attention. >> but way off the radar south of mexico is a region that's even more violent. >> in fact, it's been called the deadliest place in the world. >> the homicide rate in honduras alone has more than doubled in five years. kaj larsen journeyed to the heart of the violence. >> reporter: in the past year over 17,000 people have been murdered in guatemala, el salvador and honduras. in honduras, over 90% of crimes like murder are never solved. they call it the impunity rate. i asked the chief of police in san pedro, the second biggest city here, if they would take us along when a call came in on a crime. a minute later we got our wish. so we jumped in the trucks and we're headed there right now to see what's going on. >> it's completely real. we're not making up how violent this place is. we've been here four hours and our first body's turned up. it appears that he's been shot. the impact wound appears to be right here on the right side of his head. the police commissioner told us as is very typical in these situations, nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything and nobody knows this guy. [ speaking spanish ] >> nobody wants to talk, which suggests that people are definitely afraid in this neighborhood. as they should be. >> for years the region has been plagued with violent gangs started by gang members deported from california. but in the last few years it's also become the main corridor for narcotics coming up from south america. as the big mexican cartels have looked for staging areas here, murder rates have skyrocketed. so this is the entrance to the morgue. there must be 15 bodies here. yesterday they received seven bodies and this morning five more. they get new bodies every day. 80% of them are from violence, usually shot with either a pistol or a rifle. there's not much to say. this woman and her mother who just lost two sons, two of the bodies i just saw inside the morgue, the son and brothers of these two women, there's a human cost to the drug war and the hondurans are paying it in blood. i just came from the morgue and there's literally bodies piling up in the hallway. why is this country so violent? >> well, the violence is not actually traditional in honduras and it has increased as the drug traffic through honduras has increased. and so i think a lot of it has to do with drugs. >> the murder rate here is 16 times the u.s. rate. murder has become so normal here that there are some hondurans who doesn't seem to spend a lot of time agonizing over it. outside the morgue i met darwin, who led me to his place around the corner. he's telling me this is a king sized one for a fat person. darwin's probably the happiest, go luckiest coffin builder that i've ever met in my whole life so he speaks really fast so i didn't understand everything but the one take away i got from being here is that the coffin business is booming here. insecurity pervades every aspect of life here. even to visit a violence reduction program backed by the u.s. government we had to have heavily armed policemen patrol the street out front. >> yeah, it violent but that's what we're working on. >> can you ask them how many of them have seen somebody killed or somebody shot? raise your hand. >> it hard to get a sense of what it like to live here when you have a heavy police escort everywhere you go. so we found someone who moves freely through the neighborhoods and let us come along. so we should leave our phone, money, everything? >> yes. >> but first we were warned, no valuables, no phones, no passports, nothing that could get us killed. >> passport. this is a piece of document for the borders. so if you want to come with me. >> laurence gaubert moved from the congo to honduras early in 2011 to head the office here of doctors without borders. >> we are trying to tackle the violence and tackling the violence is a big challenge. >> were you surprised at the level of violence when you got here? >> i was shocked. i was shocked. i didn't know. when i was reached here i was it's united states, we can go to mcdonald's, burger king, you have access to everything. but in fact you meet exactly the same problems as you can meet in congo and in the capital city. >> laurence helped doctors without boarders launch a street outreach mission. every day they walk the most dangerous areas of the city. you're not scared? >> we have to be scared to protect ourselves. just going and thinking that it will be easy, we will be very at risk. >> what goes hand in hand with the violence here is extreme poverty. the doctors without borders street team was giving medical and psychological care here. it looked like so many neighborhoods throughout latin america. if we hadn't been told, we wouldn't have guessed it was so violent. what he's telling me is that this is where he lives under this tarp. these are his spare clothes and he's got -- and this is his kitchen where you see these three fish being cooked right here. and they cook for all of the street children here is one of the other things that he's saying. the other thing that you notice when you're speaking to edwin is there's all these kids around here. but even in plain view of the cameras, all of them are sniffing glue. because we are the first foreigners, let alone journalists that the doctors without borders street team had ever taken with them, they were extra alert to security. >> the security driver just said it was it was time to go so we should go. >> as we headed back to the van, the market started to close down, night was falling and the city now getting more dangerous was ready to shut down. 