(Tegucigalpa) Clashes between rival gangs on Tuesday at a women’s prison in Honduras, which sparked a fire, left at least 41 people dead, police said.
The “preliminary” toll of this explosion of violence in this prison located about 25 km north of the capital Tegucigalpa is 41 dead women, said police spokesman Edgardo Barahona, who could not specify whether all the victims are inmates.
The brawl also left five injured who were transported to a hospital in the capital, added Mr. Barahona.
Honduran President Xiomara Castro (left) declared on her Twitter account “shattered by the monstrous assassination […] planned by maras”, the criminal gangs that terrorize the country. She demanded “accounts” in particular from the Minister of the Interior by promising “drastic measures”.
The majority of the victims burned to death while others succumbed to gunshot wounds, prosecutors’ spokesman Yuri Mora told AFP.
Mora said an investigation was underway to determine which gang was behind the attack.
According to the family representative 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 carried out by detainees of the rival gang Barrio 18.
Members of a criminal gang broke into the cell of a rival gang and set the fire, she told the press. This sector of the Tamara prison, where some 900 women are detained, was “completely destroyed” by the fire, according to Mme Order.
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.
Deputy Interior Minister Julissa Villanueva announced on her Twitter account an “immediate intervention by firefighters, police and military”.
Gangrene
Honduras is plagued by corruption and the terror reigned by the “maras”, who engage, as in neighboring Guatemala and El Salvador, in racketeering, drug trafficking and hired murder.
Organized crime is responsible for a particularly high rate of homicides, which last year amounted to 40 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, four times higher than the world average, excluding conflict zones.
According to the authorities, despite measures taken to control the country’s 26 prisons, where around 20,000 people are detained, the leaders of the incarcerated criminal gangs continue to order crimes and misdemeanors from their cells.
Violence, as well as misery, push thousands of inhabitants to emigrate towards the United States in search of a better life.
Honduras is an important transit node for cocaine from Colombia to the United States.
The previous president of this Central American country Juan Orlando Hernandez was handed over in April 2022 to American justice who claimed him for drug trafficking. His brother “Tony”, convicted of drug trafficking, had been sentenced to life in prison a year earlier by a New York court.
According to US prosecutors, the former head of state had made his country a “narco-state” with complicity at the highest level of the police and the army.
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 ex-president Hernandez.
The new left-wing president Xiomara Castro has promised to fight against criminal gangs by allowing, as in neighboring El Salvador, arrests without a judicial warrant.