Journalists, lawyers, and environmental activists are being killed, and you never find the reason for their killing,” says Linda Lizzie Rivera Lobo, an attorney with the country’s National Commission for Human Rights, which was created by the Honduran government two decades ago. “There is no credibility in the office of the public prosecutor. It’s total impunity.”

Perched a mile up in the hills of western Honduras, on the edge of Lenca country, La Esperanza (“the Hope”) is a tranquil town of cobblestone streets, pastel-colored adobe houses, and old Roman Catholic churches. When I arrived there on a Sunday afternoon two months after CĂĄceres’s death, the town had mostly returned to its normal rhythms following a spasm of angry protests. At the outdoor Sunday market, Lenca women in bright headscarfs called ±èČčñłÜ±đ±ôŽÇČő sold pottery and produce—bananas, blackberries, mangos, squashes, peppers—while tourists made their way to La Gruta, a cave on a hill overlooking town where, according to legend, the Lenca rebel leader Lempira took refuge from the Spanish conquistadores three decades after Christopher Columbus “discovered” the territory on his fourth New World voyage, in 1502. He named it for the deep waters off the Caribbean coast: honduras means “depths.”Ìę

La Esperanza’s calm facade belied an undercurrent of fear. I followed a rough asphalt road past red-tile-roofed farmhouses, toward the residential development on the town’s outskirts where Cáceres was killed. A motorcycle cop and a soldier guarded her concrete house and small garden, which was roped off with crime-scene tape marked POLICIA NACIONAL. I walked around to the rear and noticed a gaping frame where the back door had been; investigators had removed it to examine a muddy print made by a military boot. It was easy to imagine the killers creeping silently in the darkness across the open field behind her home. The development had been virtually deserted and the house unguarded when the assassins arrived.

CĂĄceres had purchased the property in Novem­ber 2015 with some of the $175,000 she received as part of the Goldman Environmental Prize. Three miles away, I found her older brother, Gustavo, at the family home in central La Esperanza, a single-story structure hidden from the street by a curtain of bamboo and palms and guarded by another motorcycle cop. Gustavo CĂĄceres told me that his sister had moved out of the family house without giving any notice. “She left to take danger away from us, especially from my mom,” he said. “But being here, surrounded by people, gave her some safety. It would have been harder for them to kill her.”Ìę

It was CĂĄceres’s mother, Austra Bertha Flores Lopez, Gustavo explained, who had drawn her daughter into humanitarian work. As a girl, Berta had accompanied her mother, a midwife who later became a Honduran congresswoman, into impoverished Lenca villages, helping deliver babies by candlelight. The experience strengthened her indigenous identity—her maternal grandmother was half Lenca—and spurred her into activism. In her early twenties, she and her future husband, Salvador ZĂșñiga, the father of her four grown children (they divorced a decade ago), founded COPINH—a grassroots organization that today consists of hundreds of salaried coordinators along with activist volunteers. Together they organized resistance to timber companies harvesting trees from Lenca forests near La Esperanza.

“She was very active, talking about how we had to stop these ‘monsters’ from exploiting the forest,” says Membreño. He remembers sneaking with her past armed guards and occupyingÌęa lumber mill in the 1990s, then joining her on a three-month protest in front of the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa that ended only when police tear-gassed the demonstrators. “I was amazed at her ease and confidence,” he says.Ìę

Beginning in 2011, CĂĄceres devoted herself nearly full-time to the cause that would eventually get her killed: the fight against the proposed Agua Zarca dam on the Gualcarque River, in a rugged, mountainous region about 70 miles west of La Esperanza. Backers, including high-ranking members of the Honduran government, promoted the project—one of about four-dozen dam concessions awarded by President Porfirio Lobo Sosa, who took office in 2010—as a model renewable-energy effort that would create hundreds of jobs in one of Honduras’s poorest regions. It would generate an average of 21.3 megawatts of electricity per hour, enough to power 120,500 rural households, with initial funding of $40 million.Ìę

In 2010, DESA, the hydroelectric engineering firm controlled by Honduras’s Atala family, won the dam concession. The project would be bankrolled by the Central American Bank for Economic Integration and constructed by the giant Chinese corporation .

Trouble began almost immediately. The region directly affected is RĂ­o Blanco, a collection of 12 communities totaling about 3,000 people along the Gualcarque River. DESA obtained the titles to riverside tracts from the mayor of the IntibucĂĄ department, of which RĂ­o Blanco is a part. DESA says that it obtained the titles legally; activists charge that the mayor fraudulently wrested them from local Lenca who’d possessed them for a century. Then, in 2011, Sinohydro moved in heavy equipment and built an access road to the river through Lenca fields. “When the people asked, ‘Why are you doing this?’ they lied,” Membreño claims. “They said nothing about the dam. They said, ‘We are just making a road to the river.’ ”

Lenca leaders argued that Agua Zarca would be an environmental disaster, flooding their crops and destroying one of the most picturesque corners of the country. “The Lenca are ancestral guardians of the rivers,” Cáceres proclaimed after COPINH took up the cause. The river, she said, served “the well-being of humanity and of this planet and should remain pristine.”

But the environmental impact would be minimal, the backers insisted. There would be no reservoir. No flooding. Fish species would be protected. Many people in RĂ­o Blanco, my diplomatic source told me, actually supported the dam because of the benefits it would bring, including irrigation projects, school supplies, and a microlending program. Critics of the movement say that the anti-dam activists relied heavily on intimidation, branding anyone in favor a stooge.

By 2012, tensions had escalated. According to complaints filed in local courts, DESA employees stampeded cattle through crop fields in a failed scheme to ruin them and force their owners to sell. The company’s guards fenced off a spring that one village depended on and rerouted the water to supply a construction camp. They began prohibiting the Lenca from using the river along a several-mile stretch.

In May 2013, hundreds of Lenca, mobilized by CĂĄceres, blocked the Sinohydro-built road to the construction site from the village of San Francisco de Ojuera. In an indication of the cozy relationship between the dam builders and the Honduran government, army units began acting as DESA’s enforcers. Between 15 and 20 soldiers, joined by police driving DESA vehicles, stopped CĂĄceres and Membreño, searched their car, and claimed they’d found a concealed pistol. CĂĄceres was charged with illegal weapons possession and released on “conditional freedom” until the beginning of her trial a month later. After she spent eight hours in court, the charges against her were dismissed for insufficient evidence.

That July brought the first death: TomĂĄs Garcia, a protest leader shot by soldiers at a demonstrationÌęoutside the DESA compound.Ìę

Still, the campaign seemed to be working. In August 2013, Sinohydro pulled out of what had become a highly controversial project, stalling construction.

The violence, however, continued. In March 2014, another COPINH activist, Maria Santos Dominguez, sister of the slain Tomás Garcia, was walking home from making school lunches when seven men with machetes attacked her. Her husband and 12-year-old ran to defend her, and they fractured her son’s skull and cut off half of his right ear. Santos Dominguez escaped with serious wounds to her hands and face. It was the second machete attack that her husband, Roque Dominguez, had survived in less than a year.

CĂĄceres had emerged as the single greatest threat to Agua Zarca—a feisty, combative spokeswoman and brilliant organizer who evinced no fear, at least publicly, and had a knack for attracting international attention. She traveled abroad, denouncing Agua Zarca at environmental conferences, and journeyed across Honduras taking up the cause of activists in places like Bajo AguĂĄn.Ìę

At the same time, her situation at home became more precarious. Two new backers, the Netherlands Development Finance Company (FMO) and the Finnish development bank FinnFund, had stepped in with $20 million in financing, givingÌęhope to DESA that it could resume the project.Ìę

CĂĄceres kept the protests and road blockages going. Tomas Membreño said that she was threatened repeatedly by DESA guards and officials and began receiving anonymous death threats. Between 2013 and 2015, Gustavo CĂĄceres said, his sister filed 32 reports with the public prosecutor’s office in La Esperanza. Late in 2013, the Honduran government agreed to provide her with a closed-circuit camera outside COPINH’s office, as well as occasional police escorts when she traveled to other parts of the country.Ìę

On March 2, 2016, CĂĄceres drew attention to the sinister links between Honduran securityÌęforces and big companies like DESA. “The government has all of these institutions at the service of these companies,” she told COPINH trainees, “because these businesses are capable of moving antiterrorism commandos—the military police, the national police, security guards, and hit men.” A few hours later she was dead.Ìę

Her assassination left her tight-knit circle bereft—and more fearful than ever. They call frequently to check up on each other, change their routines often, and rarely spend any time alone. On my second evening in La Esperanza, I joined four activists—two American expatriates, an Irishwoman, and a Honduran—for dinner at the town’s most popular restaurant, El Fogón, a two-story orange adobe house with a balcony overlooking an alley and walls covered with Lenca ceremonial masks.

