Twenty-seven dead in Honduran bus massacre

[Moloch]

TEGUCIGALPA (AFP) - Honduran police investigated a massacre in which 27 people were killed when their bus was strafed by gunfire in what officials suspect was a grisly message from gangs to President Ricardo Maduro and crime-busting politicians.

More than 20 were wounded in the attack late Thursday in Chamelecon, 220 kilometers (140 miles) north of here. An earlier toll said 35 people had been injured.

Maduro, in a television and radio broadcast, said the passenger bus "was machine-gunned," killing several passengers in an attack that has shocked the nation ahead of Christmas in what the local media described as a "massacre" committed by a gang of "assassins."

Security ministry spokesman Leonel Sauceda, revising an earlier toll of 22 dead, said 18 people were killed at the scene of the crime while nine others died later of their wounds at medical care centers.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1504&ncid=1504&e=4&u=/afp/20041224/ts_afp/hondurasviolence_041224184358

[Retired AF Dem]

1. And this was done by people protesting the death penalty

I don't think I have the words to describe this idiocy.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

13. What the intercourse are you talking about?

"Maduro traveled to the stricken town overnight, where he has taken personal command of the hunt for those responsible for the massacre.

He said he had no idea what the motives were behind "one of the most barbaric and cowardly acts in Honduran history" and offered a 53,000-dollar (39,000-euro) reward for any information leading to the attackers' capture.

[karl meltdown]

2. ALPHABIT CHANNELS call attackers ...

leftist rebels and a small splinter group of maoist revolutionary movement from farther south.

[bin.dare]

3. Globalization of Gangs Worries C.A. Police

http://www.ticotimes.net/archive/01_25_02_6.htm

By Néfer Muñoz
Inter-Press Service
As the phenomenon of youth gangs continues to grow in Central America, researchers have found that many of them are originating from gangs in the U.S.

Known regionally as maras, street gangs are made up of hundreds of thousands of youth from Guatemala to Panama. Experts claim the gangs are highly organized and heavily armed.

"Gangs in this region are part of transnational organizations," said Nicaraguan philosophy professor José Luis Rocha, who has studied the emergence and activities of youth gangs in the region.

He says the largest, most active gangs are found in El Salvador and Guatemala, followed by Honduras and Nicaragua.

ROCHA and other researchers say patterns in behavior, methods of violence and initiation rites suggests that gang violence in Central America was imported from two large gangs operating in the U.S. city of Los Angeles, California.

Regional gangs Mara 18 and Mara 13 take their names from two streets in L.A., where they first emerged.

"Most of the ‘mareros’ – or gang-bangers – are 18 to 25 years old, but some members are much younger, while others are older," said Rocha, who, along with a team of social scientists at the University of Central America (Managua) prepared the first-ever regional study on gangs, titled "Maras and Gang-Members in Central America."

Rocha stresses that Mara 13 and Mara 18 have taken root in Central America as a phenomenon linked to migration, fed mainly by poor youngsters who have voluntarily returned from or who were deported from the U.S.

Many of them brought back the customs of the L.A. gangs, such as tattoos, rap music, baggy clothing and their own unique slang vocabulary.

"This is simply one clear illustration of the globalization process," said Rocha. Gang-members are not common criminals, they steal and attack others in order to "be someone" in a society that has excluded them economically, socially and politically, he explained.

Non-governmental organizations point out that society’s strong animosity towards youth gangs has merely fueled the violence, while few attempts have been made to understand the underlying causes and come up with solutions.

Child advocacy group, Casa Alianza, has sounded the alarm on "social cleansing" carried out by the police in the streets of Central America’s largest cities. The main victims of the death squad killings are street children and gang-members, says regional director Bruce Harris.

From 1998 to December 2000, extra-judicial killings of at least 1,000 minors at the hands of death squads were documented in Honduras alone, according to Casa Alianza

"If society labels them and kills them, of course they are going to respond with violence," Harris emphasized. He added that many mareros are youngsters who have dropped out of school and found no work opportunities.

"For many of them, it is easier to learn to kill than to learn to write," said the activist.

