At least 36 people were killed in weekend clashes in Honduran prisons as the military and police tried to regain control after a spate of murders linked to the criminal gangs plaguing the country.
On Sunday afternoon, 18 gang members died in a clash between inmates at El Porvenir prison, 60km north of the capital Tegucigalpa.
“Firearms, knives and machetes” were used in the brawl, which also left 10 wounded, Lieutenant Jose Coello, a spokesman for the National Inter-Institutional Security Force (Fusina), told local media.
On Friday night, 18 prisoners died and 16 were wounded in a shooting at the prison in the port town of Tela, northwest of the capital.
The killings came shortly after Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez — grappling with a wave of prison killings — on Tuesday last week ordered the army and the police to take control of the country’s 27 prisons, which are badly overcrowded with about 21,000 inmates.
The security forces later said they were deploying about 1,200 soldiers and police officers in 18 facilities classified as “high risk.”
Hernandez announced the crackdown after the killings on Dec. 14 of five members of the feared MS-13 gang by a fellow detainee at the high-security prison in La Tolva, east of Tegucigalpa.
That came just a day after Pedro Idelfonso Armas, the warden of Honduras’ main high-security prison in Santa Barbara, El Pozo, was shot dead in the south of the country.
The Honduran Ministry of Defense and Security had suspended Armas shortly before his death, amid an investigation into his presence during the Oct. 26 murder of Magdaleno Meza, a drug kingpin whose confession and notebooks linked him to the Honduran president’s brother, Juan Antonio Hernandez.
Meza’s account books were used as evidence in the New York trial of Hernandez, who was subsequently convicted on four counts of drug trafficking. He faces sentencing — possibly for life — next month.
The Honduran president condemned the conviction of his younger brother, saying it was based on “the testimony of confessed assassins.”
A video circulating on social media shows the 52-year-old Armas talking with Meza when prison guards opened a locked gate, allowing a dozen inmates to burst in to stab and fatally shoot him.
In statements to reporters, Meza’s lawyer, Carlos Chajtur, publicly accused the government of having ordered his client to be killed in retaliation for having collaborated with US justice in the trial against Hernandez.
On Sunday night, military and police chiefs told the media that the wave of violence inside prisons “is an escalation of the criminal world to try to prevent Fusina [...] from imposing the necessary controls in the country’s penal centers.”
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Honduras said it observed “with alarm the violence inside prisons,” and urged the government “to guarantee the life and respect of human rights to those deprived of liberty and proceed to a prompt, effective and transparent investigation.”
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