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British Prime Minister William Gladstone was obsessed with prostitutes, in particular, their souls. As a young man in the 1840s, Gladstone spent nights cruising the streets of London trying to convert sex workers to Christianity-- occasionally in their private quarters. Gladstone would come home from his rounds sometimes so aroused that he'd submit to a ritual of self-flagellation, at once to heighten and relieve lust that, he wrote in his diary, he found otherwise uncontrollable.

A vociferous public posture that aims to eliminate what one secretly most desires confounds logic, but obeys the more basic and powerful laws of human psychology.

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Those laws were in force last month when British expatriate child-saver and anti-sex campaigner Bruce Harris was exposed as soliciting a teenager for sex in Tegucigalpa, Honduras's capital. For 15 years, Harris had been the director of Casa Alianza, the Latin American branch of New York-based Covenant House. Déjà vu? Father Bruce Ritter, Covenant House's founder, spent a career railing against queers and porn. In the Reagan years, Ritter was a darling of the right-wing, before he went down in flames in 1990 in scandals involving financial corruption and sex with teenage boys.

Colonial redux

Covenant House, during and after Ritter, combines the sometimes competent provision of social services to street kids with an aggressive, sex-charged public posture that traffics in hysteria and demonization-- and often plays loose with facts. In some ways, their shtick can be traced to the "white slave" panic that so exercised prurient Victorian imaginations, such as Gladstone's.

The southerly extension of Covenant House's franchise is one ripple in the new wave of Central America's second colonialization-- this time by the US. Whether it's the importation of gangs from Los Angeles, Protestant fundamentalism from Texas, or the turning of the region's fields and factories away from local needs to grow berries or sew socks for the US market, Latin America increasingly dances to America's beat.

Harris did his part, helping import Anglo-style sexual hysteria. At the same time, he highlighted real abuses, such as death-squad murders of street youth, and his Casa Alianza provided some badly needed services.

Though Harris-- awarded an Order of the British Empire medal in 2000-- was lionized abroad, he and Casa Alianza made enemies locally. So the Latin American media and the elites they serve are now enjoying revenge, and using the machinery of hysteria and homophobia Harris helped foster to give the activist his coup de grace-- certainly as a public figure and maybe as a free man.

Alarming pickup

Harris's opponents got their opening one evening in late August, when the Casa Alianza director borrowed a black car from a friend and went cruising in Tegucigalpa. On a dark street near the San Francisco Church, he encountered a 19-year-old youth-- named in the press as Olman Alberto Garcia or Carlos Alberto Ortiz, among other variations. Harris says the "sex servant" approached him with a solicitation. The youth-- we'll call him Ortiz-- says Harris made the first moves. Anyway, Ortiz jumped in the car, and the two drove off.

From the beginning the pick-up didn't go according to plan. The car's alarm sounded unexpectedly, and Harris, unfamiliar with the vehicle, couldn't turn it off. Police stopped the car to see what was up, but after Harris gave assurances, the two continued on, to the Monte Fresco Motel, at kilometer 7 on the road to Valle de Angeles.

Inside their motel room, according to El Nuevo Diario, Harris "placed his mouth on the organ of the child [sic] and then he [Harris] asked him to stimulate him with his finger." The session continued about 45 minutes, the newspaper goes on, and "After satisfying their sexual-abuse instincts [sic], they bathed and got dressed, and Harris dropped him off where he had picked him up," with the youth 500 lempiras (about US$27) richer.

Ortiz had been a Casa Alianza client, and an occasional resident at its shelter between 1998 and 2002. He seems to have been a quick study of the Covenant House creed, regarding sex as both terribly wrong and a powerful tool. Ortiz reportedly blames Casa Alianza for what he regards as his own initial "corruption" at the hands of other boys. In November 2002, Ortiz accused an elderly priest, Father Clementino Nuñez, of sexual contact, but the charge was dismissed by the Special Prosecutor for Children due to "inconsistent testimony."

Was Ortiz seeking to get back at Casa Alianza? Did the police, from their own motives, track Ortiz down after recognizing Harris when they stopped his car?

It's not clear how, but within a few weeks, Harris's tryst with the youth became international news.

Harris admitted sex with the teen, but denied knowing Ortiz had been a client of his agency. He announced his resignation from Casa Alianza and left for Costa Rica, in order, he said, to spend time with his wife and children. From Covenant House headquarters in New York came word that he'd been fired.

Prickly pride

With Harris's blood in the water, the Honduran political establishment quickly moved in for kill.

"On many occasions Harris denigrated the dignity of Honduras, accusing it of favoring sexual exploitation," wrote La Prensa, and portraying the nation, "without offering adequate proof," as a place "where the police killed young kids in the street."

Oscar Alvarez, Honduran Minister of Security, called the tryst between Harris and Ortiz a possible example of "horrible sexual exploitation."

"[I]ntelligence agencies are investigating how many children Harris might have hired for sexual purposes," La Prensa went on, invoking the standard tropes of sex hysteria that make teenagers out to be helpless children and consensual sex "abuse."

"I want to tell you that when we speak we do not speculate," the Minister of Security went on. "We base our statements on intelligence reports, and in this case we are investigating other suspicious cases." Meanwhile Casa Alianza was denounced as a "nest of perversions," and there were threats of government intervention, or even of shutting the shelter down.

Harris, for his part, accused his opponents of "sharpening their machetes to make firewood of a fallen tree, including those who stand condemned of crimes that most harm children."

"Many have forgotten this and are judging my 15 years of service to children for a brief error of 15 minutes," Harris said. "I believe that people have seen what Casa Alianza and I myself have done. I think we must evaluate the facts. We are all human beings; we commit errors. I think that I have never done anything illegal." He promised to cooperate with police, even as he disappeared, some reports said, to Miami.

Butterfly pinned

Ortiz had hovered around Tegucigalpa's hustling scene for years. "This guy sat down beside me in a park near the cathedral and in a very friendly way began to chat me up," says a local community activist-- we'll call him Juan Gomez-- who worked in the Honduras capital and recalls meeting Ortiz in 2001. "He told me he was homeless and wouldn't mind having a place to sleep for the night; he said he knew of an economical place nearby where the two of us could stay." Gomez says he did not take the youth up on his offer.

"The impression I had of Ortiz was that of a gay kid who had a pleasant way about him and liked older guys," Gomez continues. "When he made the accusations against the elderly priest, I found it hard to believe he had really been taken advantage of himself, and I was wondering what objective he was pursuing. My perplexity only increases with this latest incident, in which he informed on Bruce Harris. What really was his reason for going to the authorities and bringing about what he knew would be the downfall of such an outstanding figure?"

Meanwhile, the Honduran media have turned Ortiz into a laboratory specimen, with commentary day after day on alleged aspects of his life: his being corrupted at an early age, his servicing priests and politicians, his being HIV-positive, and what is termed his "mendacity" and "fantasizing." The Catholic archdiocese and a Catholic school have threatened to sue him if he accuses any more priests. Ortiz seems to have been secluded by the authorities, kept outside of town, and repeatedly interrogated.

Kill the terrorists?

So for Ortiz, as so often holds generally, the trumpeted concern for young people is flashy cover for other agendas. A new twist in the local media's coverage of street youths is that they are being recruited by mafiosi, and even Al Quaeda.

"At night you see troops of kids lost in the hallucination of glue or other drugs, defenseless and barely cared for by the stray dogs," writes Tegucigalpa's El Heraldo in a recent piece headlined "Street kids, instruments of organized crime."

"The daytime noise of the sellers, the traffic jams, and the coming and going of people is at night substituted by mafias that take control of the city in order to pervert the minors and do dirty business," the paper goes on.

"It all sounds absurd," Gomez tells The Guide, "but it justifies further brutal repression and death-squad 'cleansings.'"

If the US decides that Latin America's homeless youths matter more as agents of terror than victims of sex, then it will take more than a British Prime Minister to save their bodies and souls. Among those who might try, Bruce Harris-- whose concern for young people was, it turns out, partly fueled by homoeroticism-- will be missing.