Researchers have traced the origin of the word "mara" to a 1970s film, "Marabunta," about ants that leave a massive swath of destruction in their wake in Brazil.

The name, has taken deep root among the maras in forming part of the image they project to society.

But experts who work with gang-members say the marginalized youth deserve a chance.

"The mareros have been demonized in Central America,’’ said UCA sociologist Juan José Soza. "But the truth is that when you get close to them, you discover that they are just youngsters like any others, with their own dreams, sorrows and ambitions."

Soza, who works with the UCA in Nicaragua, said there are an estimated 400 organized youth gangs in Managua alone.

Many of them, which call themselves "clicas" in Nicaragua, are small sub-groupings of Mara 13 and Mara 18. The two gangs are involved in turf wars in the impoverished capital.

Some experts say the maras are the heirs to the culture of violence left behind in Central America by the armed conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s. They point out that the violent activities are facilitated by the large number of small arms available on the black market.

"The maras use violence as a form of life and as a way of gaining social

visibility," said Salvadoran psychologist María Salvador.

Experts agree on the urgent need for regional governments to design social policies aimed at assisting and rehabilitating young people.

[Algomas]

7. Freedom Fighters never die...

their poison just infects the entire culture, an unfortunate side-effect of our criminal foreign policy. Amerika has done such a wonderful job exporting their Family Values to the third world. But I guess that when Freedom is on the march, there will be casualties.

[Judi Lynn]

4. What is known about the President?

He's got some creepy friends. Hope they aren't staging a 9/11 for him, in order to help him tighten his grip on the country. What was lost, after all? Certainly not anyone he would know.

[bin.dare]

5. This is what Amnesty International had to say ...

Background

Ricardo Maduro, who had been elected President in November 2001, took office in January. He came to power with an agenda to fight crime and quickly introduced “zero tolerance” initiatives and involved the army in law enforcement activities. However, these measures appeared to have little impact on crime levels and no significant reduction in crime had been recorded by the end of the year.

The economic conditions of the poorer sectors of society continued to deteriorate; there were reports of acute hunger and malnutrition in some rural areas. The fall in the price of coffee and the failure of various crops early in the year exacerbated the situation. There were demonstrations against government plans to privatize basic services and utilities, such as education and water (see below).

The new government entered into a number of agreements with human rights organizations and other civil society organizations. These included an undertaking to review violations of human rights which took place in the 1980s, including over 100 “disappearances”, for which no one has ever been held to account, despite the continued efforts of non-governmental organizations.

Children

There were continued and persistent reports of the killing of children and young people, some in circumstances suggesting that they had been extrajudicially executed. According to Casa Alianza, a non-governmental organization working with street children which has been monitoring such deaths, around 1,500 children and young people had been killed since 1998, 556 of whom were killed in 2002 alone.

In January the National Commissioner for the Protection of Human Rights published a report, Informe Preliminar sobre Muertes Violentas de Niños, Niñas y Adolescentes en Honduras, Preliminary Report on the Violent Death of Boys, Girls and Teenagers in Honduras. The report disagreed with the explanation that the deaths were the result of inter-gang violence, but found some credence instead for the argument that the deaths were the result of “social cleansing”. It also found that the majority of the victims did not have criminal records, contrary to public perception.

(more)
http://web.amnesty.org/report2003/hnd-summary-eng

[bin.dare]

6. Creepy friends? how about Giuliani ?

'Homies Were Burning Alive'
By Tom Hayden, AlterNet. Posted June 2, 2004.

TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS -- In first-ever interviews, representatives of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS) gang in Honduras this week described how security forces were to blame for the May 17 prison fire that killed 105 of those they call their homeboys. In addition to starting the fire, police and prison guards allegedly kept the facility's gates locked for over an hour while trapped inmates were burnt alive or died from smoke inhalation.

Human rights observers, children's advocates, and MS members say the tragedy is a direct consequence of Honduras' mano dura (strong fist) policies. These policies employ suppression tactics based on New York City's "zero tolerance" police strategies of the '90s, and were instituted on the advice of the Manhattan Institute think-tank and the Giuliani Group, which have exported the New York model to Latin America.