CĂĄceres had eaten here on the night of her murder. “We figured that her enemies would do the proper political calculations to know that murdering Berta CĂĄceres would have a very high cost,” said Karen Spring, coordinator of the Honduras Solidarity Network, an informal group of North American human-rights organizations, who lives here in Honduras. Spring, who had been with CĂĄceres on the day she died, believes that they decided the move was worth it. “They sent a chilling message that if you speak out against the government, you will be killed. People are terrified.”Ìę

One day after CĂĄceres’s death, DESA issuedÌęa statement denying that it had anything to do with her murder. Her supporters filled the streets of Tegucigalpa and La Esperanza. The U.S. government—which has given $200 million in military and counter-narcotics aid to Honduras since 2009—called on President Juan Orlando HernĂĄndez, Lobo Sosa’s successor, to “conduct a prompt, thorough, and transparent investigation and to ensure those responsible are brought to justice.”Ìę

Two months later, a newly formed elite unit of the public prosecutor’s office, a kind of Honduran FBI created under U.S. pressure, arrested four suspects: the alleged triggermen, Edilson and Emerson Duarte, 25, twin brothers from the region around La Esperanza who had reportedly served in the Honduran military; Sergio RamĂłn Rodri­guez, a DESA engineer working on Agua Zarca; and former DESA security chief Douglas Geovanny Bustillo, a retired Honduran air-force lieutenant. Mobile-phone records had placed the twins around CĂĄceres’s house on the day she died, and all four men had allegedly engaged in coded phone conversations about the killing.Ìę

“Rodriguez and Bustillo were the ones saying to Berta, ‘You old witch, you won’t be coming through here anymore,’ ” Membreño told me. “On several occasions, Rodriguez warned me that I would be killed.” All four men are in prison awaiting trial.Ìę

It soon became apparent that the alleged conspiracy reached even higher. Shortly afterÌęthose arrests, the prosecutorial unit arrested an active army major, Mariano DĂ­az ChĂĄvez—who had reportedly graduated from a U.S. Ranger–supported Honduran special-forces course and had fought beside U.S. troops in Iraq—and charged him with hiring the hit-men brothers. He, like the others, is in custody awaiting trial. (A sixth man, RĂĄpalo Orellana, was arrested in September, while a seventh suspect remained at large.)

The picture got even murkier in June, when a former Honduran soldier, ex-first-sergeant Rodrigo Cruz, told The Guardian that Cáceres’s name had appeared on a hit list of dozens of environmental and land ­activists distributed to a U.S.-trained Honduran military-police unit months before her death. “I’m 100 percent certain that Berta Cáceres was killed by the army,” Cruz said. Cáceres herself told a reporter in December 2013, “The army has an assassination list of 18 wanted human rights fighters with my name at the top.”

The Honduran army has denied the allegation, but this would hardly mark the first time that the country’s security forces have been involved in high-level murders. Earlier this year, a Honduran newspaper published excerpts from a report by the inspector general’s office of the Security Ministry, which oversees the Honduran national police, exposing a death squad that had operated from deep inside the police force for several years. Acting on orders from a Caribbean drug baron, the killers had assassinated the country’s top antinarcotics chief in 2009 and his security adviser two years later.Ìę

Linda Rivera Lobo of the National Commission for Human Rights said that domestic and external pressure had forced the government to take action after the Cáceres murder. “But there is a limit to how far they will go,” she told me. The investigation “points to the material authors, but not the intellectual authors of the crime.”

Many thought that such a high-profile murder would drive other guns for hire to ground. But just two weeks later, in the town of Peña Blanca, 47 miles north of La Esperanza, another COPINH activist, Nelson García, a 39-year-old dental technician and scrap-metal recycler, was gunned down in broad daylight.

Peña Blanca is a sleepy town near 111-square-mile Yojoa Lake, Honduras’s largest, nestled amid jungled mountains in the heart of tourist country. For all its reputation as a homicidal hellhole, Honduras has long been a magnet for backpackers and other adventurers, drawn to natural treasures like Roatan Island, which sits on the second-longest barrier reef in the world, and archaeological sites like Copan, perhaps the greatest existing example of Maya civilization.

The shores of Yojoa Lake are dotted with low-budget gringo resorts. Not far away, a different reality presents itself: a sea of corrugated-metal and wood shacks filling a gully outside the town of RĂ­o Lindo. Shirtless campesinos sweat in the heat as they nail togetherÌęcrude wooden frames. Children wander around broken-down cars eating maize porridge cooked on portable gas stoves.Ìę

Five years ago, a prosperous fish farmer donated 15 acres of forest and farmland adjacent to this shantytown to the municipality of RĂ­o Lindo, on the condition that the property be turned over to 180 landless Lenca families. But the mayor allegedly claimed the land for himself. In 2014, Berta CĂĄceres and her COPINH activists arrived, and the Lenca occupied the ten-acre property, naming the new settlement RĂ­o Chiquito.

Nelson García was one of those recruited by Cáceres to join her in the field. He remained by the squatters’ side for two years, helping build dozens of neat rows of wooden homes and installing septic tanks and water pumps. “We were living ‘illegally,’ but we were encouraged by Berta’s strength,” the community’s spokesman, a lanky campesino in his forties named Jorge Alberto Ávila, told me. “Berta came here every couple of months. Nelson came every single day.”

“Nelson told me that he was afraid” after CĂĄceres’s death, his father, Santos Benedicto GarcĂ­a, explained to me as we sat beneath an inert ceiling fan in his airless house in Peña Blanca. GarcĂ­a’s aunt, MarĂ­a GarcĂ­a, said that Nelson had received death threats. “I told Nelson that he should take his family away, but he said no,” she insisted. “He wouldn’t go to the police, because he didn’t trust them.” GarcĂ­a didn’t go to Berta’s funeral; he was advised by fellow activists to stay away.Ìę

A few hours earlier, beneath a scorching sun, Ávila had led me up a hill to a field enclosed by barbed wire and dotted with the burned, bulldozed remains of houses—all that was left of the squatter settlement of Río Chiquito. On March 15, 2016, twelve days after Cáceres’s killing, 100 soldiers and policemen had moved in. “They gave us half an hour to leave,” Ávila told me. “Then they brought in a chainsaw and a bulldozer.” The 80 remaining Lenca families were now squatting on adjacent public land.

GarcĂ­a had spent that morning finding shelter for the evicted families. Then he returned home. At 11:30 a.m., he got into his truck to deliver a load of scrap to a nearbyÌęjunkyard. His wife noticed a red pickup with two men in it parked across the street. Moments later, as he pulled out of his driveway, the pickup blocked GarcĂ­a’s vehicle and a gunman opened fire. GarcĂ­a’s four-year-old son, who was playing outside, watched his father die.

Ordinarily, the killers would back off after taking down their chosen target, but this time the threats continued. “We came back from the burial, and that same day they called his wife and said, ‘Take care of yourself, walk on your toes, you will be the next victim,’ ” GarcĂ­a’s father told me. During the next week, he claimed, a nephew was shot at four times while staying with GarcĂ­a’s widow and four children, and an uncle had his horse shot out from under him—“right in the forehead”—while riding down a trail on his finca.Ìę

Two weeks after García’s killing, the Honduran national police arrested Didier Enrique “Electric” Ramirez, a member of a local gang, and charged him with murder. He too is awaiting trial.

GarcĂ­a’s family and friends claim that Ramirez was a hit man sent by higher-ups—municipal officials, they believe—with a message to land activists: help the poor against the country’s elite and you will die. But as with so many killings in Honduras, the true motive may never be known. The diplomat I talked to in Tegucigalpa told me the murder “was related to extortion”—GarcĂ­a had died for failing to pay a weekly “war tax” to the gang that ruled Peña Blanca. Again, this was a version of events that the National Commission for Human Rights discounted.Ìę

There was no public mourning for Nelson GarcĂ­a—as there was for CĂĄceres—and no offers to help take care of his family. Prosecutors moved them, for their safety, to a village in southern Honduras, where, according to GarcĂ­a’s father, they were now unprotected and destitute. “Nelson fought hard to put bread on the table, and now the family is in hiding, alone, without money,” he told me as darkness fell on Peña Blanca. “The kids are not in school. His wife will never come back here. She wants to leave the country, become a refugee. She will never return.”

The day after my visit to RĂ­o Lindo, I set out for the site of the Agua Zarca dam. The paved highway, running southwest, took us back in the direction of La Esperanza and then veered off into Lenca backcountry. After an hour, the road disintegrated into a rough dirt track, and we switchbacked for two hours through hills thick with pine and oak. In the wide valley far below, a mosaic of maize, bean, and coffee plots, broken by clusters of houses and groves of palms, extended toward the pale blue silhouettes of distant mountains.Ìę

I was traveling to the river for a long-­anticipated meeting that seemed likely to determine the future of the dam. In the wake of Cáceres’s murder, both of the project’s European backers, FMO and FinnFund, had temporarily suspended their loans. “We strongly believe that all concerns raised in the protests around the project have been met through a thorough design,” FinnFund declared in a statement. “We are, however, worried about the possibility of increased tensions in Honduras as a consequence of the murder.”

Now FMO was dispatching an investigative commission to San Francisco de Ojuera, the site of the access road to the river.

The meeting was just starting when I arrived. Four human rights and indigenous-land experts—two women and two men in their forties and fifties, including one Honduran and three others who’d flown in from Australia, Chile, and Great Britain—stood in the blazing sun before 100 people who had gathered on a steep hillside. The experts jotted in notebooks as one Lenca after another stepped forward to denounce what they called “the death project.” A grizzled septuagenarian described how DESA had bulldozed roads through farms. “They destroyedÌęour corn, our livelihoods,” he said. An elderly woman in black accused the company of murder. “DESA sent their people to kill our people. Bertita, our comrade, gave her life for us,” she said. A teacher in a New York Yankees cap insisted that the Lenca communities were united in their opposition to the dam: “Of 400 families in my village, only seven were in favor.”Ìę

“Who threatened you?” asked the Brit, a gangly man whose skin was turning lobster red in the sun. “The company people? People you didn’t know?”

