World Briefing | The Americas: Honduras: Inmates’ Kin Storm Morgue

The beliefs of a Catholic media network have put it at odds with the Obama administration.

Room for Debate asks: What is missing from this sprawling legislation, and what should be cut?

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World Briefing | The Americas: Honduras Prison Fire Was Accidental, Officials Say

The beliefs of a Catholic media network have put it at odds with the Obama administration.

Room for Debate asks: What is missing from this sprawling legislation, and what should be cut?

View the original article here

World Briefing | The Americas: Honduras Prison Fire Was Accidental, Officials Say

The beliefs of a Catholic media network have put it at odds with the Obama administration.

Room for Debate asks: What is missing from this sprawling legislation, and what should be cut?

View the original article here

World Briefing | The Americas: Honduras: U.N. Calls for Inquiry Into Fire at Prison

Reading and listening with a star of “Downton Abbey.”

We improve our standard of living by increasing efficiency. But that quest can go too far. We need a little friction to slow it down.

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Prison Fire Kills More Than 300 in Honduras

Outside the fence, hundreds of relatives rushed the gates of the burned-out prison on Wednesday, anguished and anxious for any word, clashing with soldiers and the police when they could not get in. As a prison officer stood on a balcony, reading out a roll call of the dead and survivors from a handwritten list, faces in the crowd turned away in tears.

It was one of the worst prison fires in recent years in Latin America, with a death toll surpassing 300, most of the victims choking to death in their cells awaiting a rescue that never came. Guards with the keys were nowhere to be found, rescuers said. Some inmates bashed their way through the roof to escape, and kept running. They are now fugitives.

Honduran prisons are rife with overcrowding, rioting and abuse on a normal day, but on Tuesday night, when officials say an inmate set fire to his mattress, things turned unimaginably worse, and this nation, already sinking into turmoil from a wave of drug trafficking, was staggered by yet another crisis.

Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world, according to the United Nations. The country’s institutions are still recovering from a 2009 coup. The police are committing assassinations. Criminal groups are extorting and kidnapping almost at will. The Peace Corps has withdrawn over concerns about crime. And the nation’s prisons are so overwhelmed that in 2010 the government declared a state of emergency in the system, acknowledging that nearly half of its prisons did not meet the minimum requirements for penitentiaries.

“This horrendous tragedy is the result of prison conditions that are symptomatic of the country’s larger public security crisis,” said José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch. Given the violence gripping the nation, he added, “there’s huge pressure to lock up real and suspected criminals, and unfortunately almost no concern for these prisoners’ well-being.”

Survivors recounted horrific scenes of companions ablaze and people trapped in their cells after the fire, the third major prison disaster in the country since 2003, broke out and burned out of control for 40 minutes before the first rescuers arrived around 11:30 p.m.

“We were asleep when we suddenly heard the screams of people on fire,” said a survivor interviewed on the Televicentro television network outside the prison, where a proverb over the entrance reads, “Let justice be done even if the world perishes.”

Family members, many of whom rushed to the prison in their pajamas, agonized throughout the day. The eight children of José Alejandro Morales gathered in a circle outside the prison’s gates early Wednesday waiting for an answer. Mr. Morales, who was sent to the prison two years ago on an armed robbery charge, was not on the list of survivors, nor had he been confirmed dead.

Then, around 2:30 p.m., a fresh list of the dead began to circulate, and the children fell to their knees.

“Our lives are ruined,” said Doris Morales, a daughter, after hearing his name. “He may have deserved to be punished, but he did not deserve this.”

The bodies of many other prisoners had been incinerated, making identification nearly impossible. Inside the prison’s gates, the thud of hundreds of black body bags being dropped at the entrance by military personnel broke the afternoon air. The bags screeched as they were dragged along a gravel road, then heaved into the back of a truck, ready to be taken to the morgue.

Honduran prisons, like many in Central America, are notorious for overcrowding and violence, a problem made worse as drug gangs have overrun the nation and set up staging grounds to move cocaine from South America to the United States.

A United Nations report in October said that Honduras had the highest murder rate in the world, at 82.1 per 100,000 residents, far ahead of the worldwide rate of 6.9. President Porfirio Lobo last week accepted a technical adviser on security sent by the United States government to help control the violence and impunity.

While Latin American prisons in general are susceptible to fires and rioting, the problem in Honduras is particularly serious, according to human rights groups and other monitors.

Karla Zabludovsky contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 17, 2012

A picture supplied by Reuters for an article on Thursday about a deadly fire in a Honduran prison was published in error. The news agency said on Thursday that it had removed from circulation the photograph showing two rows of prisoners’ bodies lying on the ground because it believed the picture was taken in 2004 after another prison fire in Honduras, and not after the fire on Wednesday. (Reuters also recalled four other pictures thought to be from the 2004 fire. The Times did not publish any of those.)