Mayor Rudy Giuliani's policies, while popular with many New Yorkers, resulted in notorious police shootings of innocent individuals such as Amadou Diallo. The tactics also included stop-and-frisk sweeps that led to the preventive detention of thousands of young blacks and Latinos, until lawsuits challenging racial profiling methods spelled the demise of the NYPD's Street Crime Units.

(more)
http://www.alternet.org/story/18843

[bemildred]

8. Something is not right here.

The "street gangs" I know don't attack buses and try to kill all
the passengers. Most "street gangs" are about money and drugs and
guns and dick-waving and stuff.

There is some form of bullshit being propagated here, I don't
know why, but I'd bet a nickel it's political.

[bin.dare]

9. this is from last year ...

... it shows at least that the Maras gangs have been blamed before.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/americas/08/30/honduras.shootings.reut/

Bus attacks kill at least 11 in Honduras
Police: Armed youth gangs may be to blame
Saturday, August 30, 2003 Posted: 10:29 PM EDT (0229 GMT)



TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (Reuters) -- As many as 11 people were killed Saturday in armed attacks on two public transport buses in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula that may have been the work of youth gangs, security officials said.

Another 17 people were wounded, many of them seriously, hospital officials said.

"In one of the cases, the bus was diverted from its route apparently so it could be attacked. Men opened fire indiscriminately, killing six people," the city's police chief, Jose Munoz, told the Reuters news agency by telephone.

He said the assailants killed another person as they fled the scene, while the rest of the victims died in a drive-by shooting of a bus in another district of the northern city, the country's second-largest.

Armando Calidonio, the deputy security minister, told radio stations that the killings were probably carried out by youth gangs known as "maras" who are responsible for a recent wave of violence in the poor Central American nation.

He said the attacks could be an effort by gang members to show they are still active despite a nationwide police crackdown.

[bemildred]

10. A bit from AI:

http://www.amnesty.ie/content/view/full/2500/

BACKGROUND INFORMATION
In recent years the number of maras, or gangs, have increased in both Honduras and other Central American countries due to increased poverty, the crisis in the family, unemployment and a lack of opportunities among the poorest sectors of society. Elements of Honduran media have frequently blamed the maras for growing public insecurity. The general public often blames a large number of crimes on the gang members, whom they consider to be criminals by nature and exempt from all human rights.

At 1:30 am, on 17 May a fire in one of the cells at San Pedro Sula prison caused the death of 104 inmates. Another 27 suffered first to third degree burns. According to reports young people remained locked in the cell during the fire and were not allowed to escape. All were members of the Salvatrucha mara or gang. In April 2003, in El Porvenir prison, in La Ceiba, department of Atlántida, 69 people, most of them members of the Mara 18, died during a riot. Dozens of police, army and prison officers accused of being implicated in those deaths remain at liberty and in their posts while the legal process continues.

[bin.dare]

11. we really do need to bring more attention to this problem ...

... it is bigger and more complex than most people realise.

