2023-06-22 05:00:00
Relatives of inmates outside a prison in Honduras where 46 women have died FREDY RODRIGUEZ | REUTERS
A fight between gangs was the trigger for the massacre
22 jun 2023 . Updated at 05:00 h.
Terrible prison tragedy in Honduras. The authorities of the Central American country confirmed yesterday the death of at least 46 inmates in the violent events that took place this Tuesday at the Women’s Center for Social Adaptation (Cefas), a women’s prison some 25 kilometers from the capital, Tegucigalpa.
The massacre was planned by gangs [pandillas] in full view and with the patience of the security authorities, according to the country’s president, Xiomara Castro. The progressive leader assured that she would take drastic measures, but did not announce what kind.
The altercations began, according to the version of a police spokesman, when a large group of female gang members from Barrio 18 subdued their guards and entered, heavily armed, a place where there were dozens of women belonging to the rival gang, the Mara Salvatrucha. The victims died from burning, and also from bullet wounds and bladed weapons.
Both groups, originating in the late 1980s in the US, have been facing each other for more than two decades on the streets of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
In Honduran prisons it is not uncommon for prisoners to bribe or extort guards to get weapons into the prison, and prison massacres are recurring in a prison system that is overcrowded and abandoned. Human Rights Watch, in a 2021 report, had also decried poor sanitation, beatings, gang violence, and inmate murders as endemic in Honduran prisons. In the Cefas there were between 800 and 900 inmates, twice its capacity.
Destitucin ministerial
Castro dismissed the Security Minister, Ramn Sabilln, on Tuesday, who will be replaced by Gustavo Sánchez, until now director of the National Police.
The operation to regain control of the prison was coordinated by Undersecretary Julissa Villanueva, who, in April, had announced a plan to intervene in the prisons, prevent telephone communications, and disarm the prisoners. Villanueva assured yesterday that the Cefas massacre occurred in response to the intervention announced in three prisons in the country.
Honduras is one of the most violent countries in the West. Castro began, at the end of 2022, a heavy-handed policy, similar, although more lax, to that carried out in El Salvador by the Nayib Bukele Administration.
The progressive president enacted partial states of emergency in dozens of the most violent municipalities in the country, suspending some constitutional rights and making arrests of suspects more flexible.
While evaluating the response to the attacks, the authorities began yesterday to carry out the first autopsies and to deliver the bodies of the prisoners to their relatives.
Filed in: Honduras El Salvador USA Guatemala
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