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After Honduras Fire, Cries for Justice Amid Tears

She hired a lawyer to help dispute the charges that her son, Octavio Ruiz, 21, had assisted gang members in a robbery. She stormed into the local prosecutor’s office to demand his release. She put up posters — “A mother needs your help,” she wrote — asking witnesses to speak out.

Ms. Castro hoped that her son might soon get a trial, but he never did. Mr. Ruiz was one of at least 350 people killed on Tuesday night as a fire tore through the Comayagua national prison, one of the deadliest disasters in Honduran history.

In some parts of Latin America, prisoners like Mr. Ruiz are held on suspicion of aiding drug cartels and gangs and told to wait for their chance at justice. But with corruption plaguing many judicial systems and prosecutors overwhelmed with drug cases, many who are accused of crimes spend far longer than they expect in legal limbo, leaving prisons like Comayagua’s grossly overcrowded.

While Mr. Ruiz was held for months, human rights groups say others are sometimes imprisoned for more than a year, and many are not formally charged while they wait.

Across Honduras, only 53 percent of prisoners have been convicted, according to government statistics released in September. In the Comayagua prison, fewer than half, 397 of 858 inmates, had been.

Honduran families on Thursday deplored what they called a double injustice: not only had their parents or cousins or children been killed in a horrific disaster, but they had also been denied a chance to vindicate themselves.

“How can we go on treating human beings like this?” asked Ms. Castro, standing outside the gates of the Comayagua prison. “Where is the sense of humanity?”

A day after Honduran officials blamed a prisoner’s setting fire to his mattress for the conflagration, the authorities backtracked somewhat, saying that it was still the most likely explanation but that investigators had not ruled out the possibility of an electrical problem. Specialists from Chile and the United States arrived to help investigate, and an initial report on the cause is expected next week. Some Hondurans, however, were skeptical of the official explanation and criticized the government’s response to the fire amid reports that many prison officials were absent when it began. Some critics called for privatizing the country’s penitentiaries.

“I won’t believe anything until they examine every corner in that prison,” said Martha Martínez, 36, whose cousin was injured in the blaze.

Many other questions remained on Thursday, including why keys could not be found to free many of the prisoners. Fidel Tejeda, one of the prison guards, told local reporters on Thursday that only one guard held the proper set of keys to open prisoner cells.

There were also complaints about rescuers’ not having entered the prison for 40 minutes.

Jaime Silva, the Comayagua fire chief, said in an interview that prison officials initially stopped firefighters from entering the complex, citing security protocol. “They have rules, and they were insistent that we follow them,” Mr. Silva said.

The country’s human rights commissioner, Ana Pineda, said the government could face a lawsuit from families claiming that human rights had been violated. “The state is in the position of guaranteeing safety in its prisons,” Ms. Pineda said. “The state must take responsibility for its actions.”

Welsy Vásquez, a lawmaker from San Pedro Sula who visited the Comayagua prison on Thursday, said Honduran prisons were “ticking time bombs” because of overcrowding. She said the National Congress should immediately devote funds to prison renovations and that prosecutors should be given more resources to investigate cases.

But Ms. Vásquez said she was skeptical that changes could be accomplished. “The cancer of Honduras is corruption,” she said. “If there are projects that benefit the people but not the criminals, they will not get done.”

Many prisons in Honduras were constructed decades ago and have been neglected, left crumbling, with poor sanitation and electrical problems.

At the same time, the burdens on the penal system have grown as Honduras has become a haven of criminal activity in recent years. Drug traffickers have flooded the country, seeking shelter from aggressive antiviolence campaigns in Mexico and Colombia.

As crime has risen, Central American leaders have faced enormous pressure to show signs of progress in the battle against drug cartels. Arrests have risen, and analysts expect prisons to grow even more unruly as a result.

Honduras has some of the strictest antigang laws in the region, which some say have contributed to the overcrowding crisis. A 2003 law allows officials to make arrests if a person shows signs of belonging to a gang, like a tattoo.

A spokesman for the government said that officials were doing the best they could with limited resources, and that the ability to make quick arrests, especially of suspected gang members, was an important tool in reducing violence.

But human rights watchdogs criticized the government’s methods and the burden they placed on the justice system.

“This is a grave, unjust problem that deserves to be resolved,” said Marcia Aguiluz, a lawyer for the Center for Justice and International Law. “These are not new themes for Honduras or Latin America.”

Families gathered at a morgue in Tegucigalpa on Thursday, scanning photos in newspapers for any sign of their relatives. By late afternoon, only a handful of bodies had been identified; the rest were so burned that they required dental and DNA tests.

Karla Zabludovsky contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 16, 2012

An earlier version of this article contained a photo credit in which the photographer’s given name was misspelled. He is Esteban Felix, not Estbean.

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