No less than 41 inmates had been killed on Tuesday morning in central Honduras after a riot broke out on the nation’s solely jail for ladies, one of many deadliest outbreaks of violence within the nation’s long-troubled jail system.
Many of the victims had been burned, whereas others had been shot, mentioned Yuri Mora, a spokesman for the general public prosecutor’s workplace, who added that the demise toll was anticipated to rise as investigators combed by way of the detention facility in Támara, close to Tegucigalpa, the capital.
Whereas the reason for the violence was not clear, the jail has been the scene of ongoing battle between feuding gangs.
“We’re dismayed by the lack of human lives,” Julissa Villanueva, vice minister of safety and head of the Honduran penitentiary system, mentioned in a information convention. The nation’s penal system, she mentioned, had been “hijacked” by organized crime.
The demise toll on Tuesday makes the episode the deadliest jail riot within the Central American nation in years. In late 2019, practically 40 gang members had been killed in clashes at two all-male prisons over the identical weekend.
Killings have surged lately within the girls’s jail, the place a number of inmates have been strangled or stabbed throughout confrontations between feminine gang members of two rival felony organizations: the 18th Avenue gang and the MS-13 gang.
The nation’s president, Xiomara Castro, mentioned she was “shocked” by the deaths and promised to take “drastic measures” to carry accountable officers accountable.
The riot was “deliberate by gangs in full view of the regulation enforcement authorities,” she tweeted, with out elaborating.
The MS-13 and 18th Avenue gangs, longtime rivals that originated in america, have fomented violence in Honduras and neighboring international locations for many years.
Struggling to comprise them, Ms. Castro has declared and prolonged states of emergency since December, suspending some constitutional rights and permitting safety brokers to detain individuals who they imagine may be related to gangs.
The mannequin is much like a much more aggressive method in El Salvador, the place a authorities crackdown on gang violence has brought on murder charges to plummet — although civil rights teams say it has led to mass arbitrary arrests, excessive overcrowding in prisons and torture.
Honduras’s technique to sort out gangs has led to a drop in violence this yr, the nationwide police has mentioned, although not as steep as in El Salvador.
And extortion by gangs, “one of many most important causes of insecurity, migration, displacement, lack of freedom,” in accordance with Ms. Castro, stays a major drawback. A current report by the native chapter of Transparency Worldwide concluded that 8.4 p.c of Honduran households proceed to endure from extortion, solely a slight drop from final yr’s 9 p.c.
Violence isn’t unusual in prisons in Honduras and different Central American international locations the place overcrowded services crammed with rival gang members present fertile floor for unrest.
A 2021 report on Honduras by Human Rights Watch mentioned that “Overcrowding, insufficient diet, poor sanitation, beatings, intra-gang violence, and detainee killings are endemic in prisons.”
Honduras’s Nationwide Ladies’s Penitentiary for Social Adaptation housed about 800 inmates, roughly double its capability, in accordance with a authorities official.
The Inter-American Fee on Human Rights, in 2020, recorded “a number of violent occasions” throughout Honduran prisons, together with the ladies’s facility, “the place no violent deaths had been reported earlier than.” A few of these incidents “had been allegedly perpetrated with firearms and different prohibited objects,” the fee mentioned.
Contraband, together with alcohol, medication, pistols, machine weapons and even grenades, have been discovered inside prisons, in accordance with Honduran authorities. Native information shops have reported that some inmates bribe officers to have the ability to smuggle weapons into the prisons.
The Honduran authorities in April unveiled a plan to handle corruption throughout the jail system and attempt to tamp down the violence, together with making certain that inmates are usually not armed and isolating these with hyperlinks to felony gangs and arranged crime.
The lethal riot on Tuesday was “the product of a direct assault by organized crime towards the actions that we’re intentionally taking,” Ms. Villanueva instructed reporters, referring to Ms. Castro’s anti-gang push.
