41 dead after riot erupts in Honduran women’s prison

At least 41 inmates were killed on Tuesday morning in central Honduras after a riot broke out at the country’s only prison for women, one of the deadliest outbreaks of violence in the country’s long-troubled prison system.

Most of the victims had been burned, while others had been shot, said Yuri Mora, a spokesperson for the public prosecutor’s office, who added that the death toll was expected to rise as investigators combed through the detention facility in Támara, near Tegucigalpa, the capital.

While the cause of the violence was not clear, the prison has been the scene of ongoing conflict between feuding gangs.

“We are dismayed by the loss of human lives,” Julissa Villanueva, vice minister of security and head of the Honduran penitentiary system, said in a news conference. The country’s penal system, she said, had been “hijacked” by organized crime.

The death toll on Tuesday makes the episode the deadliest prison riot in the Central American country in years. In late 2019, nearly 40 gang members were killed in clashes at two all-male prisons over the same weekend.

Killings have surged in recent years in the women’s prison, where several inmates have been strangled or stabbed during confrontations between female gang members of two rival criminal organizations: the 18th Street gang and the MS-13 gang.

The country’s president, Xiomara Castro, said she was “shocked” by the deaths and promised to take “drastic measures” to hold responsible officials accountable.

The riot was “planned by gangs in full view of the law enforcement authorities,” she tweeted, without elaborating.

The MS-13 and 18th Street gangs, longtime rivals that originated in the United States, have fomented violence in Honduras and neighboring countries for decades.

Struggling to contain them, Castro has declared and extended states of emergency since December, suspending some constitutional rights and allowing security agents to detain people who they believe might be associated with gangs.

The model is similar to a far more aggressive approach in El Salvador, where a government crackdown on gang violence has caused homicide rates to plummet – though civil rights groups say it has led to mass arbitrary arrests, extreme overcrowding in prisons and torture.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.