Hope Dwindles for Hondurans Living in Peril

SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras — The pastor came one afternoon to survey his church, or what was left of it: remnants of a “welcome” sign and a strip of Christmas garland still tacked to the wall.

The gang took the chairs. They took the light fixtures. They took the doors. They had given his family 24 hours to get out and so they did, abandoning their home and the small evangelical church he led.

“There was no other way,” Pastor Jorge Rivas said the other day, on the porch of a house in another part of this violent city, where the family has taken refuge. “We would die there.”

When he moved there 20 years ago, Mr. Rivas commanded respect, even among the gang members. The neighborhood, Chamelecón, was not yet the most dangerous in one of the most dangerous cities in the hemisphere.

Two of Honduras’s most powerful gangs, Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18, and their myriad factions battle for turf, with the borderlines of their territory the most lethal. The most spectacular crime occurred a decade ago, when 28 people on a bus passing through the neighborhood were killed by gang members upset at plans to restore the death penalty.

The police remain so unable to take on the gangs and cartels that sometimes they do not even have gas in their aging vehicles to go on patrol.

“It’s like sending kindergartners up against an N.B.A. basketball team,” said Steven S. Dudley, a director of InsightCrime.com, a website tracking and analyzing Latin American crime trends.