How Hondurans came to dominate the SF drug trade

I’ve written in the past about the fact that drug dealers in San Francisco are routinely referred to as “Hondos” because so many of them are immigrants from Honduras. Today the SF Chronicle published a story describing how this particular group, from a specific area of the country, came to dominate the SF drug trade. They thrive as a group because they all know each other.

Since the pandemic, drug dealers who have migrated from Honduras, mostly from the Siria Valley about 80 miles north of the capital, Tegucigalpa, and near Dervin’s hometown, have taken control of the open-air markets in the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods. They amount to hundreds of cogs in a global enterprise that’s supplied by Mexican cartels and enriched by an epidemic of addiction in America…

Bloody turf wars and gang initiation rituals aren’t defining features of San Francisco’s modern drug operation, partly because the Honduran dealers “all know each other,” a city police officer said. The intent is to make money fast, and any mayhem is costly — it attracts police attention and can close a block for hours.

Still, the specter of violence is constant. Almost all the Honduran dealers The Chronicle interviewed said that despite their dominance over the area, they or their families in Honduras could be killed for running afoul of the bosses. On the streets, desperate customers can be volatile, and robbers know they’re carrying cash. The Hondurans are known to defend their territory with knives and machetes.

The Chronicle reports that more than 200 Hondurans have been charged with dealing drugs since 2022. Surprisingly, the key to their success may be the relative lack of ego. There are no big bosses or drug kingpins driving around in fancy cars and living in big houses. Instead, the Hondos live in rental apartments in Oakland and take the subway to the Tenderloin district each day. It’s a regular job for them. All of the drug trafficking across the border and up the coast is arranged by cartel middlemen.

The cartels hire runners to ferry their product from Mexico to Southern California; from there it’s transported up the West Coast with local operatives close to the cartels working out the details. These operatives often own a few properties in the East Bay, which can serve as stash houses and rental units for street dealers, according to court records and police interviews.

These operatives are the highest-ranking members of the Bay Area network and are the middlemen in this global operation. The operatives are known to their underlings as “the machine,” according to two sources.

The “machine” delivers the product and the Hondos sell it. When they need more drugs they place a phone call in code to the supplier. The Honduran dealers aren’t often physically intimidating to their rivals they make up for it by being highly organized. They operate in a pack of around 10 people to a block. One person is always armed in case of a robbery attempt. The dealers also work homeless addicts into their scheme to protect themselves.

A common tactic is to hire a person who uses drugs, often a homeless person, to hold the bulk of the day’s drug inventory in a backpack. The holder is usually paid $10 an hour, plus some drugs, in exchange for mitigating the dealer’s risk, because the seriousness of charges from an arrest can depend on the amount of drugs a person is caught holding.

One man who has lived on the streets of San Francisco for 17 years and frequently works as a holder said the arrangement carries almost no risk from police.

“They’re only looking for the Hondos,” he said, using a term the dealers use to describe themselves.

The dealers also tend to dress the same in black and hide their faces which makes it hard to identify individuals (the same tactic Antifa uses).

The Chronicle reports the top dealers early $300 to $700 per day, so maybe $2,500 a week or $10,000 a month. That’s a lot more than people with little or no English could make in any legitimate job. According to one dealer, those figures are down compared to a few years ago when he could make $1,000 a day. But now there are too many competing Hondos and fentanyl has made the product cheaper because it takes so much less of it to get high.

Of course it doesn’t help that San Francisco’s sanctuary laws seem designed to protect the Hondos. Prosecutors are required to consider immigration status when bringing charges and are not allowed to cooperate with ICE. One city supervisor has proposed changing this but there is opposition.

Some immigrants convicted of selling fentanyl in San Francisco would lose protections from the city’s sanctuary laws, potentially making it easier to deport them, under legislation proposed Tuesday by Supervisor Matt Dorsey.

The lawmaker said his proposal is a “hard line” against those selling the super-powerful synthetic opioid that has claimed more than 1,400 lives in San Francisco since 2020. While Dorsey’s proposal aligns with recent moves by the mayor and district attorney to seek more punishment for fentanyl dealers, it may draw opposition from advocates of the sanctuary law, which under most circumstances bars city authorities from assisting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE…

A central feature of San Francisco’s sanctuary law is a strict limit on when local authorities may notify ICE that the city is releasing a person from jail that the federal agency wants to deport…

Bill Hing, a professor of law and migration studies at the University of San Francisco, said the city “should not be in the business of facilitating the deportation of its residents.” Even though the proposed law is narrow, he worried it could cause a chilling effect on immigrant communities.

“That message of distrust affects all of us,” he said. The proposal “gives false hope to the public that deporting people is going to reduce fentanyl overdoses. … it’s a distraction to real solutions.”

This can only make it easier to be an illegal immigrant drug dealer in the city. If the city really wants to break up the Hondos, they could start by letting ICE take them away.