“They were security guards,” a young man said. He named Douglas Bustillo, the DESA security chief, one of those arrested for the CĂĄceres killing, as the group’s ringleader. “The guards from that company take photos of us. They’ve gotten to know us very well.”Ìę

When the meeting broke up, I set out down the gravel road to the Gualcarque River. A Lenca grandmother in her sixties advised me not to go by myself. “You never know what can happen here,” she said, and offered to accompany me. During a February 2016 protest march along this road, she told me, DESA had sent up drones to monitor and photograph the participants.Ìę

We walked downhill past pine groves and pastures. She pointed to a compound of green-roofed wooden huts in a meadow, the road-construction camp that the Chinese had abandoned. Farther down the hill, we clambered over the debris from a landslide unleashed by the road construction and heard the thundering of the river a hundred feet below. Another turn brought the Gualcarque River into view: a foaming green ribbon cutting through a chasm. I heard the shouts of kids splashing in the water and then reached the riverbank. A few dozen yards upstream, whitewater cascaded over a course of boulders, then squeezed through a channel formed by two jagged outcroppings and widened into a shallow pool.Ìę

After the 2013 violence, DESA had retreated to the opposite side of the river; the company was waiting for tensions to ease so that it could resume construction. All through the past winter, two sharpshooters had stood watch from the top of the cliff with their rifles aimed at Lenca swimming in the river. Finally, COPINH activists stormed the plateau and set fire to the grass, driving out the snipers. Downstream I noticed a yellow hunk of machinery, six feet high by ten feet long, that resembled a giant oilcan. The activists had captured it during their assault of the sharpshooter post and rolled it down the slope. It now sat cockeyed in a pool of water, just before the river gained force again as it hurtled down a steep gradient.

I dove into the pool and took in the jungled hills rising sharply above the river, the white gravel banks, and the olive green water frothing through the gorge. This sublime place surely deserved to remain untouched, I thought. And it appeared likely that it would. Shortly after the investigative commission visited San Francisco de Ojuera, the Dutch bank announced that its engagement with DESA was over. “There is a need for FMO to seek a responsible and legal exit from the project,” a spokesman would tell me. The Finns were pulling out as well, leaving the project’s largest lender, the Central American Bank for Economic Integration, which had pledged $24 million to the $40 million project, standing alone. Pressure was now mounting on that institution as well, from international human rights organizations, the European Union, and other groups.Ìę

In the end, it seemed, the conspirators who had taken the life of Berta CĂĄceres had also assured the demise of the Agua Zarca dam. I climbed out of the river, dried myself in the sun, and then, trying to tamp down my nervousness, began the long climb along the deserted, Chinese-built road to my car.

Contributing editor Joshua Hammer () is the , including .

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Rising Tide, from filmmaker , explores the Meso-American reef around Roatan and Utila in Honduras. This place is a long-standing hotbed for divers from across the globe. Follow more from Goetz .

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If you’re someone who likes to play it safe, I’d say stick with Costa Rica. It has a well-established tourist infrastructure, a stable government, amazing biodiversity, and sandy beaches on the Pacific and Caribbean coasts. I also admire the country’s commitment to eco-tourism and sustainability. The downside? There’s very little left undiscovered.

Honduras, on the other hand, is the rising star of Central America. Yes, it’s a rough place: corruption is rife, income inequality is staggering, and parts of some of the larger cities are unsafe. But the country has been experiencing something of a turnaround, and visitors will find ancient Mayan ruins, empty beaches, and a growing list of world-class lodges, all for relatively low prices. If you want to take the road less traveled, here are my recommendations.

Beaches
Rainforest
Ruins

čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏ in Honduras: Beaches

Sand and sun worshippers, not to mention scuba divers and deep-sea fishing nuts, love the reef-protected Bay Islands, which lie 10 to 30 miles off the northern coast. But for an even more laid-back and culturally rich experience, take the ferry from the port city of La Ceiba to the roadless cay of Utila. The clarity, warm temperatures, and dense aquatic life make diving in the turquoise water here as rewarding as anywhere in the Caribbean. Stay in a bungalow at the , which has the nicest digs on the island. The resort can book fishing or dive trips and other excursions, and the rates are reasonable, starting at $145 a night.Ìę

čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏ in Honduras: Rainforest

Take a boat upriver into the thick rainforest of the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO Heritage Site, and you’ll feel like you’ve traveled far up the Amazon. The parks residents include 39 mammal species, including jaguars and pumas, 377 bird species, and 126 different reptiles and amphibians. Thousands of indigenous people also live in the surrounding mountains. , an organization run by six indigenous communities, offers multi-day treks and tours through the preserve.

čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏ in Honduras: Ruins

The ancient city of Copan, in the western portion of the country, was a major Mayan outpost until it was abandoned sometime in the 10th century. The Spanish discovered its ruins 600 years later, and now the temples, plazas, and buildings on its small but impressive site are some of the best of the ancient civilization’s remaining architecture. is one of the many local operators who will guide you through the ruins.

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The bus ride to the stadium is like every other bus ride through this place: an uncomfortable kind of third-world tourism. We’re in this big, dark, cold transport, and we’re wearing shoes and button-down shirts, holding bags with computers. čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏ, there are a lot of people without those things, and all these places we pass by—an all-purpose store with a male mannequin in a speedo and advertising for giant carpets called USA Factory, a McDonald’s branded with a faded cartoon of Ronald McDonald spinning a basketball on his hand, a place called Robert Tire—seem and are funny to me, but probably make sense to everyone watching us as we go by.

Ìę

Earlier this morning, we had breakfast with—or at least, near; it was a rectangular table thing, so some people were far away—Sunil Gulati, president of the U.S. Soccer Federation. He answered a lot of questions, from things ranging from the future of Landon Donovan (probably the greatest American player ever, who is currently on an open-ended, maybe-forever hiatus from the sport), the country’s failed bid for the 2022 World Cup, and the near-impossibility of switching the current Major League Soccer schedule (starts in March, ends in November) to match with the major European leagues (starts in August, ends in mid-to-late May).

He seemed a funny-enough guy—at least, he made me laugh, like, more than three times. Toward the end, he was asked a question about Americans in particular being content with just being average on a world scale, happy making a living as professional soccer players, and not really concerned with getting better. He didn’t answer the question, but he did say that American players—and just Americans in general—are more-coddled than players from other countries because America is America. For the best Brazilian or Argentinean players, a successful career is often a fight out of poverty.

The conversation continued for another 10 or so minutes after that. Everyone went back to typing out notes on their laptops. Others checked their iPhones to make sure they were still recording. And I took a sip of my orange juice through a straw.

WE GOT TO THE stadium three hours before kickoff—so early because the stadium was supposedly going to fill up (meaning, seats are full, hallways are full, stairways are full, and there’s barely enough air for everyone to breathe). Cars started parking about a mile out, just filling up those empty green fields we saw yesterday without anyone directing anything but also without any real noticeable chaos. (That’s how things were all day.) Fans yelled at our bus, not in a menancing way, just in the way that you yell because this is one of the few times when that is a socially acceptable thing to do.

Locals sold Honduran flags and gear all the way from the hotel to the stadium—the amount and extent increasing as we got closer. The jerseys were all bootleg. Honduras wears Joma; these didn’t have a brand. Most of the vendors had a couple American flags, too, which wasn’t all that strange because it’s worth a shot/always diversify. But there were a few Honduran kids in the stadium holding out a big red-white-and-blue flag while wearing Joma Honduras shirts. They wanted to get on TV, I guess, because their buddy, a sort of chubby kid with a side-part and some overly-gold, definitely-frost-tinted, and possibly-women’s sunglasses held up a sign with a picture of a dead Uncle Sam (his eyes were “x’s”) getting hit in the face with a soccer ball that read: “HOY SI TIO SAM.”

This was two rows in front of me, and a row in front of most of the other journalists, right in line with midfield. They gave us two rows of seats under an overhang, but only one with a counter for computers. One thing we had: many outlets. One thing we didn’t have: much Internet. The stadium Wi-Fi was mostly not-present and totally spotty whenever it was.

So, most of waiting for the game was listening to a tiny, all-bass-heavy selection of music on shuffle: one straight-up mariachi-type song, a pop-ballad centered around the word “volveremos,” something by the Honduran Ke$ha and the Honduran Akon—seriously, both of their whiny-but-not-actually-whining voices, just in another language—and some kind of Honduran soccer anthem (I understood “seleccion,” the Spanish word used to refer to national teams) that sounded like a commercial for a waterpark. And the majority of the music was this last song. I still have it in my head: Starts with a bicycle horn. Guy yells. Response: HONDOORAS. Repeat that three times. Then some verses sung in this happy-battle-chant way, followed by—always fucking followed by—“vamos vamos todos.” I’m pretty sure if I ever hear those two words as those three words ever again, I’ll start sweating and immediately feel like I have a laptop on my lap no matter where I am. I’m also not sure my body will ever again function properly without the rhythm of that song to go off of. We shall see.

The stadium was about two-thirds full when we arrived, and slowly filled up from there, the lower seats last. (There’s a barbed wire fence circling the inside of the stands, so if you sit too close, your view is actually pretty terrible.) There were four of those inflatable people with long arms and legs on each corner of the field. (Sponsored by Claro, obviously.) And behind both of the goals were a bunch of other giant inflatable things, including: a Salva Vida beer bottle, a Coke bottle, a fat cowboy in a Honduras jersey, a superhero guy with spiked-back hair, and an orange ball labeled “Lotto.”

Other pre-game entertainment: a man slowly riding around the track on a mountain bike, wearing a helmet with a Honduran flag. Another man flying a blimp (you know the sponsor) with a string, running across the field. A third man in a cowboy hat singing and playing guitar at midfield, flanked by four Honduran women who were dancing, I guess, but basically just stepping forward and backward. (At one point, the mountain biker got off his bike—but kept his helmet on—and started grinding with the air in front of them.) Then there was a 60-piece high school marching band, all in Honduras jerseys, who were, honestly, kind of terrible, but did a reasonable-enough imitation of the standard high-school-marching-band-fight-song. Some women in traditional dresses danced to one side of the band, while a bunch of young boys in these feather wigs and these outfits that made it look like they were only wearing cloth diapers, just kind of stood on the other side and really limply shook these sticks they were holding.