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[ giggles ] will be giving away passafree copies of the alcoholism & addiction cure. to get yours, go to ssagesmalibubook.com. it's been called the most violent place on earth. it's a small area of central america where our kaj larsen met one man who is fighting a war against a tidal wave of drugs and murder. >> a police surveillance camera in guatemala city captures a scene that has become common. a car stops at an intersection at midnight. a man is forced out and shot. it was more than 6 million -- 6,000 murders in guatemala in 2011. eight times the u.s. homicide rate. fueling the violence, narco trafficking as mexico's cartels, including the el have a violent zetas move south. what we're talking about is ungoverned space. we are briefed by a dea agent who asked us not to reveal his face. >> the m-240 machine gun fires a 7.62 round and we need it in the indian country where we're going. dodging storms we flew with the dea in two huey helicopter gunships into a no man's land in guatemala, land comprised of uninhabited stretches of jungle, much of it flooded because of the rainy season. soon we were flying over clandestine landing slips, hundreds of them, used for smuggling drugs coming up from venezuela. sometimes the planes crashed but since one load of cocaine more than paid for a plane, often they were just abandoned. there's an airplane carcass right there below me. you can see it's got birds on it, crash landed. it's a little flooded from the rains. but when it's dry there's about 30 to 40 aircraft just laying out here, all that were abandoned after they brought the drugs in. after the u.s. helped beef up the guatemalan defenses, the traffickers began looking to another place to land drugs. they chose guatemala's violent neighbor, honduras. and it's become the new front line of the narco wars. jim kenny has been fighting that war for more than 12 years. >> that land's your first point either by both or an air track, illicit airplane coming in. the best opportunity to stop the drugs is at that point. >> as head of the u.s. drug enforcement office in honduras, jim kenny runs america's first line of defense with the support of only two other dea agents. if jim's small team can't intercept the drugs when they land, the likelihood is that they'll make it all the way to the u.s.-mexico border. it's highly unusual for a dea agent in overseas operations to be seen on camera, but i was allowed to follow jim around honduras. i mean, we're out there now, right? this is the wild west. >> as close as you get to it, yes. they're saying 75% to 80% of the 25 plus tons that come through here a month is maritime. >> the boat we were riding on was one of the interceptor boats the honduran navy uses to try to stop smuggling boats any time the dea gets intelligence about a load coming in from south america. >> dwle, yes, these are all from drug boats. >> when we got to the base and saw some the go-fast boats confiscated from smugglers it's easy to see how outmatched the hon dur -- honduran navy is. >> last night we had pretty good information about a go-fast that was coming up that was off the rotan island. unfortunately we were not able to find them. very difficult. very difficult. you're going out in a very vast, wide area. >> it's a needle in a haystack. >> jim says in the last two and a half years in honduras, he feels like he's aged ten years. >> it's frustrating at times because we a lot of times have the knowledge and the intelligence to be able to respond and do things but because of the lack of resources, it's difficult. >> put some gray in the old beard? but jim has been making progress, changing a crucial piece of the puzzle here. this is your piece right here, these guys coming out. >> these guys are the vetted team that we trust, that we can pass very sensitive intelligence to. >> this is jim's vetted unit, specially selected honduran police officers chosen for their skills and their honesty. >> corruption's an issue here as it is in central america and other countries, south america. they've all been polygraphed, all drug tested, all interviewed and they all get trained. we train each one from evidence handling up to the tactics. >> when jim gets a tip about an illicit aircraft headed to honduras with a load of cocaine, it's the vetted team's mission to fly to that landing site and intercept it. there's a high likelihood they could get in a fire fight on one of these mission, right? >> yes, yes, and very this been in firefights. very dangerous and very brave and they know there's a high possibility there's going to be a confrontation. >> when jim arrived in honduras in 2009, the vetted unit had 7 officers. now it has 41. and of the 94 smuggling planes that landed in honduras in 2010, the government of honduras was able to intercept 7, five of which were intercepted by jim's unit. that doesn't sound like a whole lot except the total for the previous year was zero. >> is it exhausting? 