TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras
Gang members in a women’s prison in Honduras slaughtered 46 other women inmates by spraying them with gunfire, hacking them with machetes and then locking survivors in their cells and dousing them with flammable liquid, an official said Wednesday.
The carnage in Tuesday’s riot
was the worst atrocity at a women’s prison in recent memory, something
President Xiomara Castro called “monstrous.”
Relatives said inmates at the
facility had been threatened for weeks by members of the notorious Barrio 18
gang.
Chillingly, the gang members
were able to arm themselves with prohibited weapons, brush past guards and
attack; they even carried locks to shut their victims inside, apparently to
burn them to death. The intensity of the fire left the walls of the cells
blackened and beds reduced to twisted heaps of metal.
“A group of armed people went
to the cellblock of a rival gang, locked the doors, opened fire on them,” said
Juan López Rochez, the chief of operations for the country’s National Police.
Miguel Martínez, a security
ministry spokesman, said the attack was taped by security cameras, up to the
moment the gang members destroyed them in what he called a “planned” attack.
“You can see the moment in
which the women overcome the guards, leaving them helpless, and take their
keys,” Martínez said.
Castro said Tuesday’s riot at
the prison in the town of Tamara, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) northwest of
Honduras’ capital, was “planned by maras (street gangs) with the knowledge and
acquiescence of security authorities.”
Castro fired Security Minister
Ramón Sabillón, and replaced him with Gustavo Sánchez, who had been serving as
head of the National Police.
But Castro but did not explain how inmates identified as members of the Barrio 18 gang were able to get guns and machetes into the prison, or move freely into an adjoining cell block. Initial reports suggested the doors to the gang’s cell block had been left open, facilitating the attack.
The amount of weaponry found
in the prison after the riot was impressive: 18 pistols, an assault rifle, two
machine pistols and two grenades — all of which were smuggled into the prison.
“Obviously, there must have
been human failures,” López Rochez said. “We are investigating all the
employees at the center.”
Sandra Rodríguez Vargas, the
assistant commissioner for Honduras’ prison system, said the attackers
“removed” guards at the facility — none appeared to have been injured — around
8 a.m. Tuesday.
Twenty-six of the victims were
burned to death and the remainder shot or stabbed, said Yuri Mora, the
spokesman for Honduras’ national police investigation agency. At least seven
inmates were being treated at a Tegucigalpa hospital.
The riot’s death toll
surpassed that of a fire at a female detention center in Guatemala in 2017,
when girls at a shelter for troubled youths set fire to mattresses to protest
rapes and other mistreatment at the overcrowded institution. The smoke and fire
killed 41 girls.
The worst prison disaster in a
century also occurred in Honduras, in 2012, at the Comayagua men’s
penitentiary, where 361 male inmates died in a fire possibly caused by a match,
cigarette or some other open flame.
There were ample warnings
ahead of Tuesday’s tragedy, according to Johanna Paola Soriano Euceda, who was
waiting outside the morgue in Tegucigalpa for news about her mother, Maribel
Euceda, and sister, Karla Soriano. Both were on trial for drug trafficking but
were held in the same area as convicted prisoners.
Soriano Euceda said they had
told her Sunday that “they (Barrio 18 members) were out of control, they were
fighting with them all the time. That was the last time we talked.”
Another woman, who did not
want to give her name for fear of reprisals, said she was waiting for news
about a friend, Alejandra Martínez, 26, who was been held in the ill-fated Cell
Block One on robbery charges.
“She told me the last time I
saw her on Sunday that the (Barrio) 18 people had threatened them, that they
were going to kill them if they didn’t turn over a relative,” she said.
Gangs sometimes demand victims
“turn over” a friend or relative by giving the gang their name, address and
description, so that enforcers can later find and kidnap, rob or kill them.
Officials described the
killings as a “terrorist act,” but also acknowledged that gangs essentially had
ruled some parts of the prison.
Julissa Villanueva, head of
the prison system, suggested the riot started because of recent attempts by
authorities to crack down on illicit activity inside prison walls and called
Tuesday’s violence a reaction to moves “we are taking against organized crime.”
“We will not back down,”
Villanueva said in a televised address after the riot.
Gangs wield broad control
inside the country’s prisons, where inmates often set their own rules and sell
prohibited goods.
They were also apparently able
to smuggle in guns and other weapons, a recurring problem in Honduran prisons.
“The issue is to prevent
people from smuggling in drugs, grenades and firearms,” said Honduran human
rights expert Joaquin Mejia. “Today’s events show that they have not been able
to do that.”
Meanwhile, the grim task
continued of trying to identify the bodies, some terribly burned. Officials on
Wednesday began turning over some of the corpses to families for burial.
The wait for news was torture
for many families of inmates. Dozens of anxious, angry relatives gathered
outside the rural prison.
“We are here dying of anguish,
of pain ... we don’t have any information,” said Salomón García, whose daughter
is an inmate at the facility.
Tuesday’s riot may increase
the pressure on Honduras to emulate the drastic zero-tolerance, no-privileges
prisons set in up in neighboring El Salvador by President Nayib Bukele. While
El Salvador’s crackdown on gangs has given rise to rights violations, it has
also proved immensely popular in a country long terrorized by street gangs.
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