Vendors sold whatever the hell they wanted. Unofficial Honduras gear—hats, scarves, jerseys, whatever—was everywhere, it seemed, and their weren’t any real official stadium refreshment stands. Rather, just a bunch of people with multiple-liter bottles of soda, their own grills, and their own coolers, who found some counter space out in the hallway. There were a few guys walking around with Little Caesar’s boxes and not yelling “pizza, pizza,” so I ate Church’s chicken, instead—some guy was selling boxes of around 11 fries, a drumstick, and a breast for $4—for the first time in my life. (Little known fact: fried chicken was invented in Honduras. Also: that is a lie.) They were selling carne asada at another makeshift stand, but the bathroom was just sort of vaguely a place for you to privately do your business and more of just a communal room where you did whatever you had to do—I saw a guy peeing on a shelf that was also a urinal—so that wasn’t an option. I also bought a bag of water, but never drank it because it was a bag of water.

I sat back down 15 minutes before kickoff and a hoard of riot police walked onto the field in masks, carrying shields, guns, and wearing neon-vests. Oh, yeah. The soccer game.

HONDURAS WON BECAUSE THEY . That’s, um, how sports work, but it’s generally just how soccer games between two somewhat-similarly-talented teams are. Two teams play, and if they played the same exact way 10 more times, you’d get 10 different results. But at the same time, what happens is what happens, and it can’t just be dismissed because there are only 10 games in this tournament.

Clint Dempsey, the American who didn’t talk to anyone, scored the first goal. A long ball from Jermaine Jones (born in Germany, but a naturalized American) came in over Dempsey’s shoulder, and, before it hit the ground, he caught it about as well as he could with his right foot, sending it into the far corner, side netting. It was suddenly shocking because it looked so easy, even though it’s not. (Willie Mays caught a ball with a glove over his shoulder, and people think it’s the greatest moment in the history of Western Civilization. Dempsey kicked a ball with his foot, people.) So, it was kind of like, “Oh, wow, I guess that just happened?” and then the stadium was silent for the first time all day. The Americans celebrated, but it felt like we were watching it at some crappy bar because there was no sound, and it was 90 degrees.

Maybe because it was in the afternoon, and it was so damn hot and so many of these guys play in countries where it’s winter now, but the game was just kind of sluggish up to that point. Even after Dempsey’s goal, the stadium was sort of muted. All the same noise—offbeat drums, random horns, stray yelling—just a few levels lower on the volume scale.

Then Honduras scored: , and the entire stadium shrieked at once. It wasn’t that growl you hear at American sporting events, but this high-pitched yelp, something like relief, coming from 30,000-plus people. The goal really was great—Klinsmann called it “probably the goal of the century here” post-game—and the father of that kid with the Uncle Sam sign—he also of the side-part—looked back at me, shaking his head, basically saying “Ohhhhh, yeahhhhh, motherfucker,” and then flipped his wrists up and down to imitate the bicycle kick in the least athletic way possible.

Again, from then on the sounds stayed the same—chaotic drums, untraceable horn spurts, and yelling-just-to-do-some-yelling—but they rose a couple decibel levels after the goal, and never dropped back down after. To give you a sense: the ref blew the first-half whistle, and the stadium MC came on the PA system, bellowing something to the effect of “Vamos Honduras.” But the ball was on the other side of the field when the ref blew his whistle, and the players near it (a few American defenders, and the Honduran attackers) kept playing. Then the ball got kicked out of bounds, and they still kept playing. One of the Hondurans grabbed the ball to throw it in, and then they played for maybe five more seconds before the ref was able to run over and finally stop it.

The bike horn honked and “VAMOS VAMOS TODOS” started up again.

THIS GAME WAS A national holiday. A guy next to me in the press section was wearing a Honduras jersey, all the Honduran cameramen were cheering for Honduras, and a bunch of the journalists we saw yesterday at the press conference, trudging through the mixed zone and taking pictures of the brief snippet of training we saw, were wearing jerseys at the game. It’s a bizarre thing from an American press perspective, sure, because impartiality seems important and it definitely is. But I don’t know if that really matters here.

Yesterday, the stadium, like I said, was this beautiful thing, but only really beautiful because of all the stuff you could project onto it and with how it contrasted with everything around it. But for this game it was this living thing, in that it kept together tens of thousands of living people, who were almost all—the “U-S-A” chants of the 50 American fans were drowned out pretty quickly—hoping for the same thing to happen. And it did.

A few minutes after a stadium-wide “SI SE PUEDE” chant, Honduras scored what ended up as the winning goal. A long ball split the American defense, a Honduran attacker beat American keeper Tim Howard to the ball and touched it toward the center of the goal. Omar Gonzalez, a 24-year-old still playing in Major League soccer and who was playing in his first-ever competitive game for the United States, hesitated for a second, and was beaten to the ball by Jerry Bengston, who slid it into the open net.

Food, water, ripped up cardboard, basically anything throw-able, fell down from the upper levels. The stadium shrieked as one again, and the base sound level moved up even higher. Journalists cheered with fans. Two people made out a couple of rows in front of me. That imaginary Uncle Sam murderer in the J-Lo shades jumped up and down, just like everyone else. The stadium wasn’t moving, but everyone in it, except for about 25 of us, was.

The game ended 11 minutes later, and that shriek came up one more time. The drums kept beating, a pattern something like the drunken footsteps of a guy walking home, and if you had a horn, you blew into it. Then for a few seconds, everyoneÌę chanting together: SI SE PUDO. And then they left, because the game was over, and even with a game like this, you’ve still got to get home before the rest.

IT’S TOUGH FOR THE U.S., this loss, because they have better players and this game was a big deal as far as U.S. soccer in the media goes. At his press conference, which I watched, sitting in front of a dozen or so TV cameras, on the floor, five feet in front of the coach, Jurgen Klinsmann said all the things you’d expect him to say. (While seated between two five-foot-tall blow-up bottles of Coke and Salva Vida beer. They also had beer on the press conference table, which American officials quickly removed.) The team needs to play better. The team will play better. He’ll make changes if he needs to. And etc.

The players took a similar tone after the game. You’re bummed when you lose, but Tim Howard, today’s captain, talked about how there are nine more games to play and there were always going to be bumps in the process. And this bump surely gets amplified with this being the first game.

The U.S. came here, and they left soon after the game with just as many points as before. It’s not all that much different after this loss; there’s just some more pressure. For Honduras, it’s a similar situation: a great start, but it doesn’t guarantee anything. They expect to win all of their games in a place like this anyway.

In short, it was just like every first-game-of-a-tournament there ever was.

When the game ended, a row of fans turned around and shook hands with some of the journalists behind them. One woman chanted U-S-A in my face while I walked through the stadium down to the press conference, and another guy smiled at me and said, “Sorry, sorry.” For The Murder Capital of the World, I should’ve been shanked in broad daylight, my laptop and phone stolen, body dumped onto the walkway outside the stadium among the Little Caesar’s boxes that one guy was collecting and stacking up to recycle later on. (I’ve been choked by an English fan after trying to shake his hand when his team tied the U.S. in the 2010 World Cup. And we left a Mexico-Guatemala game early because a Mexican spilled a beer on my brother and then threatened to kill him.) That didn’t happen, though, as the existence of this thing you’re reading would suggest. And hell, a guy apologized to me.

After talking with some of the players at a less-full, more-depressing mixed zone, we got on the coach bus for the last time and rode back to the hotel behind the escort. No one was dead, which was good. And no one outside the bus really paid any attention this time. Some people yelled, while most did nothing and just sat on their cars or stood on the grass in the middle of the street, presumably headed somewhere, eventually, but not right then. Things will get better and they’ll get worse, but Honduras had just won a soccer game.

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Some truths about countries: they have people, they have/say they have “a government,” and if they have a mall, that mall is terrible. That’s a redundancy, sure, because every mall is terrible. They’re all too clean, too big, and either too loud or too quiet. There’s a food court, too many nearly-identical clothing stores with vaguely-suggestive first-name names, and always a Cinnabon. Always a goddamn Cinnabon—even in San Pedro Sula.

Ìę

This being, you know, The Murder Capital of the World, (Jay-Z was wrong, unless he secretly grew up here) we’ve been told to not leave the hotel so we don’t get mugged and to then not resist said mugging if it happens because we will be assaulted with either a pistol or a knife and possibly murdered. The only place we can go safely, we're told, is the mall next door. (Note: one commenter called me a “candyass,” and he/she is correct.) The one with the coned-off parking spot with a stork-holding-a-baby sign (I don’t know, new-born-baby parking?) and the FOODCOURT and CARRION lettering on the outside walls. (I expected a warehouse filled with carcasses. What I got was a Honduran Sears.)

There was a coffee-and-donuts place called DK’D Donuts with suspiciously-similar-to-Dunkin-Donuts magenta and off-orange colors. An electronics store that looked like a bootleg Apple store—same silver, smooth-edges vibe—but claimed to be an “authorized Apple retailer.” Donald’s Barber Shop, which looked like a jewelry store but had taxi-cab and fire-truck seats for kids. The part-Nike-store-part-regular-athletic store that sold mostly FC Barcelona gear and had only two stands-worth of Honduras stuff. (One of the employees followed us around the entire store, keeping a constant three-foot buffer.) And the Ace “hardware” store that sold food, a bunch of children’s toys, and had five (total) bottles of liquor for sale at the register.

Once we found the movie theater, hidden on the third floor and closed—but showing Duro de Matar, El Vuelto, and Lincoln when open—it was time to go. . We walked out, while a guy wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a gun pushed an old man in a wheelchair through the door.

