Casa Alianza, Honduran social cleansing

The message was simple and clear and scraped into the back of the lifeless body: "limpiando la ciudad" --- cleaning up the city.

The victim, an identified tattooed youth, somewhere between 17 and 20 years old, was one of 67 children and youth under the age of 23 years old murdered in Honduras during the month of February 2003. In what has been a shameful record month for killings especially considering February only has 28 days --- 25 of the young victims were children under the age of 18* and 42 were youth between 18 and 23 years of age**.

There were two massacres*** of children and youth in Honduras this past month.

In one, the bodies of three girls: Tatiana Díaz, 15 years old; Saida Rodríguez, 18, and another still unidentified teenage girl, were found in the area known as Puerto Escondido in San Pedro Sula, the industrial capital of Honduras, on the morning of February 13th. Two of the girls had been raped and all three had been shot through the head. The girls were from Tegucigalpa and Tatiana studied at the Sacred Heart Institute. The press reported that they were gang members although their naked bodies showed no tattoos, a normal feature used by the press to supposedly identify gang members. A 9mm bullet case was found at the scene of the crime.

The second massacre of three teenagers also occurred in San Pedro Sula the evening of February 26th in the Colonia Asentamientos Humanos. José Fernández, 16; and the brothers Sergio and Wilmer Ortíz, 18 and 17 respectively, were sleeping inside their wooden home when, at about 11pm, armed men broke down the door and started firing at the boys. According to the adjacent neighbors, nobody saw anything. Such is the fear factor in Honduras. Police found twelve 9mm spent bullet cases in the house. The press reported the boys as being sympathizers of the 18th street gang as if this was a justification for murder.

Of the February 2003 murder victims, the youngest was eight years old; one 13-year-old; three 15-year-olds; four 16-year-olds; sixteen 17-year-olds; eight 18-year-olds; three 19-year-olds; sixteen 20-year-olds; four 21- year-olds and eleven 22-year-olds.

During the month of February, there was not one conviction of any of the killers responsible for the 1,688 murders of children and youth in Honduras since 1998 through the end of February 2003.

In witness reports, several of the murders this past month were drive-by shootings by adult subjects in a red pick-up. In the February killings, 85 percent of the perpetrators are still unknown and 9 percent reportedly by gang members. One of the deaths is attributed to a member of the Military Police.

Eighty-seven percent of the victims in February were males and 91 percent of the murders were committed with guns and 9 percent knives. The largest percentage of the killings occurred in the capital of Tegucigalpa 43 percent, closely followed by San Pedro Sula with 39 percent. The murders of children and youth in smaller cities continues to rise, with killings this month in El Progreso, Yoro; La Ceiba; Lima, Cortes; Pespire, Choluteca; and Villanueva, Cortes.

On the evening of Saturday, February 7th, 17-year-old Hugo Ramón Sosa and his older brother Olban, said goodnight to their mother and walked the three blocks towards the room where they lived in the community of Dos Caminos in the province of Villanueva. According to neighbors, soldiers from the Honduran elite military unit called the Cobras ransacked the brothers room and then took them away to an undisclosed location. At first light, after neighbors had informed her, the anxious mother took a bag of food for her sons whom she assumed were at the local military base. But they were not there.

The tortured and gagged bodies of Hugo Ramón and Olban Salinas, with their hands and legs tied behind them, were found riddled with bullets on the side of a dirt road in Cerro Cascabel, several kilometers from where the brothers said goodnight to their mother.

The issue of child and youth murders has now become an important topic on the political agenda in this Central American country of approximately 5.5 million people as the numbers of young victims grows yet the authorities explain that they have insufficient police personnel to adequately investigate the murders.

In an effort to protect their neighborhoods and to confront the lack of policemen or the lack of trust in the police, people have organized Vigilance Committees and Block Police. The Public Prosecutor has filed charges against several of these groups accusing them of illegally detaining people and committing excesses.

The Inter-American Development Bank has announced the approval of a $20 million soft loan for Honduras to support a social peace and citizen security project in the 17 municipalities in Valle de Sula, a region plagued by high levels of crime and violence.

A leading manufacturing region, Valle de Sula --- where San Pedro Sula is located --- generates about 55 percent of this Central American country's gross domestic product. Its population, currently at 1.3 million, has been growing at an average rate of five percent a year due to internal migration.

The region also has a homicide rate of more than 100 per 100,000 inhabitants a year, which by far exceeds the average for all Honduras (60 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants) and the Latin American average (40 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants).

* According to Article 1 of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, For the purposes of the present Convention, a child means every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier.

** The World Health Organization uses the term youth for young people 18-25 years of age. Casa Alianza uses the term up to the age of 23 as that is our program's upper age limit.

*** The United Nations describes a massacre as that of three or more people For more information, please contact info@casa-alianza.org

opinion

Clear messages in Honduran social cleansing