http://www.caribvoice.org/Immigration/deadlyexport.html

America's deadly export: Crime

Washington, April 10, 2004: According to an Associated Press report, the U.S. government calls them criminal aliens, but they are as American as drive-by shootings and crack cocaine. Many came to the United States as children, often in the arms of men and women fleeing poverty and war. They went to school here, but usually not for long. They came of age on city streets from Los Angeles to New York. Eventually they broke the law.
In 1996, Congress banished them from America for life and directed immigration agents to hunt them down. The biggest dragnet in U.S. history is now well under way. Already, more than 500,000 have been rounded up and deported, government figures said, and this year they are being banished at a rate of one every seven minutes to more than 160 countries around the world.
The culture of drugs and guns many carry back to their native lands is wreaking havoc in nations that receive them in substantial numbers.
A six-month Associated Press investigation, which included interviews with more than 300 police, deportees, church leaders, social scientists and government officials in the United States and abroad, found that in some countries, the resulting crime waves are overwhelming police.
In Jamaica, one out of every 106 males over the age of 15 is now a criminal deportee from the United States. Ten-thousand strong, most live in the capital city of Kingston. Jamaican police say they have been involved in hundreds of murders.
In Guyana, more than 600 criminal deportees have been absorbed by a country of less than 700,000. Before their arrival, drive-by shootings, car hijackings, kidnappings and bank robberies were relatively uncommon, said Ronald Gajraj, the country's Home Affairs minister. Now such crimes are a constant part of Guyanese life.
In Honduras, the latest figures from Interpol say, murders increased from 1,615 in 1995, to 9,241 in 1998, after the first wave of what is now 7,000 criminal deportees. Honduran police say the guns, drugs, and gangs they have brought with them are largely responsible.
What the law says
Under the 1996 U.S. law, every non-citizen sentenced to a year or more in prison is subject to deportation, even if the sentence is suspended. Deportable crimes can be anything from murder to petty theft. The law is retroactive, and it eliminated nearly all grounds for appeal.
As many as 250,000 aliens now serving time in U.S. prisons, on probation or on parole have been marked for deportation, said the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. The total number of deportable criminal aliens among the estimated 11.8 million non-citizens living in the United States is unknown.
Eighty percent of the deportees are being sent to seven Caribbean and Latin American countries (Jamaica, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic), places where jobs are scarce and police resources are limited. Mexico has absorbed 340,000, said the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Deported after serving sentences for their crimes in America, the criminal deportees are simply set loose upon arrival, usually with little or no money and with no prospects of work.
In El Salvador, for example, the criminal deportees are greeted at the airport by Roman Catholic charities workers, given a sandwich and bus fare, and sent on their way. In the Azores, officials said many have been dropped at the airport by U.S. immigration escorts without even the bus fare to get to town.
To survive in what for most of them are unfamiliar surroundings, many turn to crime.
The criminal deportees who most worry receiving countries are the gang members.
In Honduras and El Salvador, for example, Los Angeles street gangs are now competing for a piece of the drug trade, warring with indigenous thugs and with one another.
"We're sending back sophisticated criminals to unsophisticated, unindustrialized societies," said Al Valdez, an Orange County, Calif., assistant district attorney and gang expert. "They overwhelm local authorities." For example, he said, in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, one detective is working 139 gang homicides.
In El Salvador and Honduras, many of the deportees become victims before they can become victimizers. Regarded as pariahs in their native lands, they are hunted by vigilante squads.
What the law intended
The 1996 law was intended to reduce crime in the United States by getting rid of some of the people who commit it. Large-scale deportations are a relatively new crime-prevention strategy. There were criminal deportations in the past, but the number last year alone exceeded the total between 1905 and 1986.
In 1986, immigration agents began focusing on deporting aliens who had committed serious felonies punishable by at least five years in prison. In that year, fewer than 2,000 were deported, the number increasing to 33,842 in 1995.
With passage of the 1996 law, criminal deportations surged again; the number this year is expected to reach 77,000, U.S. government statistics say. Forty-one percent of the deportations last year were drug-related, and no other crime accounted for more than 10 percent.
The criminal deportees represent a fraction of the 11 million non-citizens who have been deported from the United States, or allowed to leave voluntarily in lieu of deportation, since 1996. Most had entered the country illegally or overstayed their visas.
One in every 11 U.S. residents, 32.5 million people, was born abroad. A report by a group that included the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the crime rate among immigrants is only half to a third that of native-born U.S. citizens. But unlike citizens, aliens who commit crimes can simply be sent home.
Officials in many of the receiving countries, however, said "home" is not where the criminal aliens are going, that many, perhaps most, were children when they first came to America and have no real connections to the countries of their birth.
The U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it has no statistics to support or refute this, and most receiving countries don't either.
Guyana's foreign minister, Rudy Insanally, said many Guyanese who immigrate to America with their children are well educated, yet their children return as criminals. "You are sending us the dregs of your society," he said, "and at the same time you are poaching our teachers and nurses.
"It is a subject of national anger and regional concern, a major foreign policy issue."
U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, a primary author of the 1996 law, responded that until they obtain citizenship, immigrants are guests in the United States.

[bemildred]

12. Ah, thank you, that clarifies it. nt