Observers stated Tuesday {that a} crackdown in Honduras on gangs within the nation’s prisons is eerily just like one carried out final 12 months in neighboring El Salvador by President Nayib Bukele.
Like authorities in El Salvador, police in Honduras who launched a jail sweep Monday have distributed dramatic movies of tattooed inmates being frog-marched round, although their movies have lacked Bukele’s slick manufacturing values and media savvy.
“It is the identical phenomenon,” stated retired police commissioner Henry Osorto, however added that the crackdowns must be scrutinized to see whether or not “requirements and worldwide treaties are being violated.”
Rights teams in Honduras cited obvious abuses as prisoners had been pressured to sit down spread-legged, half-naked and nestled in opposition to each other in open jail yards. And as they did in El Salvador, officers in Honduras angrily disregarding criticism, saying the road gangs abused civilians extra.
“These criminals violate individual’s human rights, they kill, kidnap and extort cash, who’s defending these rights?” Honduran navy police commander Ramiro Muñoz stated in an interview with native media Tuesday.
That was strikingly just like Bukele’s dismissal of complaints from rights teams about El Salvador’s jail crackdown in 2022, when he bragged that inmate had been “sleeping on the flooring, and consuming two meals a day” after he took away mattresses, diminished meals provides and halted visits and web service in prisons.
“They did not say something when the criminals killed dozens of Salvadorans, however they jumped after we began detaining them,” Bukele stated of rights teams on the time.
Honduran President Xiomara Castro has decreed a state of emergency in some provinces, and the federal government distributed video Tuesday of police tearing down a cyclone fence {that a} gangs had erected in a city in northern Honduras to mark its territory.
And like El Salvador, two days of strict military-style searches of jails in Honduras turned up some surprises.
One heavily-tattooed chief of the violent Barrio 18 gang in Honduras was present in a jail totally different from the one he was formally assigned to. That, and the heaps of weapons present in inmates’ cells, may solely be defined by jail mismanagement and corruption.
“The jail system in Honduras is a corrupt college for criminals, and we’re going to dismantle it and provides individuals safety,” Protection Minister Jose Manuel Zelaya Rosales wrote in his social media accounts. He’s the nephew of former president Mel Zelaya, who’s married to Xiomara Castro.
After inmates had been pressured to strip to their shorts and sit hunched over in a jail courtyard in one of many searches, navy police went by way of their cells and located dozens of pistols, a whole bunch of rounds of assault rifles and grenades.
The jail sweep demonstrated the Honduran authorities’ resolve to crack down on gangs following final week’s gang-related bloodbath of 46 feminine inmates within the worst atrocity at a ladies’ jail in current reminiscence
The violence on the ladies’ jail in Tamara, northeast of Honduras’ capital, outraged the nation and sparked raids, curfews and a crackdown.
In that bloodbath, feminine inmates belonging to the Barrio 18 avenue gang smuggled in weapons, machetes and a flammable liquid. They subdued guards and burst into cellblocks housing members of a rival gang. They sprayed the victims with gunfire, hacked to dying others after which locked their cells and set the victims on hearth. (https://polishnews.co.uk/honduras-copies-el-salvadors-playbook-in-anti-gang-crackdown/)
Source: AP
