Honduras plans to build 20,000-capacity 'megaprison' for gang members amid crackdown

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — Honduras' president announced the creation of a new “megaprison” with a capacity of 20,000, part of the government's broader crackdown on gang and criminal violence. efforts to overhaul its long-troubled prison system.

President Xiomara Castro unveiled a series of emergency measures in a nationally televised address Saturday morning, including plans to strengthen the military's role in fighting organized crime, pursue drug traffickers drugs as terrorists and to build new facilities to reduce overpopulation as narcoviolence and other crimes increase in the country. of 10 million.

The left-wing Castro's “megaprison” ambitions mirror those of President Nayib Bukele in neighboring El Salvador, who has built Latin America's largest prison – a 40,000-capacity facility to accommodate growing numbers of detainees swept up in the president's campaign of mass arrests. .

Honduran security forces must “urgently carry out interventions” in all regions of the country currently experiencing “the highest rates of gang violence, drug trafficking, money laundering” and other crimes , Castro said in his midnight speech.

Authorities plan to build and immediately send dangerous gangsters to a 20,000-capacity prison near the rural eastern province of Olancho, said Maj. Gen. Roosevelt Hernández, head of army staff.

Intensified police raids have pushed Honduran's prison population to 19,500 inmates, crammed into a system designed for 13,000 people, the Honduran National Committee Against Torture, or CONAPREV, reported last year.

The government rushed to build new detention centers. Last year, Castro announced plans to build the only island penal colony in the Western Hemisphere – an isolated prison with a capacity of 2,000 on the Islas del Cisne archipelago, about 250 kilometers from the coast of the country.

The Honduran Defense Council also demanded that Congress amend the penal code to allow authorities to detain suspected gang leaders without filing charges and conduct mass trials, as they do for suspected terrorists.

The series of measures is the latest example of Castro's hard line on security, which intensified amid a wave of narcoviolence in 2022, when she imposed a state of emergency to combat bloodshed and suspended part of the constitution – a page straight from the textbook. from Bukele to El Salvador.

Like Bukele's anti-gang crackdown that restricted civil liberties in El Salvador, Castro's tactics have drawn criticism from human rights groups who accuse his government of going too far in its crime suppression policy.

But Bukele's success in eradicating the gangs that once terrorized large swathes of El Salvador has won him admiration across the region, including in Honduras, where a weary public wants to see results.

Last week, Honduran Security Minister Gustavo Sánchez announced that the government had recorded 20% fewer homicides in the first five months of 2024 compared to the same period last year.

Yet critics remain skeptical that the Bukele model will produce results in Honduras, where gangs remain powerful and corruption entrenched despite a recent decline in homicides.