It was just an empty field lined with billboards on the road into La Ceiba, Honduras. But on a hot summer day in 1995, hundreds of squatters descended to stake land claims on it. It was another ‘land invasion’, not uncommon in Central America. Activists had researched the property and found its ownership unclear. They’d organized, and word about the field had quickly spread among homeless Hondurans desperate for a small plot of land to build a home. Now ‘Los Invasores’, ‘The Invaders’ as locals called them started building, their first structures hastily slapped together shelters of palm fronds, plastic sheeting and scavenged lumber. Permanent homes could follow later. A squatters 'committee' was elected to manage the instant camp. A community formed.

Now the waiting game began. Would Los Invasores be allowed to stay or would they be evicted? The drama would take time to play out…and it did. Months later, with no warning, the Honduran Army moved in with bulldozers and razed the fledgling community to the ground. Los Invasores were homeless. Again. But a week later, in a surprising turn of events, the government abruptly relented and allowed Los Invasores to return to the site…to build again. And so it went in one of the poorest nations in the western hemisphere.

Four images aren’t from the squatters camp. In the first, a subsistence farmer surveys his hillside bean crop. The soldier guarded a bank in La Ceiba. Armed guards were a common sight at gas stations, stores and supermarkets. The guard leaning in the doorway at the entrance to La Ceiba City Hall kept a watchful eye on the street. “Violent crime is rampant in Honduras,” notes the Human Rights Watch 2019 Report on Honduras. “Despite a recent downward trend, the murder rate remains among the highest in the world.”

Images from this shoot appeared in the photo essay “Los Invasarios” published in the summer 1997 issue of WorldView, the US Peace Corps magazine.

(Photographed in 1995 with a Nikon F3HP SLR loaded with TRI-X 400 film processed in D76. Images scanned from 8x10 prints much later ;-)