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>> six. >> six times? wow. he says the new efforts are already paying off. >> translator: in the past couple of years after they began making the police more professional, the murder rate has begun to decline. >> but it takes more than training investigators. radical surgery had to be performed to fight one of the region's biggest and oldest problems, corruption. this is the large suburb, population 1 million. it used to be one of the more violent areas in metropolitan guatemala city. then two crime fighting pilot programs were introduced with aid from the u.s. state department. what's unique about this police station is that they actually fired 100% of the police officers here and they took all rookies out of the academy. the reason of course is because corruption is so endemic that they had to start with fresh officers who had never been on the street. the results have been dramatic. police say that the conviction rate has gone from practically zero to 98%. in the city hall, i met the mayor who, along with u.s. aid, commissioned a surveillance camera system that's had a big impact. in one neighborhood, 53 cameras have been installed and crime has dropped by 90%. >> translator: crime throughout the entire city is down 28% to 30%. >> this is one of the murders that the cameras were able to solve. >> this guy just jumped out of a van right here, white sweat shirt, pulled out a gun. now he's shooting. what this is is they took a green grab of prior to the murder that we just saw up on the big screen and it allowed them to identify the guy who committed the murder as well as that you have this guy in this purple sweat shirt who actually handed the guy who committed the shooting the gun. >> in addition to watching the criminals, the cameras are also a way for the mayor to observe his own police force. so when officers show up on scene, they're required to salute the cameras to show that they're on the job. in a place where police accountability is a huge issue, for him to see his officers saluting on job is a huge, huge improvement. the murder rate in guatemala has just begun to decline slightly. still it's eight time the rate in the united states. the minister has a message for america, the largest consumer of illegal drugs. >> translator: consuming drugs has consequences. every kilo, every gram is paid for in blood in latin america and central america. >> and kaj larsen joins us safe and sound in the studio, all cleaned up. >> no flak jacket. >> we see so many narco stories out of new mexico. but to see these images out of guatemala and honduras, what led to you this story? >> there has been a lot of focus on mexico in the news. and the violence there has been very disturbing and very visible because they're our nearest neighbor. increasingly the corridor has become a major trafficking route for narcotics. just four years ago, less than 1 hernandez of the drugs moved up through that corridor. today over 60% are moving via land. with that has become an exponential increase in violence in places like honduras and guatemala. so much so that even this month the peace corps is pulling out of their operations in honduras. >> the peace corps is leaving. >> you got the demand as you pointed out in the piece and supply. but sort of stopping the drugs moving along that route, what's being done for that? >> it's the right question because it's such a critical choke point for narcotics. 90% of cocaine is making its first stop in honduras. law enforcement is increasingly paying attention to this area but it's a difficult battle. there's a u.s. joint task force run by the military there that's supporting the hondurans with air assets and intelligence. i embedded myself with the dea. and their vetted unit. >> i think you're making the point that the dea is fighting an uphill battle here. how do they feel about it in terms of resources? >> obviously they'd like to bring more resources to the fight. the dea is a very tough and very professional organization. the power of these cartels which are effectively operating as multi-national corporations with supply chains and distribution centers, the head of the cartel was on the forbes list. these are very, very powerful organizations and they're very hard to combat. >> that's frightening. i learned a lot, though. i appreciate it. i'm glad you're back safe and sound. >> great to see you guys. >> up next, was it murder or miscarriage of justice? the story of two families torn apart by a deadly shooting. ? as a police chief i have an opportunity