Is Honduras mimicking El Salvador's strategy to combat gang violence?

After El Salvador opened one of the largest maximum-security prisons in the Americas, Honduras appears to be following in its neighbor’s footsteps in efforts to combat gang violence. 

The El Salvador prison – called the center for terrorism confinement – is in Tecoluca in San Vicente department and is designed house up to 40,000 inmates. Construction took around seven months after OMNI, DISA and Contratista General de América Latina were awarded the contracts directly. 

The jail has been the target of fierce criticism from NGOs and countries like Colombia, whose President Gustavo Petro has interacted vociferously with his El Salvador counterpart Nayib Bukele via Twitter, because of alleged human rights violations. 

El Salvador has been under a ‘state of exception’ for a year that limits constitutional rights like the freedom of movement and association in an attempt to reduce violence. NGOs and international organizations claim the government uses torture, arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearance in its fight against the gangs known as maras. 

The measures are aimed at reducing the number of homicides and there is some evidence they could be working. According to El Universal newspaper, the peak since the end of the civil war in 1992 was in 2015 with 6,656 homicides, which dropped to 1,147 in 2021 and to 495 in 2022. Bukele’s approval ratings, meanwhile, are sky high.

Now Honduras appears to following its neighbor’s example. Last December, President Xiomara Castro implemented a state of exception to fight gangs like Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha. The measure was extended twice, creating concern at the United Nations, which asked not to prolong it. The measure is meant to expire on April 20, if it is not extended again.

And last week Honduran authorities announced the construction of two maximum security prisons, with room for 1,500 inmates each. The head of the national police, Gustavo Sánchez, said they will be built on Cisne island in the Caribbean area and in the mountain area of Patuca. 

“This project is for this year, it’s an immediate construction, the resources are being identified and the idea is to house 1,500 members of criminal structures in each facility,” Sánchez said, according to newspaper La Prensa. 

The objective, he added, is to build the prisons in remote areas to have tighter control of the conditions.

Members of indigenous groups in the eastern Caribbean area of Honduras have rejected the construction of the penitentiaries. 

“This government cannot make those decisions without community engagement because La Mosquitia is an autonomous, inviolable, and indigenous territory, that is governed under other agreements and treaties,” the representative of indigenous group Muskiti Asla Takanka, Modesto Morales, was quoted as saying by La Voz de Honduras.

The projects will be overseen by the security ministry, according to Sánchez, and construction is meant to start in the next few months. No investment amounts or names of contractors have been released.