Orlando Sierra / AFP / Getty Images
23.05.12
( PHOTOS: The aftermath of the horrific prison fire. )
Brownfield and the Obama Administration had every right to be chagrined when, seven months later, Honduras’ oligarchic business lobby – representing industrialists who pay some of the world’s lowest tax rates – forced the national Congress to chop the security levy by 75%. It was all too predictable in a country and a region where the elite’s sense of civic responsibility is virtually non-existent. And the consequences were all too evident this morning, Feb. 15, in Comayagua, Honduras, where more than 300 inmates were killed in a fire that broke out in an overcrowded prison late Tuesday night. When reporters pressed Honduran Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla for answers, his reply was hardly surprising: “We don’t have the money.”
Even in Latin America, where unconscionably squalid, violent prisons are the norm, the Comayagua inferno “is an extraordinary tragedy,” says Jeremy McDermott, co-director of InSight, a website that tracks crime and security issues in the region. Most of the more than 800 inmates in the prison, which Honduran authorities say houses convicts guilty of violent crimes – but which news reports now say held hundreds who hadn’t even been charged yet – were locked in their cells when the fire began, apparently due to an electrical short or a crazed prisoner who set a mattress ablaze. But prison officials say guards couldn’t find keys in time to help screaming inmates to safety. It was Honduras’ third ghastly prison fire in less than a decade: 170 total died in blazes in 2003 and 2004.
Source: TIME (blog)