U.S. SOCCER HELD THE day-before-the-game press conference at our hotel because all the journalists are here and because it’s the least San Pedro Sula place in San Pedro Sula. All the rooms have flat screens, shower-baths, white comforters with those annoying half-blankets draped over the top, and all those other nice-hotel things you’d expect from some big American city. There’s a pool, a patio with ceiling fans, a workout room, and three fancy-ish restaurants. The walls are pretty high, too. While here, we’re in San Pedro Sula only in the widest, non-geographical sense.Ìę

The press conference was every press conference: journalists asking questions because they have to write stories and players/coaches answering questions because they have to answer questions. No one really wants to be there, but everyone’s always been there, so it keeps happening. I don’t know. Maybe not for the Honduran media, who outnumbered Americans with somewhere around 30 people and about nine television cameras. Their cameras clicked from beginning to end, and they asked most of their questions through a translator sitting next to coach Jurgen Klinsmann, who was flanked on the other side by midfielder Michael Bradley.

Klinsmann and Bradley each have sort of interesting stories. Klinsmann is a German, who lives in California and . He’s one of the greatest German players of all time and was a member of their most recent World Cup-winning team from 1990. He then coached Germany to an unexpected third-place finish in the 2006 World Cup. After that, he coached Bayern Munich, the biggest and best club in Germany (sometimes referred to as FC Hollywood), for less than one season, as he was fired with five games left. And Germany has done even better without him and with his assistant from 2006 as the head coach. So, in general, people are unconvinced.

Bradley is the son of the man Klinsmann replaced, now-former U.S. coach Bob Bradley. While he’s only 25, Bradley’s played 72 games (that is a high number) for the U.S. At first, some troll-types said Bradley was only being selected because his dad was the coach—all this while he was playing and playing well in the Netherlands and Germany, for teams much better than the U.S. Bradley is now a starting center midfielder for Roma, which is in Rome, which is in Italy. They’re one of the biggest and most historically-successful clubs in the country, and Bradley is widely considered (and just is) one of the two best American players, along with Clint Dempsey.

They’re interesting stories, but only in the sense that it’ll be interesting to see how their careers play out. Nothing gets added to them from a press conference—barring some table-flipping, cameraman-punching, or journalist-choking. The interesting thing about this, besides the idea of the U.S. playing an interesting sport and trying to qualify for maybe the most interesting sporting event in the world, is where they have to do it. Toward the end of the press conference, Bradley was asked about what it’s like to have to play such an important game in an area surrounded by security concerns:

“It doesn’t affect us at all.”

LATER, WE'RE AT THE stadium: Estadio Olímpico Metropolitano. The only time we’re encouraged to leave the hotel is when we’re riding in a police motorcade, and that’s how we got there: in a coach bus behind the team’s coach bus, surrounded by police vans, police motorcycles, and blaring sirens. Being inconspicuous does not matter when it comes to being safe. It’s about as close as we could get to just carrying the hotel to the stadium, it seems.

Everyone on the street turns and looks because that’s what you do when you see two big buses surrounded by police, no matter where you are. One guy in a wifebeater, sitting on a motorcycle, gave the convoy a thumbs down, and a maybe-seven-year-old girl grabbed the bars of a fence, jumped up and down, and looked like she was yelling. Everyone else just turned their heads and went back to being wherever they were. We passed some stray dogs, a place called Power Chicken, and a bunch of school buses that were being refurbished with tinted windows and a Jesus-Christ-wearing-a-crown-of-thorns decal, and then we were there.

The team has one training session before tomorrow’s game, and before that, there’s something called a mixed zone, which is pretty much the soccer-press equivalent of a petting zoo. Basically, there’s a 20-to-30-foot bit of fence up outside the locker room. Journalists, cameramen, camerawomen, and whoever else managed to get into the stadium on one side, players on the other. And it’s then a 20-minute scramble to ask as many questions as you can, but players are outnumbered by media by about 20 to one, and there is no ratio for media to fence space because you can’t divide by zero. There’s no room. Cameramen are swinging their cameras freely, somehow not smacking anyone in the face.

Jozy Altidore, a striker who plays in the Netherlands, spoke about getting racially abused during a game last week, saying, “All you can really do is hope it doesn’t happen again … and move on from it.” (.) He respects the Honduran team and hopes to start tomorrow. Geoff Cameron, a central defender who plays in England and is the one sure starter for half of the two central-defense slots, talked about going out tomorrow with the right attitude, communicating, and matching the intensity of his opponents. He also said, “You never know what’s being thrown at you, and you have to adjust on the fly,” which is maybe something that can be applied beyond the field here, but is not at all what he meant. The Honduran media flocked to the team’s few Spanish-speaking players, and Clint Dempsey, the star of the team and the person everyone wants to talk to, talked to no one. We now know nothing we didn’t know before.

For a good 20 seconds, I was sandwiched by two sweaty stomachs underneath the tucked-in polo shirts of two large Honduran men who wanted to hear from Altidore. It’s a weird cattle-drive-type thing—just read back that last sentence—but I guess this seems like the only way to do it since no one’s leaving the hotels, other than for the game. Just throw everyone in a tight space, put a fence in between them, and see what happens.

After that, training began and we—something like 50 Hondurans and 20 Americans—were allowed to watch from one of the end lines. The warm-up takes more time than that, so we didn’t see much from the players, but the stadium was weirdly beautiful. Or at least the idea of it was. And not in that Fenway or Wrigley way—distinct, classic designs—but in the way that this place contrasts everything around it, yet still is very much of this place. It hasn’t been renovated in a long time—if ever—and it’s most definitely not “classic,” just sort of old and rusty and old. If it were in the middle of the city, it’d look like everything else around it—kind of sad and aged, a sheen of dirt over everything—only sadder and older and dirtier. But the stadium’s a little ways outside the city, just past two giant green fields where people were pulling horses that clearly didn’t want to be pulled, some 25 minutes from our hotel.

The stadium itself is this over-colored (blues, reds, oranges, yellows, and greens) and over-advertised-on bowl ( is everywhere), but it’s also this solid thing that’s just sort of there, in the sun, with this bright green grass (surprisingly long and surprisingly plentiful), taller than everything around, other than the mountains a few miles away. Opposite the mountain-side, there’s not much at all, and you can look through the openings in the stands on one end and see nothing but sky. The mountains were covered by some light clouds, but you could still see their outline and the sun shone through just enough to brighten things up without making everyone sweat. There was a small breeze. A bunch of kids played soccer on a field you could see through the entrance. Some good things were pretty obvious: almost-perfect weather, the crazy greenness of it all, the breadth of the mountains, kids doing an active thing and sounding like they’re having fun, and this big structure, weathered from all the things and all the people that have been here and so big because more than enough people care about what’s happening tomorrow afternoon. This is all non-Cinnabon stuff: good and relatable, everywhere only if you're looking.

Then the cops walked onto the field with their “Policia” hats and navy blue outfits and their shiny tuxedo shoes or their pants-tucked-into-boots. A few of them had rifles, and the others had guns in holsters. Our 15 minutes were up. They told us it was time to go, and I couldn’t forget everything else we’ve been told about this place.

The post Soccer in the World’s Most Violent City: The Great Mall of San Pedro Sula appeared first on čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏ Online.

“Javier, when was the coup?”

Ìę

Those words came out of the mouth of some man—southern, reasonably-tall, and apparently the mayor of San Pedro Sula, based on some of the I’m-sort-of-a-regular way he tried to talk about the place—on our shuttle from the airport to the hotel.

It doesn’t really matter that the driver’s name was Melvin—he got three letters right, at least—or that, after a back and forth, they decided that the coup happened no later than 2008. , as , esteemed person-who-has-been-to-Honduras-once, told me from the back of the shuttle. And what matters here is just that the coup happened. It happened less than four years ago, and now I’m here, rolling through the streets in a van, navigated by a man not named Javier, who has no problem cutting through gas stations instead of waiting for a red light to turn.

So, why the hell would anyone go to San Pedro Sula, Honduras?

That’s something I asked myself this morning, while I sat in the Houston airport waiting for my flight. I mean, it’s an easy-enough answer for the majority of people who were on the plane: they’re Honduran. But there were other not-Honduran people on this flight, too, all traveling to this city either to stay or to transfer on to somewhere else, but traveling to the same point for the two-and-a-half hours we were in the air.

Type San Pedro Sula into a Google search. See that second result? It’s a Washington Post article titled “.” As of January 2012, on the homicides-per-100,000-people scale, this city was first with 159. (For reference, New Orleans was the most violent American city on the list with 57 per 100,000.) —the transportation hub and industrial center of the country; also, a hub along the dotted path that is the Western cocaine trade—“the world’s most violent city.”

(It should also be noted that the State Department says, “Tens of thousands of U.S. citizens safely visit Honduras each year for study, tourism, business, and volunteer work.” Which is then followed by, “However, crime and violence are serious problems throughout the country.”)

So, again, what were all these other people doing, boarding this flight? Well, the elderly Canadian couple I met were on their way to some hidden outpost to meet friends. When I asked if they were staying in San Pedro, the woman—as nicely and as old-lady-like as possible—just laughed in my face. Then there was a Canadian woman going backpacking with friends through the country (that makes it sound less menacing than it actually is) for five weeks, and the guy with the guitar from Tulsa who apparently grew up down here and easily switched from that Oklahoma twang to perfect, Honduran-accented Spanish. Oh, and the church group from Louisiana—all overweight, post-middle-age, John-Deere-hat-and-camo-bag types … wearing John Deere hats and carrying camo bags—doing God knows (seriously) what.

But everyone had their reasons because this just isn’t a place you come to just to come to. You do it for, well, any other reason than that. My, Noah’s, and a couple other people on the plane’s reason: to watch a soccer game.

THIS IS HOW THE path to the World Cup generally goes for the United States Men’s National Soccer Team: they win most of their games at home, they lose in Mexico, and they scrape and scrap together enough wins and ties from games they play in Central America and the Caribbean.

