Honduras announces plan to build 20,000-inmate ‘megaprison’

AFP | Tegucigalpa, Honduras

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

Honduras will build a 20,000-capacity “megaprison”, President Xiomara Castro announced on Friday, among a raft of measures to combat a “security emergency” in the Central American country.

Castro, flanked by members of Honduras’s National Defense and Security Council, said in a late-night address to the nation the “plan of solutions against crime” was in response to public complaints about rising violence.

She said the armed forces and police must make “urgent interventions ” in all ar a s where there was “a high incidence of crimes such as murder, drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, arms trafficking, illicit associations and money laundering.”

The mega prison and about a dozen other measures in the plan echo neighbouring El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele’s anti-gang campaign has drawn criticism from rights groups but has made him one of the most popular leaders in Latin America.

Hondurasi of the world’s most violent countries, with a homicide rate of 34 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023, almost six times the global average. Armed forces chief Roosevelt Hernandez said the immediate construction of the 20,000-inmate “Emergency Reclusion Center” had been ordered under the “declared security emergency” in a depopulated area between the departments of Olancho and Gracias a Dios in the northeast.