"In Tegucigalpa, the Iron Fist Fails"

...These groups, for the moment, especially the drug traffickers and the kidnappers, have put the state on alert...

...Once home to a thriving nightlife, Tegucigalpa now shuts down by 2 a.m., in accordance with a curfew imposed last year by the city government...

...Residents must be in their homes by that time, and anyone wanting to host a party in their house must request permission from the municipal government...

...Student rivalries gave way to fights over territory and control of arms and drug markets...

...Premised on the idea that gangs are primarily responsible for Honduras’s frequent deadly violence and heralded as a “war on gangs” by the media, it promised to make the country safe through sheer force...

...The New Press, 2006), p. 185...

...This separation of military and police roles led to the creation of the Ministry of Security, an ostensibly civilian department, in 1998...

...More than half of them, the report says, are in Honduras alone.6 “In conversations with gang members,” says German Reyes, a journalism professor at UNAH, “they say their principal enemy isn’t the population but the police...

...They feel as if they are a business for the authorities, because every time they get arrested, they have to pay the police $500 if they want to be set free...

...4. José Manuel Torres Funes, El libro azul de Casa Alianza (Tegucigalpa, 2006), p. 8. 5. “Youth Gangs in Central America,” p. 4. 6. “Maras y pandillas en Centroamérica: Las respuestas de la sociedad civil organizada,” Vol...

...They constitute the centerpiece of the mano dura policy...

...We need a comprehensive policy on citizen security...

...President Manuel Zelaya, who took office in January 2006, has avoided addressing the issue, though in a meeting in March with human rights groups, he expressed annoyance at the publicity surrounding youth killings, arguing that it “hurts the country’s image” and “repels investment...

...About 2,000 youths have died since mano dura was adopted, and about 3,000 since 1998, constituting “a selective policy of extermination,” according to Casa Alianza, a Costa Rica–based organization that works with street children.4 Last year, after an arduous case brought by Casa Alianza before the Inter-American Human Rights Court, the Honduran state was found guilty of having participated in these killings...

...Five years later, however, violence in the mano dura’s birthplace has only worsened, the policy’s only visible effect being the saturation of the country’s jails to the point of near collapse...

...But his and humanitarian groups’ concern goes beyond this...

...5 Whereas in an earlier era, the gangs’ social structure largely centered on competition over the influence and control of members, in the late 1990s they became much more violent, as L.A...

...The United Nations Development Program’s 2006 report on human development in Honduras mentioned this, reporting an increasingly widespread feeling of isolation among the population...

...It’s linked to organized crime...

...President Zelaya campaigned on an anti-crime ticket, proposing to double the number of police officers and to jail murderers and rapists for life...

...This represented a rollback of policies adopted in 1996, when the civil police were removed from the military’s aegis because of charges of corruption, extrajudicial killings, and military links to narco-trafficking...

...The issue of violence and insecurity,” she says, “should be seen from a more comprehensive angle, and not only as a problem of gangs...

...3. Mark Ungar, “Crime and Citizen Security in Latin America,” in Eric Hershberg and Fred Rosen, eds., Latin America After Neoliberalism: Turning the Tide in the 21st Century...

...Like Maduro before him, Zelaya justifies the military-police operations on the basis of an army policy that grants it a civil role in “emergencies...

...4, Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas” (San Salvador, 2006), p. 240...

...The main thrust of mano dura is no longer exclusively toward gang members, but is now also aimed at the drug cartels...

...Public space, “where society is made visible, where otherness appears,” has become an empty space, says Mario Posas, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH...

...Organized crime, meaning drug-trafficking cartels, kidnappers, and others, maintains various gang zones under its control, producing a “perverse relation in the cycle of violence, crime, and insecurity,” Amador says...

...The gangs arrived with globalization and the liberalization of the global economy,” Moreno says, “while the state was unable to interpret how this maelstrom was going to profoundly affect social reality...

...It would seem no one is interested in young people...

...The latest figures show 3,108 killings in 2006, a 44% increase over 2005, according to Observatorio de la Violencia, an NGO.1 In fact, the number of officially recorded homicides has increased every year since the mano dura’s inception, except for a dip in 2004.2 The 2006 figure makes for a yearly average of 46.2 violent deaths per 100,000 people, more than five times the World Health Organization’s estimated global average...

...Zelaya left the anti-gang law in force, allowing the military-police incursions to continue...

...For the police, the youths’ appearance—baggy pants and T-shirts, tattoos—is enough to signal that they are gang members and therefore subject to arrest, despite there being no law to justify this...

...As the streets begin emptying at night, combined military-police units sweep into the city’s barrios marginales—the poor neighborhoods surrounding the city, on the slopes of the surrounding hillsides, also known as the “belt of misery”—with the stated aim of disrupting youth gangs and arresting their members...

...In Honduras, their members are largely Honduran youth, organized by Honduran and Salvadoran deportees from the United States, according to police spokesman Miguel Amador...