Three (possibly four, depending on the result of a consolation game) North American teams will qualify for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. There are six teams—the U.S., Mexico, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Panama, and Honduras—in the final stage of qualifying, which is referred to as . Over the next year, each team will play 10 games (one home, one away: against each of the other five). It all kicks off on Wednesday, and, for the Americans, it’s kicking off in San Pedro Sula.

Quick primer: all of the Americans, and this is true for most national teams, play professionally for club teams, whether they’re in Europe, Mexico, the United States, or somewhere else, as their full-time jobs. They then play for the U.S. intermittently throughout the year (pro leagues take breaks for international games) in qualifying and the occasional major tournament (regional tournaments and the World Cup) over the summer. Here is the roster (clubs in parentheses):

GOALKEEPERS: Brad Guzan (Aston Villa, England), Tim Howard (Everton, England), Sean Johnson (Chicago).

DEFENDERS: Matt Besler (Kansas City), Carlos Bocanegra (Racing Santander, Spain), Geoff Cameron (Stoke, England), Edgar Castillo (Tijuana, Mexico), Timmy Chandler (Nuremberg, Germany), Brad Evans (Seattle), Omar Gonzalez (Los Angeles), Fabian Johnson (Hoffenheim, Germany), Michael Parkhurst (Augsburg, Germany).

MIDFIELDERS: Michael Bradley (Roma, Italy), Brad Davis (Houston), Maurice Edu (Bursaspor, Turkey), Jermaine Jones (Schalke, Germany), Sacha Kljestan (Anderlecht, Belgium), Jose Torres (Tigres, Mexico), Danny Williams (Hoffenheim), Graham Zusi (Kansas City).

FORWARDS: Jozy Altidore (AZ Alkmaar, Netherlands), Clint Dempsey (Tottenham, England), Herculez Gomez (Santos Laguna, Mexico), Eddie Johnson (Seattle).

Some combination of those 24 guys will either beat/tie/lose to Honduras on Wednesday, and they’ll all be staying in a hotel down here starting tonight. (At the urging of the U.S. Soccer Federation, and I’m told this is a first, all American journalists are staying in the same beefed-up-security hotel.) Look at where they’re all coming from: basically, anywhere that isn’t San Pedro Sula.

Not the place where the guy was selling glass-bottled coke out of a wagon pulled by a horse. Or the place with the gigantic, all-white, abandoned Jewish temple right outside the airport. Or the place where a one-armed man was passed out in the middle of the highway, surrounded by 20 or so people, somehow with towels on the ground underneath, just generally looking pretty dire. Or the place with a pharmacy fronted with security guards. Or the place with the Chinese restaurant fronted by security guards. And most definitely not the place where Pizza Hut is the nicest building you see between the airport and your hotel.

In short: this isn’t necessarily the most-conducive environment for optimal athletic performance, but this doesn’t mean that it can’t be or that it won’t be or that it even needs to be in order for the U.S. to win. But it makes a soccer game—and I think this is one of the few times I’ll be able to say this without feeling queasy—almost something more than only that.Ìę

Ìęso everyone in the country can watch the game, which is great. We should at least be coup-d’etat-free until then.

The post Soccer in the World’s Most Violent City: Why Are You Here? appeared first on čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏ Online.

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Dreading winter’s chill? It’s always summer in Central America, where you can still surf untouched breaks, summit active volcanoes, and scuba-dive pristine reefs from Guatemala all the way south to Panama. Click on the links below to explore some of the regions best trips. Book now and thank us later.

Nicaragua
Panama
Costa Rica
Honduras
Guatemala
Belize
El Salvador

Nicaragua

The contra-Sandinista war ended more than 20 years ago. It's time to go see the country's beautiful future for yourself.

The beach at Hotel Punta Teonoste

The beach at Hotel Punta Teonoste

The Cathedral of Leon

The Cathedral of Leon

The author on Cerro Negro

The author on Cerro Negro

THE WIND IS HOWLING, the bats are flying, and I’m on the wrong side of the zona de peligro—no pase sign, peering into what 16th-century Spanish priests considered to be the burning maw of hell. It’s after-hours at Masaya Volcano National Park, Nicaragua’s first, where a 36-square-mile caldera gracefully rises 2,095 feet above the dry tropical forest halfway between the capital, ­Managua, and the colonial city of Granada. The crater I’m peering into, ­San­ti­ago, is one of the most ­active in Central America, spewing as much as 1,200 tons of sulfur dioxide per day. The pulsing thump of glowing ­magma 1,246 feet ­below sounds like crashing waves. It’s so mesmerizing that I take a step closer.

If this park were in the U.S., there would be a six-foot chain-link fence topped by razor wire circling the crater rim. But Nica­raguans have a large appetite for risk and a practically nonexistent national-park budget. This no-barriers connection to what lies beneath, as well as nighttime tours of massive bat caves, are what make the park so sensational. My guide, Juan Carlos Mendoza, was here at Masaya in 2001 with 150 American tourists when it erupted.

“I heard a boom and thought it was dynamite,” Mendoza says. That’s when a volcanic rock bombed his bus, making evacuation difficult. Since everyone came out alive, Mendoza, a 50-year-old former Sandinista, remained calm. He’d seen worse.

“Su turno es su turno,” he tells photographer João Canziani and me as, on cue, a deep boom emanates from the crater and I leap toward the “safe” side of the fissure on the rim. In other words, when it’s your time to die, it’s your time to die. Not only do I respect Mendoza’s savant-like knowledge of Nicaragua—from bird species to batty politicians—but after a week traveling together, I’m also starting to get his Latin pícaro sense of humor. It’s dark, spicy, and not at all PC.

It also matches the mood of Masaya, which I’ve deemed the Dark Park because of the near perfect metaphor it creates for Nicaragua’s surreal and violent history. Hundreds of years ago, Masaya was used as a sacrificial altar by the Chorotega ­Indians, who threw maidens and small children into the crater to ­appease the goddess of fire. In the 1970s, dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle’s hit men dumped their tortured prisoners’ bodies here to disappear the evidence. “Beauty, in Nicaragua, often contained the beast,” wrote Salman Rushdie in his 1987 book The Jaguar Smile.

Most Americans know more about its beast than its beauty. Our collective knowledge of Central America’s largest country—slightly bigger than the state of New York, with a population of nearly six million people, and the second-poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere—centers on two events. The first was the five-year civil war that killed an estimated 50,000 Nicaraguans and ended with the socialist Sandinistas’ overthrow of Somoza in 1979.

The second was the contra-Sandinista war, a poorly masked U.S.-Soviet proxy conflict to control this resource-rich banana republic. The war lasted through most of the 1980s and killed 30,000 people, but for Americans the screaming headline was the Iran-contra affair, the 1986 scandal in which the Reagan administration illegally sold arms to Iran in order to fund the contras, the Nicaraguan soldiers trained by the U.S. to overthrow the Sandinistas.

Add a string of corrupt politicians and the 2006 resurgence of President Daniel Ortega, a populist Sandinista whose administration is heavily backed by oil subsidies from Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, and it’s clear that while Nicaragua is no longer a dictatorship, it isn’t exactly a democracy, either.

But even questionably ethical leadership can’t keep Nicaragua from finally, fully taking advantage of its assets: it may come as a surprise to most Americans that the country is on par with Panama as the second safest in Central America, behind Costa Rica, according to United ­Nations statistics. It’s also one of the most biologically diverse. More than 18 percent of Nicaragua is protected in 77 parks and reserves, which include the more than five-­million-acre Bosawás Biosphere Reserve, the second-largest intact rain­forest in the Western Hemi­sphere. It has 25 volcanoes ­(seven of which are active); more than 750 bird species; empty, world-class surf beaches on the Pacific; unexplored jungles on the Caribbean; and a population that is pulling itself up by its bootstraps through tourism. With a growing number of colo­nial hotels and designer eco-lodges, the allure of Nicaragua is no longer a secret. More than a million foreigners—210,479 from the United States—visited in 2010. Like Costa Rica 20 years ago, Nicaragua is on the cusp of going mainstream.

It’s impossible to see the entire country in ten days, so we’ve started in Managua and are making a figure-eight loop northwest to the city of León and the beaches of the Pacific; then to Granada; then ­turning south to the expat surfing hot spot San Juan del Sur. From there we’ll visit the newly anointed World Biosphere ­Reserve of Ometepe Island in Lake Nicaragua—the ­largest freshwater body in Central America—and finish back in Managua.

Tonight we’ve diverted from the gringo trail altogether. The park is deserted, and we have the glow of the Masaya Volcano and the distant view of moonlit Lake Nicaragua to ourselves. From this vantage point, it feels like Nicaragua’s moment is now.

“I CONSIDER MYSELF to be very nationalistic. I love my country,” Mendoza tells me as we speed toward Managua in a white SUV. We’ve been poking around the ruins of León Viejo, the second-oldest Nicaraguan city, founded in 1524 and destroyed by a severe earthquake in 1610. This former gold-trading center is Nicaragua’s first World Heritage site.

“Our history is very heroic,” Mendoza continues. “This country has so much potential, but I don’t think I’m going to live long enough to see its future.”

Mendoza is the future of Nicaragua. Five foot eleven and barrel-chested, he speaks impec­cable English, wears a military buzz cut, has a massive jaguar tooth dangling around his neck, and never takes off his name tag. He’s the country’s conduit to the world—from everyday people on up. When Pope John Paul II was scheduled to visit in 1996, Mendoza was the man assigned to show him around. Unfortunately, the plans were changed at the last minute.

“I could have ridden in the Popemobile!” he says dejectedly.

