HONDURAS

Honduras exists in a permanent state of emergency that the world only notices when caravans form at the US border. The men in those caravans are fleeing something specific: a country where gang taxation means you pay MS-13 or Barrio 18 a percentage of your income or your family dies, where police are often indistinguishable from criminals, and where the murder of a young man generates less paperwork than a traffic accident.

The maquiladora (factory) economy offers the only legal employment for many men, but at wages that can't cover basic needs, creating a desperation that feeds the migration cycle. Boys who refuse gang recruitment face a death sentence; boys who accept face a different one. The men who manage to build stable lives do so in a state of constant psychological siege, always aware that violence is one wrong corner away. Honduras has fewer than 100 psychologists for a population of 10 million, and the concept of therapy is so foreign in most communities that the Spanish word for it doesn't appear in daily conversation.