At least 41 inmates were found dead at a Honduran women’s prison on Tuesday, a local official said, in what family members say stemmed from an alleged confrontation between rival gang members.
“41 deaths are reported, preliminary,” in a brawl registered at the Women’s Center for Social Adaptation (Cefas), located 25 km north of the capital, police spokesman Edgardo Barahona informed the AFP news agency.
The spokesman for the Public Ministry, Yuri Mora, told the Reuters news agency that the victims died “mostly burned and others shot.” The official did not give details about the origin of the event because it must be reported by the Penitentiary Institute, after the investigations, he clarified.
For her part, the president of an association of relatives of prisoners, Delma Ordóñez, said that during the early hours of the morning there was a confrontation between members of the rival gangs Mara 18 and Mara Salvatrucha MS-13 in the prison, where there are some 900 inmates. . Ordóñez explained that the brawl and the fire at Cefas supposedly occurred after the authorities notified new rules inside the prison.
Relatives of the inmates stationed themselves outside the prison to learn about the status of their loved ones. The center operates a room where there are 23 children who are the children of the prisoners, according to Evelyn Escoto, Commissioner of the state National Center for Prevention Against Torture, Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment (CONAPREV).
“I’m looking for information about what happened to my daughter, but we haven’t been informed yet,” a woman who gave her name as Ligia Rodríguez said in a television interview from the site.
The Vice Minister of Security, Julissa Villanueva, ordered an “immediate intervention” in the prison after declaring an emergency due to the fight and assured that the authorities “we will not tolerate acts of vandalism or irregularities.”
Villanueva told journalists that the brawl is “the product of the actions of organized crime” in response to the intervention announced by the authorities in the prisons of Ilama, in Santa Bárbara, in the west of the country, and La Ceiba, in the Caribbean. .
In Cefas “vandalism has been reactivated and women, with weapons and balaclavas, started burning,” but the fire was already controlled by the Honduran Fire Department, said Villanueva, who has been appointed by the Honduran president, Xiomara Castro, to lead an intervention in the country’s prisons.
The Honduran authorities announced on April 18 a set of measures to bring order to the country’s prisons that involve the blocking of cell phone calls, a real disarmament of the prisoners and the classification of the inmates for dangerousness.
Since April, a dozen shootings or confrontations have been recorded in Honduran prisons, where overcrowding and overcrowding prevail, there is a lack of adequate and safe physical facilities for housing inmates, and hygiene and sanitation conditions are deplorable. .
Honduras has a long history of events in its overcrowded prisons, among the most infamous is a fire that occurred in February 2012 that left 360 dead and was later declared accidental by US experts.
FUENTE: EFE AFP REUTERS