...1. Observatorio de la Violencia, co-sponsored by the United Nations, UNAH, the Ministry of Health, and the Honduran police, has since 2005 remedied the problem of unreliability in Honduran crime statistics, collating and analyzing reports from both the police and the media...

...Guillermo Jiménez, former coordinator of a national program for preventing young people from joining gangs, as well as for reinserting ex-gang members into society, says that in his interviews with young gang members, they admit to having changed their strategies, keeping a lower profile and no longer tattooing themselves as much...

...There are about 69,145 gang members in Central America, distributed in 920 groups, according to a 2006 report from the Commission of Police Chiefs of Central America and the Caribbean...

...2. Washington Office on Latin America, “Youth Gangs in Central America: Issues in Human Rights, Effective Policing, and Prevention,” November 2006, p. 16, www.wola.org/media/gangs/report_final_nov_06.pdf...

...In Honduras, the policy was met with strong initial support, especially from the media, whose sensationalistic press coverage of violence and crime has long exacerbated social fear in Honduras, according to an April report by the Center for the Investigation and Promotion of Human Rights in Honduras...

...But in its decade of existence, it has had only two civilian ministers, and in the past five years it has been led exclusively by former military officials, who have turned it into an informal branch of the Armed Forces...

...And if indeed they are a product of this incessant cycle of violence,” he adds, “many of their actions could be prevented with effective state policies that until now have been absent...

...gang culture spread throughout the region...

...The presidents of El Salvador and Guatemala followed suit, instituting similar policies (in El Salvador, it came to be called the super mano dura...

...It is not through ironfisted measures or cosmetics that the police can encourage change,” Custodio says...

...They are also found in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico, and maintain strong ties...

...This has proceeded despite strong criticism from humanitarian groups, especially Human Rights Ombudsman Ramón Custodio, who has accused the government of returning the country to the infamous national security doctrine of the 1980s, under which the country’s U.S.-trained military police disappeared 184 people for ideological crimes...

...Ismael Moreno, a priest who leads the Jesuit congregation in Honduras, says the gang as a social form is linked to the intensification of conflicts and the widespread social exclusion in Honduras, where eight out of 10 people live in poverty or extreme poverty, according to official figures...

...The reform proposal, still under discussion, would formally turn the Ministry of Security into a strictly military entity that would likely begin forming police groups similar to the ones that illegally operated in the 1980s, says Bertha Oliva of the Committee of Detained and Disappeared Family Members in Honduras...

...Mirna Flores, head of the Observatorio, can only conclude that the mano dura has failed...

...These operations, which have names like Operation Cage, Thunderclap, and Patria, generally occur once a week, particularly in “hot” areas...

...7. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/country_profiles/1225416.stm...

...Instituting the mano dura required reforms to the Penal Procedural Code, in particular Article 332, which now explicitly prohibits “illicit association” with gangs and sets forth fines between $525 and $10,000 for leaders of gangs or “other groups that associate with the permanent goal of executing any act constituting a crime...

...Most significantly, the “anti-gang law” (ley antimaras), as the press called it, dissolved the boundaries between the military and the police, making way for their joint operations...

...This is related to an omnipresent security that keeps people from going into the street or to insecure spaces...

...Moreover, CONASIN may soon be eliminated by a proposal to reform the police laws put forth by the current government, through the security minister, Álvaro Romero, who says the council “has had too many protests over its minister...

...Nevertheless, the minister of security, Álvaro Romero, attributes the majority of crimes against youth to the “war between gangs...

...Most come from the barrios marginales, and their strongest presence is in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro de Sula in the north...

...According to Custodio, the remilitarization of security that the government has favored in the last five years has generated a “violence that is at the point of unbalancing social peace...

...But he also favored rehabilitating former gang members, which came across as a move toward a more integral approach to security.7 This proved impossible...

...Custodio says the ex–military men at the Ministry of Security are doing away with police training for community service and have reduced the functions assigned to the National Council of Interior Security (CONASIN), composed of civil and state organizations aimed at assessing security policy...

...About a third of violent crimes in Honduras are committed by gang members, according to police.3 Moreover, the numbers on “social cleansing,” or extrajudicial killings of young people, have also not budged...

...Thelma Mejía is a correspondent for Inter Press Service and is the author of Noticias inéditas de una sala de redacción (Tegucigalpa: Editorial Guaymuras, 2002...

...The gang, or mara, phenomenon has for more than a decade spread throughout the countries of Central America, thanks largely to the United States’ 1995 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, under which more than 150,000 people—many of them former refugees from the Central American wars—were deported from the United States to their ostensible “countries of origin...

...In Honduras, the two largest gangs are the Pandilla 18 and the Mara Salvatrucha (MS), both of which began in Los Angeles (see “Beyond the Stigma...

...Most of the joint military-police operations pit security forces against young alleged gang members, usually aged 15 to 19...

...But police spokesman Miguel Amador thinks differently...

...Former president Ricardo Maduro pioneered mano dura in Central America, adopting the policy in 2002...

...He doesn’t deny that there have been corrupt police officers, but the problem of violence and crime “goes beyond that,” he says...