by DAWN PALEY
Marta de Jesus Raudales Varela at her home in Tegucigalpa. PHOTO/Murray Bush/Flux Photo
TEGUCIGALPA—Election day in Tegucigalpa kicked off on November 24th last year with the feel of a carnival, a rare sensation in a city where the vast majority of residents are faced with grinding poverty, regular gang extortion and a murder rate that is among the world’s highest. In front of each voting station, tents from the various political parties provided shade, blaring music at each other from huge speakers as groups of youth and volunteers hung around. Police, army and masked military police oversaw the crowds. Cars honked and people waved Honduran and political party flags as their vehicles crawled through the fray.
But for Marta de Jesus Raudales Varela, who lives in a small house on a steep unpaved street, it was a heart-wrenching day. In January, her son Ángel Francisco Durón Raudales, an activist with the leftwing LIBRE Party was murdered along with five others around the corner from the family home in the Las Ayestas neighborhood.
“[The killers] told them to lie face down, so they lay face down, and they emptied their pockets so that they could pretend it was a robbery. [The killers] had their faces covered, but everyone could see what happened,” said Raudales. The killers shot all six in the back and in the head as they lay with their faces to the sidewalk.
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In Honduras’ biggest cities, gang members, who often work in collusion with police and soldiers, are to blame for much of the violence and extortion. Things aren’t much calmer in the country’s rural areas, where state security forces have been deployed with the stated purpose of fighting against drug trafficking.
“Drug trafficking has been a pretext to militarize, because in reality the amount of trafficking hasn’t fallen, but because of narco activity there are now military bases in La Mosquitia, for example, and there are more bases than ever. [It’s a] US occupation, and narco trafficking is the pretext,” said Berta Caceres, General Coordinator of the Council of Indigenous and Popular Organizations of Honduras (COPINH). For Caceres and others involved in land struggles around the country, the militarization of Honduras brings with it direct and deadly consequences.
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Gang activity in Honduras has a history that reaches back across the border to the US. Both the M-13 and M-18 gangs were initiated by people deported to Central America from the United States. Their ranks swelled in cities like Tegucigalpa as a Clinton-era policy of double punishment (deporting undocumented migrants after they’ve served a prison sentence, even if they’d spent nearly their whole lives in the US) came into play in 1996. Imposing the prison system on jailed youth and then deporting them has strengthened these groups.
This stands out especially in a comparison of gang membership between Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador (the so called northern triangle countries) and Nicaragua. The US Government Accountability Office reports that “Nicaragua has a significant number of gang members, but does not have large numbers of MS-13 or M-18 members, perhaps due to the fact that Nicaragua has had a much lower deportation rate from the United States than the ‘northern triangle’ countries.”
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