Mendoza was also, as they say, “en la lucha”—in the fight. After graduating from John F. Kennedy High School in Fremont, California (his family sent him to the U.S. after an earthquake demolished Managua), in 1980, he was selected by the ministry of tourism to undergo a yearlong intensive training program, studying the history, geography, wildlife, flora, fauna, and volcanology of Nicaragua. In November 1983, he was hired as one of the country’s first official tour guides. Five months later, he was drafted into the Sandi­nista army. Mendoza went off to the jungle without complaint.

“I thought it was correct to defend my country,” he says.

After two years, Mendoza was allowed to return to his tourism job; he was assigned VIPs like Kuwaiti princes and a Central American president. He’s been at it ever since, guiding for Careli Tours, a company owned by the Melchiors, the ­family that pioneered Costa Rican environmental tourism.

It’s impossible to fully under­stand a country as conflicted and convoluted as Nicaragua. While it helps to study the past, it doesn’t do any good to dwell on it. Within an hour’s radius of LeĂłn, there are plenty of ways to ditch the beast and connect with the beauty. We hiked 2,395-foot Cerro Negro Volcano, a jet-black dome with a crater so active that it melted Canziani’s hiking boots. On Juan ­Venado Island, a mangrove-lined estuary that parallels the Pacific, we saw caimans and a pale-billed woodpecker so elusive that Mendoza had to look it up in his Birds of Costa Rica book—Birds of Nicaragua doesn’t yet exist. A few miles up the coast in the village of Las Peñitas, we ate ruco, a whitefish fried whole and ­sautĂ©ed in tomatoes and red sauce, under palapas over­looking a wild beach that stretched for miles.

A day later, we’re 80 miles southeast on a 23,100-square-foot island in the northwest corner of Lake Nicaragua. It’s one of the only freshwater lakes in the world populated by sharks. (The dictator Somoza delighted in feeding them cows.) We’re sharing Jicaro ­Island Ecolodge with a Colombian photo­grapher, his assistant, and a Brazilian model, who are here to shoot a cover for a tony U.S. travel magazine. This stunning and simple nine-casita lodge, which opened in 2010, was the vision of British businesswoman Karen Emanuel, who partnered with British architect ­Matthew Falkiner to create an oasis made from local volcanic rock and recycled wood. This is one of those getaways where, after you’ve completed your yoga, meditated, and taken a dip in the lake, the chefs will prepare you a honey-infused tropical-fruit smoothie for breakfast before you sprawl out by the pool.

But sometimes the beast rears its head even in paradise. An employee at Jicaro, who wished to remain nameless, began fighting for the Sandinistas at 17.

“I try to forget it. It wasn’t a good time,” he told us at break­fast. “If I wanted to smoke a cigarette, I had to hide it in a ­banana leaf so the enemy couldn’t see the light and kill me.”

The only benefit of the war, he adds with a smile, was that when it finally ended there were seven women for every man. “I’m so happy because my wife is young and I enjoy life,” he says. “The war was over 20 years ago. Now all we have is a beautiful future.”

FOR THE GOOD LIFE, wealthy Managuans and expat surfers congregate on the Pacific coast at San Juan del Sur. Twenty-five miles northwest of the Costa Rican border, the beach town of 18,500 people sits on a half-moon bay with a statue of Jesus looking down from one hillside and the guests at the luxury Pelican Eyes resort looking down from the other. We’re in town only long enough to pick up Rex Calderon, the 19-year-old Central American surfing champion, who grew up a block from the beach. The unassuming five-foot-six, mustached and muscled pro is going to show us how to catch a wave Nicaragua style.

From San Juan del Sur, Mendoza drives 30 minutes north on a dirt track through the dry scrub and stops at a wooden gate manned by two armed security guards. One of them pokes his head into our SUV and charges $3 per person to enter the private property that grants ­access to Playa Hermosa, a beach so untouched that the last two seasons of Survivor were filmed here. A few miles beyond the gate, the road dead-ends at a parking lot where a truckload of local surfers are packing it in for the day. The offshore breezes here are generally perfect in March and April, but it’s February and the heavy winds blowing off Lake Nicaragua, to the east, are chopping up the swell.

Beyond the palm trees and palapas, the beach opens up into a mile-long crescent. To the southwest, the mountains of Costa Rica rise in the hazy distance. Out on the water, Calderon, who has been sponsored by Quicksilver since he was 13 and is Nicaragua’s answer to Mick Fanning, is ­cutting through the waves with the grace of a cat, launching impressive air and popping effortless 360s. To his right is Johnny Goldenberg, a 43-year-old Canadian expat and local real estate entrepreneur who moved to San Juan del Sur five years ago. With a gap-toothed smile and a body full of tattooed Buddhist wisdom, Goldenberg is Calderon’s benefactor, ­providing him with Eberly boards.

“Rex is a good kid—he doesn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs,” Goldenberg tells me as he zips up his wetsuit. “And he’s a coldhearted killer in a contest. The only problem is trying to get him to leave Nicaragua to compete. He loves it here.”

“I’ve had to travel far and wide to find a surf spot with only three guys in the water,” he continues. “The only way I’m leaving is if I can’t afford to live here anymore. Nicaragua is a cross between Cuba and Cabo. It’s got that natural beauty, but the look and feel of socialism. The nervousness when nobody would invest is gone.”

A friend of Calderon’s has just finished telling me how safe it is here when a security guard wearing a BEER IS AN APPETIZER T-shirt drives up in a rusty Land Cruiser and urges me to hide my camera. The only other person within a mile is a woman in a bikini sunbathing. I wonder out loud who he thinks might steal it. The security guard points to the dense jungle scrub behind the beach and is about to expound when a surfer appears out of the water. He intro­duces himself as Juan Manuel Caldera, a local developer.

“It’s very simple. We have kids who watch surfers with fancy sunglasses and shorts, and they start snatching things,” Caldera explains. “We’ve solved that by putting security here.”

Caldera, it turns out, is a Nicaraguan journalist who covered the contra-Sandinista war for NBC and now owns the off-the-grid solar-powered development Las Fincas, a few miles away. He, like Mendoza, had the resources to leave Nicaragua during the worst years. But for both men, the pull toward home was too strong to resist.

“Nicaragua is the safest, most wonderful country in Central America,” Caldera tells me as we slowly walk back down the empty beach. “But it’s all about perception. We have got to change the perception.”Ìę

Fishing in Panama

Redefine roughing it in Islas Secas

Life in Panama

Life in Panama

Fishing near Isla Parida

Fishing near Isla Parida

A palapa at the Islas Secas Resort

A palapa at the Islas Secas Resort

The path to dinner

The path to dinner

They left us there, on that deserted island. My husband and I watched as the 40-foot Munson landing craft pulled away, beaching us on a speck of jungle surrounded by the Gulf of ChiriquĂ­. We had only our bathing suits, two beach umbrellas, a double kayak, snorkels, masks, fins, a cooler of Balboa beer, two fresh pasta salads, four fluffy towels, sunscreen, bug stuff, and a shortwave radio. These meager provisions would have to last us three hours.

It was our two-year anniversary. We waved and set off in our kayak to explore Isla Pargo, one of 16 islands in the remote private archipelago of Islas Secas.

I’d heard about Islas Secas Resort from my childhood friend Carter Andrews. Carter and I grew up normally enough in Nashville, Tennessee, but then he went on to become one of the world’s best fishing guides, with sea-monster cameos on ESPN. Last year he signed on as the fishing director for Islas Secas and several other properties owned by a conservation-minded billionaire. “You’ve
got to get down here,” he told me. “This place is ridiculous.”

He wasn’t kidding. The approach alone is like something out of Jurassic Park. From the small mainland fishing-lodge settlement of Boca Chica, we hopped in a 34-foot SeaVee boat and roared an hour toward the Pacific horizon. By the time we sighted Islas Secas, 25 miles out, the mainland had disappeared. We slowed past green cliffs lined with frigate birds and arrived at a long dock where ­Enrique the bartender waited with two papaya smoothies.

Islas Secas is my kind of roughing it. Guests stay in seven solar-powered yurts, each with its own bathroom and a plantation bed wrapped in mosquito netting. Every morning at 6:30, Enrique delivered a fresh carafe of coffee. Dinner was a stroll to another yurt on a crescent-shaped beach, where chef Alexander Rojas cooked up fish curry and fresh-picked-mango cheesecake on a bay that, each August, fills with breaching humpback whales.

That’s the real draw of Islas Secas: the sea life—parrotfish, puffer fish, king angelfish, shovel­nose guitarfish; whitetip reef sharks, green and ridley turtles, spotted and spinner dolphins. The Gulf of Chiriquí serves as a nursery for the Tropical Eastern Pacific Marine Corridor, a nutrient-rich highway of currents stretching from Costa Rica all the way to the Galápagos. To put that a little less scientifically: the fishing and diving are insane. Much of this bounty is found in Coiba National Park, a 430,825-acre sanctuary surrounding the 124,320-acre volcanic island of Coiba. Coiba was belched up from the Galápagos hot spot 70 million years ago. More recently, until 2004, it was Panama’s most notorious penal colony. Now a Unesco World Heritage site, the park includes the most biodiverse waters in the region. Islas Secas is the closest jumping-off point.

We circled Coiba one day with Carter and his family, his three-year-old daughter, Payton, snorkeling alongside her mother in 25 feet of clear water. But most days we fished, banging 30 miles out to the seamount of Montuosa to cast popping lures for 50-pound yellow­fin tuna. Carter has a bear’s physique and a bruin’s mane of hair; his first mate, local Juan Spragge, is a 21-year-old fishing prodigy. The other captains call them Yogi and Boo-Boo, which might bother them more if they weren’t tagging and releasing more 700-pound marlin than anyone else on Panama’s Hannibal Bank. At one point, we came upon four boobies sunning themselves on a floating log, watching for fish. Carter stopped the boat. “Mahi—under there,” he said. One cast and a dorado was on the line, flashing green. Carter handed me the rod.

