by Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña, OFRANEH
Last Tuesday night, February 14th, the penitentiary centre at Comayagua burned down, with the deplorable result of more than 355 charred prisoners. This is the third time in less than 10 years that horrific fires take the lives of hundreds of prisoners; many of them without having received any sentences at all or simply brought before the authorities because of having tattoos.
The fires in the prisons at Ceiba and San Pedro Sula, during the tenure of the nationalist Ricardo Maduro, did not serve as a lesson on the aberrant management of justice and prisons in Honduras. Once again history repeats itself, but now seems even grimmer, with leaked declarations of alleged fugitives, which talked about a scheduled escape in complicity with the prison authorities, and the indications of neighbours of the prison farm, which felt a strong smell of gasoline coming from the detention facility. The violence in which the country finds itself is not unsubstantiated. The reduced elite of Power are complicit in the sequestration of Honduras, clearly with the customary support from countries whose interests revolve around the plunder of the so-called natural and human resources.
The coup d’état in 2009 served as a catalyst for the indignities suffered by the Honduran people. Unfortunately, the elections imposed by the US Empire and some countries of the European Union legitimized the coupists and the heir regime that served the process of defenestration of democracy.
The existing putrefaction in state security bodies, the looting of arsenals, the arms trafficking from the US, the militarization of the drug cartels, the uncontrollable gangs (maras, children of neoliberalism) are parts of this violence cocktail, which crushes the people in Honduras.
If the rumors about penitentiary authorities’ involvement in causing the incident were confirmed (apart from the abominable negligence of not allowing firefighters’ entry to the site and keeping the prison cells locked), the events in Comayagua will prove to be a premeditated massacre, thus stoning the already deceased judicial system of the current banana republic.
The entire country is completely overwhelmed by this massacre. Meanwhile, the current administration keeps its permanent smile, and after the narrative style of George Orwell and his ministry of truth, they intend to disguise the honduras, the depths in which we are immersed, into a field of human rights and economic crisis affecting the country. In this country we are all prisoners of a small group of maniacs, some of them specialized in repression and others in deterrence. The political laboratory that has become the so-called triangle of death (Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras) helped the US Empire to create a war zone, where insecurity is used by media disinformation in order to instill in the people the supposed necessity for heavy-handed government to eradicate violence.
An example is the elected president of Guatemala, Otto Pérez, known as the butcher of the Ixil people. The loss of people’s historical memory is a serious indicator of the inability to solve our problems, and how some factions step in applying for a foreign intervention.
The ongoing violence is not unsubstantiated, but rather part of a script well-prepared and directed over long distances, with the macabre aim of setting fire to Honduras and prolonging domination.
La Ceiba, Atlántida, February 20th, 2012