Riots kill 41 at Honduran women’s prison
At least 41 inmates were killed in central Honduras on Tuesday morning after a riot broke out at the country’s only women’s prison.
Most of the victims had been burned, while others had been shot, said Yuri Mora, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, who added that the death toll is expected to rise as investigators searched the detention center in Támara, near Tegucigalpa. capital.
While the cause of the violence was not clear, the prison has been the scene of ongoing clashes between feuding gangs.
“We are appalled by the loss of life,” Julissa Villanueva, deputy security minister and head of the Honduran penitentiary system, said at a news conference. The country’s penal system, she said, had been “hijacked” by organized crime.
Tuesday’s death toll makes the episode the deadliest prison riot in the Central American country in years. At the end of 2019, there were almost 40 gang members killed in skirmishes in two male-only prisons on the same weekend.
Have murders increased sharply in recent years at the Women’s Prison, where several inmates have been strangled or stabbed during confrontations between female gang members from two rival criminal organizations: the 18th Street gang and the MS-13 gang.
The country’s president, Xiomara Castro, said she was “appalled” by the deaths and vowed to take “drastic measures” to hold responsible officials accountable.
The riot was “planned by gangs in full view of law enforcement,” she tweeted, without elaborating.
The MS-13 and 18th Street gangs, old rivals originating in the United States, have fueled decades of violence in Honduras and neighboring countries.
Struggling to contain them, Ms Castro has since December declared and extended a state of emergency, suspending some constitutional rights and allowing security officers to detain people they believe have links to gangs.
The model is similar to a much more aggressive approach in El Salvador, where the government’s crackdown on gang violence has reduced murder rates — though civil rights groups say it has led to mass arbitrary arrests, extreme prison overcrowding and torture.
Honduras’ strategy to crack down on gangs has led to a drop in violence this year, the national police said, although not as much as in El Salvador.
And gang extortion, “one of the main causes of insecurity, migration, displacement, loss of freedom”, according to Ms Castro, remains a major problem. a recent report by the local chapter of Transparency International concluded that 8.4 percent of Honduran households are still victims of extortion, only a slight decrease from last year’s 9 percent.
Violence is not uncommon in prisons in Honduras and other Central American countries, where overcrowded prisons filled with rival gang members provide fertile ground for unrest.
A 2021 report on Honduras by Human Rights Watch said that “overcrowding, inadequate nutrition, poor sanitation, beatings, gang violence and inmate killings are endemic in prisons.”
The National Women’s Prison for Social Adjustment in Honduras housed about 800 inmates, about double the capacity, according to a government official.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, in 2020, included “several violent events” in Honduran prisons, including the women’s facility, “where violent deaths had not been reported before.” Some of those incidents “were reportedly committed with firearms and other prohibited items,” the commission said.
According to Honduran authorities, contraband has been found in prisons, including alcohol, drugs, pistols, machine guns and even grenades. Local news outlets have reported some prisoners bribe officials to smuggle weapons into prisons.
The Honduran government in April unveiled a plan to tackle prison corruption and curb violence, including by ensuring inmates are unarmed and isolating those associated with criminal gangs and organized crime .
Tuesday’s deadly uprising was “the product of a direct attack by organized crime against the actions we deliberately take,” Ms Villanueva told reporters, referring to Ms Castro’s anti-gang action.