Global Courant
The Honduran government has announced a crackdown on organized crime within the Central American country’s prison system after an attack at a women’s prison killed 46 people last week.
The Honduran Armed Forces said on Monday that their attempt to “take back control of the prisons” had begun, dubbing the “Operation Faith and Hope” initiative.
Searches were underway Monday morning at the Tamara Penal Center, where the armed forces said they had restored high caliber weapons, grenades, ammunition, mobile phones and internet access devices within the prison walls.
The initial search appeared to focus on the men’s prison, although Tamara was also the site of the deadly attack last week at the Centro Femenino de Adaptacion Social (CEFAS), a women’s detention center that holds about 900 people.
“Operations in other penal centers will continue,” the armed forces said in Twitter posts on Monday.
Relatives of those killed at the Centro Femenino de Adaptacion Social (CEFAS) gather at a mortuary in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, June 21 (File: Fredy Rodriguez/Reuters)
The June 20 attack in Tamara, about 50 km northwest of the capital Tegucigalpa, marked one of the country’s deadliest prison riots in recent memory.
Violence erupted after women from the Barrio 18 street gang confronted their rivals in the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) group in the heavily divided prison, authorities said.
Officials have said the gang members were able to infiltrate a rival cellblock with guns, machetes and flammable liquids that they used to set fire to their enemies. Some are said to have even brought locks to lock their victims in their cells while they were burned alive.
Eighteen handguns, an assault rifle, two submachine guns and two grenades were reportedly recovered after the attack.
Yuri Mora, a spokesman for the Honduran National Police, said 26 of the victims died in the flames, while the rest succumbed to gunshot and stab wounds.
The attack sparked a public outcry, with family members gathering outside the prison walls and President Xiomara Castro denouncing the violence as “monstrous”.
Remilitarize the prison system
Castro vowed to take “drastic measures” in the aftermath of the prison clash. Last week, she announced that control of 21 of the country’s 26 prisons would be handed over to the Military Police of Public Order (PMOP) in a bid to crack down on organized crime.
It was a dramatic U-turn for a government that had once tried to demilitarize certain aspects of public safety. Last year, Castro had taken the prisons out of PMOP authority and placed them under national police instead.
Castro also said in her announcement that her government would use islands off the coast of Honduras to house “very dangerous” gang leaders.
Deadly prison clashes are not unheard of in Honduras: Over the course of a single weekend in 2019, about 37 suspected gang members were killed in prison violence spearheaded by Castro’s predecessor, Juan Orlando Hernandez.
And in 2017, a government-run shelter for troubled girls saw 41 people killed when mattresses were set on fire as part of a protest against appalling conditions.
Members of the Military Police of Public Order present weapons discovered Monday at a prison in Támara, Honduras (Fredy Rodriguez/Reuters)
But when the left-wing Castro came to power in January 2022, her government marked a break with the past. Not only did she become Honduras’s first female president, but her inauguration also ended 12 years of rule by the conservative National Party.
Nevertheless, Castro’s government has been accused of not doing enough to end gang-related crime in the country.
In December, she declared a state of emergency to deal with the gangs’ territorial wars, but so far it has failed to dampen the violence.
On Saturday, gunmen killed at least 11 people in a shooting at a billiard room in Choloma, a manufacturing center linked to the Barrio 18 gang. In response, the government imposed a 15-day curfew in the city and another in nearby San Pedro Sula in northern Honduras.
Officials indicated that the billiards shootings could be linked to an ongoing battle between gangs.
“We don’t rule out that these crimes could be some kind of revenge for what happened in the women’s prison,” said National Police Commissioner Miguel Perez Suazo.
Photos released Monday by the Honduran armed forces draw comparisons to images from the prisons of neighboring El Salvador (Honduras Armed Forces/Handout via Reuters)
Footage released Monday by the Honduran armed forces showed the results of the prison raid, with long lines of suspected gang members stripped down to their shorts and sitting on the floor under the watch of armed guards.
The images evoke comparisons with neighboring El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele has led a controversial ‘war on gangs’.
When Bukele expanded the country’s penal system — to accommodate the more than 65,000 people arrested — photos of the country’s new “megaprison” show similar treatment, with male prisoners crammed into rows on the floor, wearing tiny boxer shorts. .
According to polls, a political figure with high approval ratings, Bukele declared a state of emergency in March 2022, suspending certain civil liberties in her drive to end gang violence in the country.
But critics have warned that the emergency order, extended since last year, has led to widespread human rights abuses, including arbitrary arrests and prison sentences, as well as a lack of due process.
Eric Olson, a fellow at the Wilson Center, a global affairs think tank, said countries like El Salvador and Honduras have a tendency to “lock young people into prisons.” But that strategy, he explained, can backfire.
“They throw them in overcrowded prisons. And whether they’re gang members or not, if they go in, they’ll come out gang members, because that’s the only way they can survive prison,” Olson told Al Jazeera.
“So in some ways the prisons themselves become factories for gang creation. And it is a very wrong idea that you can lock up huge numbers of young people and solve the problem.”
