At least 41 inmates have been killed on Tuesday morning in central Honduras after a riot broke out on the nation’s solely jail for girls, one of many deadliest outbreaks of violence within the nation’s long-troubled jail system.
Most 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 loss of life toll was anticipated to rise as investigators combed by means of the detention facility in Támara, close to Tegucigalpa, the capital.
While the reason for the violence was not clear, the jail has been the scene of ongoing battle between feuding gangs.
“We are dismayed by the loss of human lives,” Julissa Villanueva, vice minister of safety and head of the Honduran penitentiary system, mentioned in a news convention. The nation’s penal system, she mentioned, had been “hijacked” by organized crime.
The loss of life toll on Tuesday makes the episode the deadliest jail riot within the Central American nation in years. In late 2019, almost 40 gang members have been killed in clashes at two all-male prisons over the identical weekend.
Killings have surged in recent times within the ladies’s jail, the place a number of inmates have been strangled or stabbed throughout confrontations between feminine gang members of two rival prison organizations: the 18th Street 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 “planned by gangs in full view of the law enforcement authorities,” she tweeted, with out elaborating.
The MS-13 and 18th Street gangs, longtime rivals that originated within the United States, 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 just like a much more aggressive strategy 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 the main causes of insecurity, migration, displacement, loss of freedom,” in response to Ms. Castro, stays a big downside. A current report by the native chapter of Transparency International concluded that 8.4 % of Honduran households proceed to endure from extortion, solely a slight drop from final yr’s 9 %.
Violence isn’t unusual in prisons in Honduras and different Central American international locations the place overcrowded amenities crammed with rival gang members present fertile floor for unrest.
A 2021 report on Honduras by Human Rights Watch mentioned that “Overcrowding, inadequate nutrition, poor sanitation, beatings, intra-gang violence, and detainee killings are endemic in prisons.”
Honduras’s National Women’s Penitentiary for Social Adaptation housed about 800 inmates, roughly double its capability, in response to a authorities official.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, in 2020, recorded “several violent events” throughout Honduran prisons, together with the ladies’s facility, “where no violent deaths had been reported before.” Some of these incidents “were allegedly perpetrated with firearms and other prohibited objects,” the fee mentioned.
Contraband, together with alcohol, medication, pistols, machine weapons and even grenades, have been discovered inside prisons, in response to Honduran authorities. Local news 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 inside 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 prison gangs and arranged crime.
The lethal riot on Tuesday was “the product of a direct attack by organized crime against the actions that we are deliberately taking,” Ms. Villanueva instructed reporters, referring to Ms. Castro’s anti-gang push.
Source: www.nytimes.com