Massacre violence rages against poor youth in Honduras

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – This year’s massacres in Honduras, which have left 81 dead, reflect that violence continues unstoppable in Honduras despite the covid-19 pandemic, with young people as the main victims, experts said Monday.

The director of the NGO Casa Alianza, José Guadalupe Ruelas, affirmed that violence in Honduras “has not stopped and continues to be carried out with impunity”, despite the pandemic, which has left the country with nearly 242,000 contagions and 6,479 deaths.

The country recorded 23 massacres among the more than 1,400 violent deaths that occurred between January and May 2021, according to the Observatory of Violence (ONV) of the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH).

Among the victims of the massacres are 8 women and 73 men, mostly young people, according to the ONV.

Ruela indicated that the victims of the massacres are mainly people of scarce resources, that is to say, “the poorer they are, the more vulnerable they are to violence”.

Violence has a “social fragmentation” function so that the communities that suffer from this phenomenon have “serious social, economic, organizational and relational problems, which makes them more vulnerable,” he added.

LACK OF RESEARCH

The lack of a “scientific investigation” into the massacres is another example of the negligent response of the security authorities who attribute these events to gang and organized crime groups, he said.

“There is no investigation to find the whereabouts of most of the perpetrators of these massacres and generate the necessary information to understand in a scientific way what is happening,” said the activist, who regretted that the country does not have a violence prevention strategy.

In his opinion, massacres are “a long-standing issue” in Honduras, where people linked to organized crime “have decision-making power over the National Police, the Army, and the country’s institutions, which increases the opportunities for violence to increase and generate this type of action (multiple homicides)”.

He said that President Juan Orlando Hernández has not fulfilled its promise to guarantee security to its population.

On the contrary, state authorities exercise “violence, which they call order and control, but it is violence, people cannot demonstrate because they are gassed and threatened”, he added.

“When one sees the results of the violence in Honduras, one cannot say that this government has been successful or has done everything necessary and comes to the sad conclusion that the government does not confront violence, it administers it for its own good, to have an electoral political discourse and to be able to militarize itself”, emphasized Ruela.

YOUNG PEOPLE, MAIN VICTIMS

The director of the Observatory of Violence, Migdonia Ayestas, agreed with Ruela that, in all this framework, young people are the population most affected by violence.

“The main risk factor for being a victim of violence is being a young person under 30 years of age” in Honduras, a country with 9.5 million inhabitants and considered one of the most violent in the world due to its high homicide rates, Ayestas stressed.

She said that 55% of the massacres are perpetrated in urban areas, and 65% of these multiple murders occur in San Pedro Sula, Tegucigalpa, Choloma, Intibucá, and Catacamas, in the north, center, west, and east of the country.

“Undoubtedly, the action of scientific criminal investigation is required to know who is developing this type of multiple (violent) acts that increase insecurity and fear in the population,” Ayestas emphasized.

The security strategies in Honduras aim to increase military and police presence to “deter crime,” but the authorities “have not established actions to prevent violence,” said the expert.