How to deal with the violence of empty, these armed gangs that rage in Central America, against a backdrop of drug trafficking and extortion? The temptation to take a hard line is increasingly felt in this region in crisis, both in El Salvador, under the thumb of the controversial president for his authoritarian tendencies, Nayib Bukele, and in neighboring Honduras, where the state of exception entered into force on Tuesday 6 December.
Arrests without warrant
By presidential decision, certain constitutional guarantees are now suspended, and for thirty days, in Honduras. Police can make warrantless arrests in 89 neighborhoods in Tegucigalpa, the capital, and 73 districts in San Pedro Sula, the country’s industrial hub. For Xiomara Castro, elected a year ago on a left-wing program, these measures, which are supposed to last a month, should help the government to “immediately recover the territories of lawlessness” and to fight against the perpetrators of extortion, “one of the main causes of migration and closure of small and medium-sized businesses”.
The calls of the population are more and more pressing. At the end of November, hundreds of bus drivers demonstrated in the capital to denounce the extortion of which they are victims. According to union leaders, some 400 transport workers have been killed since the beginning of the year for trying to stand up to emptyin particular the Pandilla 18 and the MS-13, the two main ones to rage in Honduras.
The uncontrolled violence of the “maras”
The empty are gangs of young people who operate in Central America, and more particularly in the “Northern Triangle” (El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala). Involved in the drug trade, they are deadly, and their presence largely explains the region’s record homicide rates – 40 murders per 100,000 people in Honduras, four times the global average. “Violence has long plagued the Northern Triangle, but homicide rates rose rapidly in the 2000s, when the region became the main South American drug transit route to the United Statess », could we read by way of explanation not long ago in a report from the American Congress.
The controversial example of El Salvador
For Xiomara Castro, the pressure was all the stronger as many citizens asked him to follow the example of El Salvador, a neighboring country of Honduras where the government of Nayib Bukele, a populist president accused of dictatorial drift, imposed a state of emergency as early as March, allowing police to make warrantless arrests. The « guerre » against gangs has led, since the beginning of the year, to the detention of 58,000 people. On Saturday, nearly 10,000 soldiers and police were deployed at dawn on the outskirts of San Salvador, during a new operation punch.
Honduras reacted first by sending last Sunday more than 600 police officers to the border with El Salvador, to “prevent entry” in the country “members of criminal structures”. Too timid effort: Tuesday, the first day of the state of emergency, hundreds of police were deployed in poor neighborhoods of Hondurass, imitating the Salvadorian example.