Safety in Honduras

Even though I'll crumble like a bad of potato chips if push comes to shove, I think that I look reasonably intimidating.  I'm tall with an athletic body.  I assume that this is the main reason I have not had any major incidents on the street throughout my travels.  I'm not completely clueless either.  Concerning safety, I won't take ridiculous risks.  I won't go in to dangerous neighborhoods alone at night and will stay away from certain areas that I hear are especially risky.  But, that said, I've had some of my most memorable experiences in dicey regions of the United States and abroad.  The more perilous and questionable a region is, the more I tend to want to explore it.  

But, I have to say, I am a little bit more worried about my trip into Honduras than usual.  I had been under the impression that Honduras and El Salvador were on par with each other in terms of safety before I came to Nicaragua.  However, I have had person after person tell me that Honduras is worse.  Much worse.

Is it really that much more dangerous in Honduras compared to Nicaragua and El Salvador?

On the State Department website, there is a stern warning about traveling to Honduras.  "The Department of State continues to warn U.S. citizens that the level of crime and violence in Honduras remains critically high, although it has declined in the past two years... Honduras has had one of the highest murder rates in the world for the last five years."  In fact, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Honduras had the highest rate of intentional homicide in the world in 2012, with 7,172 intentional homicides or 90.4 per a population of 100,000.

The intentional homicide rate was the highest in the world in 2012 in Honduras

From Jairo and his cousin to a cab driver in Managua to a middle-aged woman working in a clothing store in Estelí, native Nicaraguans have told me about the danger I will experience once I've crossed the border into Honduras.  I pressed the taxi driver to explain why there was so much violence there as opposed to in Nicaragua.  They only thing he could come up with was that people in Honduras are much more aggressive than people in Nicaragua.  When I pressed him further, he shrugged his shoulders.  I left the taxi feeling like he had implied that there was a recognizable difference between Nicaraguans and Honduras, especially when it came to violence.  

I'll be interested to see if there is a noticeable difference between Hondurans and Nicaraguans

However, few Nicaraguans I talked to have even been across the border and much fewer have spent a couple days in Honduras.  Even Jairo just took a bus straight from Guatemala to Nicaragua.  Maybe these Nicaraguans have no rational reason to be speaking so poorly of the safety in Honduras.  Or maybe they are preaching the truth.  Whatever the answer is, I will find out what the answer really is in the next week or so!