The director of Honduras' main federal prison said on Friday he has ordered a "red alert" based on intelligence that inmates, including gang members, may be planning a riot or a mass escape during national elections this weekend.
But three members of the Mara Salvatrucha-13 gang serving time here say the real danger today will be the probable election of a president who plans to impose harsher penalties for gang members -- a plan they say will backfire and only unleash more violence.
The two leading presidential candidates -- ruling National Party nominee Porfirio Lobo Sosa and Liberal Party challenger Manuel Zelaya -- are locked in a tight race with no clear winner.
PHOTO: AP
Lobo Sosa has proposed imposing the death penalty for violent gang members and others who commit "abominable" crimes such as sexual assault, drug trafficking, murder and terrorism.
Zelaya has said he would support life in prison for violent criminals, and in the campaign's final days, pledged to be tough on gangs.
The 250 members of the Mara Salvatrucha and 167 members of the rival Mara 18 housed inside the National Penitentiary of Honduras are not very keen on those campaign pledges and, as a result, could cause problems on election day, said penitentiary director Marvin Rajo, 30.
"It's possible that chaos could be unleashed here," Rajo said in his office at the prison in Tamara, 32km north of Tegucigalpa.
"If we have any crisis in the jails on Sunday, it will start here," he said.
Honduras operates 24 prisons housing 11,000 inmates, including 1,800 gang members, in facilities that are vastly overcrowded. The national penitentiary, with its capacity for 1,500 prisoners, has a head count of more than 3,600 prisoners, Rajo said.
Rajo has doubled security at the prison after receiving intelligence that inmates may be planning to riot or attempt a mass escape on election day.
But Mara Salvatrucha gang members Julio Cesar Rodriguez, 26, Hector Hernandez, 25, and Carlos Martinez, 29, interviewed in a prison recreation area moments before Rajo made his comments, said the real trouble will come when a new president tries to implement the stronger punishments against gangs.
If Lobo Sosa gets Congress to approve the death penalty, for example, "it will increase the violence," Rodriguez said.
"A war from the government will not bring an end to the other war," he said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS