Honduras reels after 'monstrous' gang battle kills 46 in women's prison
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Relatives wait to collect their loved ones outside the morgue. Some victims of the violence were shot and others died in a fire that broke out at the prison.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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TEGUCIGALPA - A vicious battle with guns and fire left at least 46 women dead at a women’s jail in Honduras, a country with a particularly high rate of prison violence and more than 1,000 inmate deaths in 20 years.
As the first bodies were handed over to mourning families for burial, the prosecutor’s office on Wednesday updated the confirmed toll from 41.
It could not say whether all the victims of Tuesday’s deadly battle at the Women’s Centre for Social Adaptation (Cefas), about 25km north of the capital Tegucigalpa, had been inmates.
The violence erupted when members of the Barrio 18 gang burst into an area housing the rival Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) group, shot at them, and set the place on fire, according to the authorities and witnesses.
That part of the prison was “completely destroyed” in the blaze, Ms Delma Ordonez, who represents inmates’ relatives, told journalists.
According to police operations director Juan Rochez, the attackers came armed with “more than 21 firearms” and grenades. Eleven suspects have been identified.
A spokesman for the Forensic Medicine Directorate, Ms Issa Alvarado, said 23 of the bodies had been identified by Wednesday and released to next-of-kin.
Hundreds of relatives remained gathered at the directorate’s offices in Tegucigalpa, desperate for news on the fate of their loved ones.
Identification was continuing “in complex cases” of badly mutilated bodies, the prosecutor’s office said on its Twitter account.
Ms Olga Castro, mother of 44-year-old Jenny Patricia Castro, was quoted by local media as saying: “I don’t know if my daughter was shot or stabbed.
“People say they heard (the women) screaming for the gates to be unlocked because… where she was, they locked them in from the outside while they were burning.”
Mr Yuri Mora, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, told AFP that most of the victims died in the fire.
Some bodies were riddled with bullets.
‘Monstrous murder’
Honduran President Xiomara Castro said on Tuesday she was “shocked” by the “monstrous murder of women in Cefas by gangs in full view and tolerance of the security authorities”.
A state of emergency was announced, and Ms Castro dismissed security minister Ramon Sabillon.
The President in April placed Deputy Security Minister Julissa Villanueva in charge of prison security after clashes in four penitentiaries left one dead and seven injured.
Ms Villanueva then announced plans to bring order to the country’s 26 prisons, which hold around 20,000 inmates, including “real disarmament” and “total blocking of the telephone signal” to stop inmates from running their criminal businesses from the inside.
She subsequently claimed Tuesday’s violence was “an attack on the government”.
Half of the bodies had been identified by Wednesday and released to next-of-kin.
PHOTO: AFP
Honduras is a country wracked by corruption and gangs that have infiltrated even the top levels of government.
Along with neighbours El Salvador and Guatemala, Honduras forms Central America’s so-called “triangle of death”, plagued by murderous gangs called “maras” that control drug trafficking and organised crime.
Drug trafficking groups and gang members are largely responsible for the soaring rate of homicides in Honduras, which at 40 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022 was four times higher than the world average.
“For 30 years, organised crime, drug trafficking, the gangs MS-13 and (Barrio) 18 have sown terror” in Honduras, criminologist Gonzalo Sanchez told AFP.
“This has become a monster with a thousand heads, which is hard to combat,” he said, adding that the country’s prisons have been transformed into “universities of crime”.
‘Narco-state’
Honduras is also a major transit country for Colombian cocaine and other narcotics headed mainly to the United States.
Former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez was extradited to the US on drug charges in April 2022, accused by prosecutors of turning his country into a “narco-state”, involving the military, police and civilians in drug trafficking.
Relatives of inmates gather outside the detention centre to await news of their loved ones.
PHOTO: AFP
Ms Castro, the country’s new leftist president, has vowed to tackle criminal gangs, and in 2022 she temporarily lifted constitutional guarantees to allow the police to make arrests without warrants.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Honduras has urged the authorities after Tuesday’s clashes to “investigate the facts, prevent their repetition, and protect the lives of prisoners”.
For its part, Honduras’ human rights ombudsman said prisoners’ rights were not adequately guaranteed.
“It is estimated that at least 1,050 inmates have lost their lives violently in prisons in Honduras since 2003,” it said on its Twitter page.
The worst single event was in February 2012, when 361 prisoners died in a fire at Comayagua prison about 50km north of the capital. AFP
