From the top of Cerrito Lindo, you can see the planes taking off from San Pedro Sula’s airport in Honduras. On the other side is a labyrinthine expanse, and at this height above the city, the night is beautiful. It all seems so peaceful. You catch blue and red flashes over the town below as the darkness surrounds you. An untrained ear would only hear fireworks, but I could make out the caliber of different weapons. Mostly, it is a regular pattern of 9mm bursts.

Surrounding the hill is an imaginary border and the neighborhood kids will tell you, “La Dieciocho controla.” Their presence permeates every aspect of life in the hood, and for some, the barrio is everything. Gang membership is a grey concept in Cerrito Lindo - it is just a part of life in the hood. It is the place where you were born and where you are from. It is what they live, and outside of these blood-drawn borders, death waits.

Barrio 18, also known as 18th Street, operates within a structure similar to the more infamous groups that make international headlines, and they maintain their control of Cerrito Lindo by dispensing the same spectacular violence. The government and the media both classify Barrio 18 as a transnational criminal organization, comparing them with drug cartels like the Sinaloa Cartel and others that are more well-known. But in reality, it is just loosely organized youths ruling over low-income communities with fear and the promise of safety.

From the summer of 2018 till 2023, I regularly visited a group of kids from the Barrio 18 gang and watched them grow up within this imaginary border, becoming lookouts and then soldiers. Some that I have known have lost their lives, some ended up in jail, some found god, and others left to look for something else. On my last night with the kid soldiers of La Dieciocho, they burned my left hand with four matches - a scar that reminds me of what we shared within Barrio 18’s Cerrito Lindo.

In the following images, you will see an endless night broken by an occasional flash of lightning. It is like swimming in dark waters under a full moon: it is scary, but still, somehow, the moonlight keeps you from drowning.

• "I think I saw at least twenty of my friends dying here. Some of them because they belonged to the gang others were just innocents. We went to their wakes singing "Ve Con Dios" (go with God), it's a beautiful song."

  M,