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

TEGUCIGALPA (AFP): Honduras will build a 20,000-capacity “megaprison”, President Xiomara Castro announced, 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 areas where there was “a high incidence of crimes such as murder, drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, arms trafficking, illicit associations and money laundering.”

The megaprison 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.

Honduras is one 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.

About 30 prisons across Honduras currently hold some 21,000 inmates who would be transferred to the new facility “immediately,” Hernandez said.

Defense Minister Manuel Zelaya said tenders would also be announced in two weeks for the construction of another prison, already planned to accommodate 2,000 inmates, on the Swan Islands in the Caribbean.

Zelaya said there were also plans to “intensify investigations and operations to locate, eradicate, secure and destroy coca leaf and marijuana plantations and drug processing centers”.