Abstract
Thousands of killings of young people in Honduras go uninvestigated. In a special report
This autumn the bodies of two young men were discovered just outside Tegucigalpa, the capital. They had their hands tied behind their backs and each one had been shot in the head.
Their crime: to have taken part in anti-government protests. There was no investigation and no one was prosecuted.
Summary executions and murders are part of ordinary life for people in Honduras. No wonder, then, that for this and other reasons an estimated 4,000 Hondurans are fleeing for the US border. And some of these are young people who fear for their lives.
According to Casa Alianza, a foundation that focuses on children’s and youth rights, there have been more than 3,000 arbitrary extra-judicial killings of children and youths under the age of 23 since Hernández took over – not a great change from previous years.
Even teenagers at middle schools and primary schools are targets. Sometimes their parents and families are killed if they try to investigate.
Those who kill – criminals and the state – do so with impunity and just 10% face trial. Honduras has one of the highest rates of impunity worldwide, but it has become almost taboo to discuss it.
Anthropologist Bertilio Amaya explains that, faced with the scale of killings from all sides, the population has become used to violence. “Death is perceived as normalised, [as] everyday. People don’t get frightened, they don’t become indignant,” he told Index.
It is a regular occurrence for bodies to turn up on the banks of rivers, with their hands bound and bullet holes in their heads.
Crime scenes read like a map of the country’s northern waterways – the Ulúa, the Chamelecón, the Bermejo and the Río Piedras. But the highest number of bodies are found by the River Choluteca in Tegucigalpa.
Nery Ordóñez, former head of criminal investigations for the Honduran national police, revealed in an interview with Index that 1,522 students met with violent deaths between 2010 and 2018. Of these, more than half were young people in middle or secondary school, while 121 were university students.
Ordóñez believes gangs and delinquent groups, and their territorial disputes, rather than police officers or military personnel are behind the deaths of middle school students.
Maras, the street gangs that originated in the USA and now operate across Central America, are known for their cruelty and violence. But police investigations do not usually look for motives behind executions, and human rights organisations say that these gangs often kill on behalf of the military and police. This makes it hard to know who is doing the killing.
Hernández’s government was first elected in 2013 on a promise of reducing the homicide rate – then 79 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Protests sparked by the re-election of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, under whose leadership thousands of deaths have not been investigated
CREDIT: Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty
He took office in 2014, and when he was reelected for a second term in 2017 the rate had dropped to 43 per 100,000, according to the Observatory of Violence of the Autonomous University of Honduras.
Hernández was the first Honduran president to run for a second term, after a controversial decision by the country’s supreme court to lift a ban on re-election. US support was also instrumental to his success in an election which the opposition claims was rigged.
During protests sparked by the election and allegations of electoral fraud, more than 23 deaths occurred, which a report by the UN High Commission says have been attributed to state security services.
According to the Coalition Against Impunity, a network of 53 human rights NGOs, only one police officer has been charged to date.
The former head of the national police’s internal affairs unit, María Luisa Borjas, who was removed from her post after accusing police officers of carrying out summary executions in 2002, is now a member of congress for the opposition. “There’s a policy of killing young people,” she claimed.
On two occasions she has spoken up in the National Congress to condemn summary executions. In retaliation, she says, the president no longer gives her the floor.
She told Index of a young man who was abducted at a demonstration when people went on pot-banging protests in defiance of the curfew in December 2017.
The men who attacked him were dressed in civilian clothing but had a military appearance. The young man, who was a leader of protests against the curfew, was abducted one day at 8pm. His body appeared the following day in a street in the Las Hadas district of the capital, bearing signs of torture.
Lawyer Joaquín Mejía, who has also worked at the human rights group Equipo de reflexión, investigación y comunicación and at Radio Progreso, has studied the composition of death squads, gangs and delinquent groups in Honduras.
“Society is well aware that social cleansing squads are operating in Honduras,” he said.
One of the groups which became targets of the violence was the Antorchas de Los Indig-nados (Torches of the Indignant) movement, which was set up in 2015 after a government corruption scandal that included the misappropriation of social security funds.
The most high-profile death was that of lawyer Kevin Ferrera, the legal representative of the leader of Los Indignados. After he was murdered for organising a protest, other high-profile figures went into exile or hiding.
In Mejia’s view, execution is a censored topic in Honduras, but the death squads have not gone away.
He says the same groups that played a fundamental role in the 1980s, during the forced disappearances, continue to play a role to this day – invisible and acting with impunity.
Honduras Factfile
President of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández has been both head of state and head of government since January 2014
The country gained independence from Spain in 1821
Two Honduran cities, Distrito Central and San Pedro Sula, rank as two of the top five most violent cities in the world with the latter having 112.09 homicides per 100,000 residents
Honduras can be a deadly place to work as a reporter. It is the most dangerous country in the Americas for journalists per capita
The country rates the second poorest in the Central America, with high unemployment and unequal distribution of income
Sources: Global Edge, UCL, The Independent, Al Jazeera, CIA