“You know what you caught there?” he said, radioing back to Chef Alex that dinner was in the boat. “Passion-fruit ceviche.”

Surfing in Costa Rica

Get schooled on the Nicoya Peninsula

WITH MORE THAN 700 species of birds and an expanding national-park system, Honduras is no slouch when it comes to land-based offerings. But the real draw is underwater. If you’ve heard of Roatán, it’s for good reason: deep cuts in the reef around the island drop thousands of feet, offering vertiginous wall diving, wreck exploration, blooming coral, and high visibility. Head to the island’s laid-back West End for white-sand beaches, open-air bars, and the Cocolobo hotel, which has a sweet infinity pool and ten balcony rooms. Nearby you’ll find accredited dive outfitters of long standing like Coconut Tree and West End Divers. If you’ve got the cojones, explore the bizarre deep-sea universe of jelly-nosed eels and ghost sharks with Karl Stanley, a 37-year-old American inventor who takes aspiring Nemos thousands of feet down in his homemade submarine, Idabel.

Guatemala

Learn Spanish—and set up base camp—in Antigua

In the Spanish colonial city of Antigua, you’ll find Centro Linguístico Maya, one of the country’s best Spanish language schools. In the shadow of three towering volcanoes, the Centro offers one-on-one instruction up to seven hours a day with a private tutor; then practice what you’ve learned at outings to local markets and ruins. For total immersion, stay with one of the school’s hand-vetted local families or check in to the lush digs at El Convento, across from the partially intact ruins of the 18th-century Capuchin convent. Antigua is a perfect jumping-off point to stunning, more than thousand-foot-deep Lake Atitlán—30 miles away in the western highlands—with sheer-cliff trails and vibrant Maya villages. But don’t go it alone: petty theft and violent crime are on the rise throughout the country. Always travel in a group with an experienced guide.

Belize

Track jaguars and whales from a Caribbean eco-lodge

SANDWICHED between Mexico and Guatemala, English-speaking Belize boasts more than two million acres of forest, 180 miles of pristine ­Caribbean coastline, and dozens of innovative eco-lodges. Two of the best? The Hamanasi Resort has treehouse bungalows on a 12-mile stretch of beach minutes from 100-foot waterfalls. The soundtrack is chacha­laca birds calling raucously, and daily activities include tracking jaguar prints in the Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary, ringed by the Maya Mountains. For diving, head to Francis Ford Coppola’s posh Turtle Inn, where the Meso­american ­Barrier Reef—the largest in the Western Hemisphere—is just offshore. From April to June, you’ll dive with migrating whale sharks, which come to feed on coral spawn during the full moon.

Surfing El Salvador

Explore the Libertad coast's Pacific breaks

Uncrowded breaks

Uncrowded breaks

THE CIVIL WAR is long past, but ongoing gang violence—though it rarely affects travel­ers—means robberies can happen. Which is why you’ll see armed guards at the supermarket and why we recommend going with a guide. But don’t wimp out, because this tiny country is packed with empty surf, 7,000-foot active volcanoes, and killer pupusas—fresh corn tortillas filled with refried beans and cheese. Plan a multisport trip with the locals at Cadejo čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏs. Start 30 minutes south of San Salvador on the La Libertad coast, where uncrowded ­Pacific breaks range from mellow El Sunzal to perilous Punta Roca, a legendarily long and bone-crushing right. Luxury can be had for less at Casa de Mar, a series of hillside cottages overlooking El Sunzal. After a few days of ­guided wave hunting, head inland to El Imposible National Park for two days of hiking and canyon­eering through epic gorges, with rare emerald ­toucans and aardvarks for company.

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Isolate in Panama
Private islands are neither affordable nor easy to come by. An exception to this rule: Isla Boca Brava, an eight-square-mile spit of land off Panama’s Pacific coast. Situated on the boundary of the lush, tropical Golfo de Chiriqui National Marine Park, the secluded island is home to the new, solar-powered Cala Mia eco-resort (doubles from $220; ). Once you arrive (via puddle-jumper flight from Panama City and a boat ride from the town of David), base yourself in one of 11 oceanfront bungalows. Next up: days spent snorkeling and kayaking the surrounding coastline (think endless sand, clear water, and abundant reef fish). Or take a dive-boat-supported scuba trip to the submerged mountains of Los Ladrones, where humpback whales and manta rays roam. At day’s end, try the organic cheese, which is made using ingredients from the resort’s own farm.

Get Lost: Surf Oaxaca

Though it’s no longer a secret, Puerto Escondido, located on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, still delivers exactly what you need on a Mexican vacation: relaxation and solitude. (Even now, there’s only one daily flight from Mexico City.) Escondido is best known among surfers for Mexpipe, a bone-crushing break on Playa Zicatela, right off the central area. For mortals, there’s the bodysurfing-friendly Playa Principal, to the north, plus no end of lagoons for swimming and snorkeling. When I was here last fall, locals directed me to their favorite hideout, Playa Carrizalillo, a palm-fringed beach that’s great for swimming and mellow longboarding (board rentals, $3.50 per hour; lessons, $20 for two hours; both available at the beach—ask for RamĂłn). Stay at Villas Carrizalillo (doubles from $150; ), situated on the cliffs above.

Get Lost: Bird-Dog Costa Rica

Great Green Macaw

Great Green Macaw

Little-known fact about Costa Rica: The country—known for being, in essence, one big West Virginia–size eco-resort—experi­ences one of the highest deforestation rates in Central America, thanks to cattle ranching and logging. To promote conservation through tourism, the Rainforest Biodiversity Group recently opened Central America’s first birdwatching route here. Modeled on similar trails in the United States, the Costa Rican Bird Route comprises 5,000 acres on 13 remote sites with 520 avian species. Order a map and a field guide ($13; ) and, once you land at the San JosĂ© airport, rent a four-wheel-drive (about $50 a day) and hit the rainforest for a week of day hikes. Start in the Tirimbina Rainforest Center (about 1.5 hours northeast of San JosĂ©) and make for the northernmost part of the trail, near Boca San Carlos, home to the endangered great green macaw. Your launchpad: the Maquenque Eco-Lodge (doubles, $105; ), next to the newly created wildlife refuge of the same name.

Get Lost: Surf El Salvador

Surfers have a knack for scoping out adventure hot spots, and El Salvador is a great place to look: Along the La Libertad coast, just 35 minutes from the capital, San Salvador, small lodges are popping up to cater to the international wave seekers flocking here. Another plus: Surfer chic means surfer cheap. Overlooking two of the region’s best breaks—El Sunzal and La Bocana—is Tekuani Kal, a six-room, Nahua-influenced guesthouse with thatch-roofed patios (doubles from $84; ). The villages along the coast still have a rustic feel—I visited last year and was blown away by the friendly mingling of local and global surfers—but it won’t be long before fancier places move in. For now, it pays to get insider intel. Call on San Salvador–based Cadejo čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏs, which rents boards and offers guided day trips for beginners and experts alike (from $85 per person; ). When you’ve had your fill of surfing, consider the singular experience of scuba-diving inside a dormant volcanic crater at Lake Ilopango, exploring caves and vertical rock walls that drop 600 feet ($90).

Get Lost: Catch a Buzz in Nicaragua

Travel agents like to paint Nicaragua as the next Costa Rica, a volcano-studded landscape full of cloudforests and glassy lakes. Sadly, word has gotten out, and Vegas-size developments are coming to the country’s Pacific coast. But inland, you can still find untrammeled adventure. And damn good coffee. Make a pilgrimage to Finca Esperanza Verde, an eco-lodge and organic coffee farm close to Matagalpa, the country’s cafĂ©-cultivating center (two-night package, $186; ). The finca’s owners pioneered responsible coffee production and the use of solar power in the region. Hike the Purple Trail, which takes you to the highest point of the 265-acre farm, a 4,000-foot vista overlooking the Dariense mountain range. Afterwards, cool off on the Blue Trail, a circular route that leads through sloth-filled jungle to a swimming hole at the base of a waterfall. It’s a little cold, but you can always warm up with some organic shade-grown in the lodge.

Get Lost: Paddle Belize

Yes, it’s easy to get around English-speaking, dollar-accepting Belize. But the good stuff can be harder to find than you think, and sometimes it pays to turn to the experts. Take Island Expeditions’ new Maya Reef Explorer trip, which brings you to the rich, remote Glover’s Reef Marine Reserve, a World Heritage site 70 miles southeast of the capital, Belize City. From a safari-style base camp, guests sea-kayak the 82-square-mile lagoon in the company of a marine biologist and local guides, hopping from reef to reef (there are more than 700) and poking around sea fans and elkhorn coral in the shallows. After a few days of scoring stellar underwater views, it’s off to the Maya ruins of Lamanai and Altun Ha, where you’ll play Hiram Bingham in the ancient cities before crashing at an eco-lodge near the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary (five-day trip, $1,199; ).

Get Lost: Honduras

Following the military coup in Honduras this past summer, the hyper-wary U.S. State Department did what you might expect: It issued a travel alert for the country. čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏ-travel outfitters also did the expected: They kept on leading trips, despite late-summer riots in the capital, Tegucigalpa. In 2010, Mountain Travel Sobek will run its regular multisport itinerary to Pico Bonito National Park (seven days, $2,995 per person; ). Meanwhile, GAP čúČúłÔčÏșÚÁÏs is continuing its trips to the Maya ruins at CopĂĄn (three days, $659 per person; ). “Our itineraries don’t visit Teguc, and the unrest has nothing to do with tourists,” says Sobek trip leader Mark Willuhn.

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