At least 50 women died in riot at a women’s prison in Honduras today, with most of them burned to death by gang members. Honduras’s president blamed the deaths on “mara” street gangs that often informally control life in Honduras’s prison.
Most victims were burned but some were stabbed or shot. It took place at the prison in Tamara, over 30 miles north of Hondura’s capital, Tegucigalpa. Nine female inmates were being treated at a Tegucigalpa hospital for gunshot and knife wounds, according to hospital workers.
Local media interviewed an injured inmate outside the hospital who said prisoners belonging to the Barrio 18 gang broke into a cell block and shot other inmates or set them on fire.
Honduran President Xiomara Castro said the riot was “planned by maras with the knowledge and acquiescence of security authorities”.
“I am going to take drastic measures!” Castro wrote on Facebook.
Over a hundred angry, distraught relatives gathered outside the prison to try to found out the fates of their loved ones.
“We are here dying of anguish, of pain,” said Salomón García, whose daughter is an inmate at the facility. “We don’t have any information.”
Julissa Villanueva, head of the country’s prison system, said the riot probably was a reaction to recent attempts to crack down on illicit activity inside the prisons and to measures “we are taking against organized crime.” “We will not back down,” he said on TV.
Gangs informally rule wide swathes of Honduras’s prisons, with prison gang leaders often setting rules and selling contraband.
The riot resulted in the largest death toll for a female detention center in Central America since 2017, when girls at a shelter for troubled youths in Guatemala set fire to mattresses to protest rapes, abuse, and overcrowding. The resulting smoke and fire killed 41 girls.
The worst Latin American prison disaster in a century occurred a decade ago in Honduras,at the Comayagua penitentiary, where 361 inmates died in a fire likely set by a match or cigarette.
