Honduras News - Daily News about Honduras

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras

Honduras led Central America over the last few years in its tough policies against the gangs Mara Salvatrucha and Mara 18, born among Central American immigrants in Los Angeles, but now spread throughout the region. Anyone with a tattoo risked going to jail, and just associating with a gang was a crime.

Newely elected President Manuel Zelaya says he wants to narrowly focus the attack on violent gang leaders, arguing that Mano Dura - Hard Hand - gave rise to death squads, imprisoned countless innocent youths and caused hysteria while doing little to lower the crime rate.

Zelaya, in an interview with The Miami Herald, called Mano Dura “a show” launched by his predecessor to generate political support through fear, and to divert attention from what he called the true source of violence - the traffic through Honduras of Colombian cocaine bound for U.S. streets.

“There was a … political campaign to blame the crime problem on the youth,” said the left-of-center Zelaya, who took office Jan. 27. “It was governing under a specter of fear. If there is fear, the protector can appear.”

Oscar Alvarez, the former security minister who oversaw the Mano Dura approach under former President Ricardo Maduro, declined to comment for this story. In the past, he has highlighted the brutality of the gangs and downplayed reports of police abuse as isolated incidents by rogue officers.

Police estimate there are up to 30,000 gang members in Honduras, a deeply impoverished nation of 7 million, with one of the highest homicide rates in the Americas.

The maras often beheaded or dismembered their victims and left the remains in public for all to see. And in December 2004, they opened fire on a bus near the northern city of San Pedro Sula and killed 28 people.

Maduro’s zero tolerance approach was popular, particularly among owners of Honduras’ duty-free assembly plants, local business owners and residents of poor neighborhoods where the rival bands often clash.

But Zelaya tapped into an increasing concern over police repression. On Election Day November 27, Zelaya eked out a close victory over his opponent, Porfirio Lobo Sosa of Maduro’s National Party, who wanted to continue Mano Dura and re-institute the death penalty.

Zelaya said he will continue to go after gang crime, and will form a new military unit to help police patrol violent areas. But he added that he also would consider a truce, easing up on youths who may be inclined to straighten out and providing them with job-training programs.

“I have gotten calls from the bosses from Mara 18 about the possibility of starting a social dialogue so that both sides could receive a pardon,” said Guillermo Jimenez, executive director of the government’s gang prevention program. “For what gangs have done to society and what society have done to gangs.”

Zelaya said he would not offer any type of amnesty, but believes that dialogue alone could help cut down on the violence. The prisons are filled far beyond their official capacities and crime has not diminished.

Instead, over the last five years there have been increasing reports by international human rights groups and the media here of police executions of suspected criminals, even street children. Amnesty International reported in 2004 that at least 2,300 “children and youths had been murdered or extra-judicially executed in the country” since 1998.

The former internal affairs chief of the national police, Maria Luisa Borjas, told The Miami Herald that she had found evidence that business groups were paying police to kill delinquents they thought were hurting business. And she alleged that top levels of the government sanctioned the killings.

“This was state policy,” Borjas said. “The previous minister of security was in charge of carrying out a policy of social cleaning.” Alvarez, the former security minister, said he would not comment on this allegation either because Maduro administration veterans have agreed not to make public comments in the first 100 days of Zelaya’s government.

A 25-year-veteran of the police, Borjas said no less than 3,000 youths - many who were not delinquents at all - were killed in the last five years, and that she began investigating the killings in March of 2002.

She said she had a witness who had been a police informant, pointing out alleged gang members. The witness believed he was helping officers detain delinquents, but learned that the people he was identifying were being killed, she added. Their bodies were often found with hands tied behind their backs, and single bullet wounds to the back of their heads.

She said the witness gave secret testimony to prosecutors, judges and the country’s human rights commission, but all the officials dismissed his information. “They determined he was mentally incompetent,” she said. “But he had dates and all the chronology. He was very logical.”

Borjas herself was suspended after she publicly accused Alvarez, her boss, of covering up extra-judicial killings. The official reason for her suspension: illegally revealing classified information.

Officers from the anti-gang Cobra police unit took the internal affairs files, she said. “They know who all the protected witnesses are,” she added.

Amnesty has criticized the police for doing little to investigate such deaths ever since. “Despite the fact the government have admitted that police officers have been involved in many of the killings, only two policemen have so far been convicted,” it reported in 2004.

The national police director, Jose Roberto Romero Luna, denies killings by his officers.

Mano Dura, he insisted, dramatically reduced the level of gang-related, particularly the extortion of bus drivers and small businesses. He did not provide statistics reflecting such a trend.

“Now things are much calmer,” Romero said. “We stopped finding the dismemberments. We’re not finding the heavy weaponry.”

As for the tatoos…

Many Hondurans believe the maras have retreated. But leaving a gang is not easy, and many Hondurans don’t want them back. Employers sometimes require applicants to remove their shirts and pants to inspect for tattoos.

Churches have been funding tattoo-removal clinics. But in a poor country, most do not have the money to buy modern laser equipment.

In a storefront clinic in Chamelecon, a suburb of San Pedro Sula, Jose Celaya was recently having his tattoos slowly cauterized by an infrared wand designed to remove hemorrhoids.

He never joined a gang, he claimed, but got tattoos when he lived in Los Angeles, mainly because he thought women would find it cool. Across his back and chest are not traditional gang markings, but Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe, the face of a lion, a rose inside a heart, his last name.

Now with two children and in desperate need of a job, he watched the nurse turn big swaths of his body into mottled white scars.

“People will see you different without your tattoos,” he said. Celaya understands people’s fear. For not ratting out a friend, Maras once attacked him so savagely with stones that his left eye is white and dead, and a .38 bullet is lodged in his back.

Nurse Gloria Maria Torres, 46, said in six years the clinic has treated more than 5,000 people - sometimes 80 a day. Still, others are getting new tattoos every day.

“It’s like a plague,” she said. “Some are taking them off, others are putting them on.”

BY JOE MOZINGO