Clashes between rival gangs on Tuesday at a women’s prison in Honduras sparked a fire, killing more than 40 people, according to police.
The “preliminary” balance of this explosion of violence in this prison, located about 25 kilometers north of the capital Tegucigalpa, is 41 dead women, said police spokesman Edgardo Barahona, who could not specify if all the victims were inmates. The fight also left five injured who were taken to a hospital in the capital, added Edgardo Barahona.
Security Minister dismissed
The president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro (left), said on her Twitter account “shocked by the monstrous assassination (…) planned by the maras”, the criminal gangs that terrorize the country. She demanded “accounts”, in particular from the Minister of the Interior, promising “drastic measures”, and dismissed the Minister of Security in the middle of the night.
Xiomara Castro has “decided to appoint General Gustavo Sánchez” as Security Minister, former director of the National Police, according to a press release. Gustavo Sánchez replaces Ramón Sabillon.
Most victims burned alive
Most of the victims burned to death while others succumbed to gunshot wounds, prosecutor’s office spokesman Yuri Mora said. He said an investigation was underway to determine which gang was behind the attack.
According to the representative of the family of the detainees, Delma Ordoñez, the victims are members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, which seems to indicate, according to her, that the attack was perpetrated by detainees from the rival gang Barrio 18.
Members of a criminal gang broke into the cell of a rival gang and set it on fire, he told reporters. This sector of the Tamara prison, where some 900 women are detained, was “totally destroyed” by the fire, according to Delma Ordoñez.
Hundreds of relatives of detainees gathered near the prison to try to obtain information.
“We don’t know who the victims are,” laments a visibly desperate man.
The Vice Minister of the Interior, Julissa Villanueva, announced on her Twitter account an “immediate intervention of firefighters, police and military.”
The country suffers from the violence of the “maras”
Honduras is plagued by corruption and terror reigned by the “maras”, which are dedicated, as in neighboring Guatemala and El Salvador, to organized crime, drug trafficking and hit men.
Organized crime is responsible for a particularly high homicide rate, which last year amounted to 40 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, four times the world average, excluding conflict zones.
According to the authorities, despite the measures taken to control the country’s 26 prisons, where some 20,000 people are detained, the leaders of the imprisoned criminal gangs continue to order crimes and offenses from their cells.
Violence, in addition to misery, pushes thousands of inhabitants to emigrate to the United States in search of a better life. Honduras is an important transit node for cocaine from Colombia to North America.
Drug trafficking to the highest peak in the state
The former president of this Central American country, Juan Orlando Hernández, was handed over to the US justice in April 2022, who claimed him for drug trafficking. His brother “Tony”, convicted of drug trafficking, had been sentenced to life imprisonment a year earlier by a New York court. According to US prosecutors, the former head of state had turned his country into a “narco-state” with complicity at the highest level of the police and military.
In May 2022, former police chief Juan Carlos Bonilla was also extradited to the United States, where he is accused of having supervised drug trafficking on behalf of former President Hernández.
The new left-wing president, Xiomara Castro, has promised to fight criminal gangs by allowing, as in neighboring El Salvador, arrests without a warrant.
Source: BFM TV
