By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Nov 17 1996 (IPS)

Human rights activists in Honduras have expressed concern over increased violence in the country and called on President Carlos Reina to take action against it.

Ramon Custodio, president of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras (CODEH), met with President Reina last week to discuss the activists’ concerns. There are still death squads operating in the country, CODEH believes, and those paramilitary groups are responsible for a significant part of the violence.

In the 1980s, death squads in Honduras were responsible for the murder and “disappearance” of many political opponents, mostly from the left, as well as intellectuals.

But according to Custodio, President Reina – himself the target of two attempts on his life in the past two years – denies the continued existence of death squads.

“President Reina appears to be blind and thinks that if one denounces the existence of death squads, one wants to ruin his government,” said Custodio. “He doesn’t see that his indifference plays into the hands of the military.”

The military deny the existence of death squads. They say the climate of violence and crime is “imported” from other countries in Central America.

Political analyst Victor Meza says the violence stems from two different phenomena – common crime, linked to poverty, and political violence, often directed at judges and prosecutors handling corruption cases.

Crime rates have been rising in this Central American country of 5.5 million people for the last two years. So far in 1996, 20 kidnappings have been reported, 1,809 cases of robbery and 576 assaults on banks and private businesses.

A major factor behind this is poverty. The unemployment rate is 33 percent and 70 percent of the population lives in poverty or extreme poverty, according to official statistics.

But in addition to this common crime, Meza says, there also is “an artificial climate of violence”, created by actions such as the latest terrorist attacks against the courts and Congress and the president himself.

Meza blames this “artificial” climate of violence for the population’s feeling of “living in an environment of increasing political instability”, which responds to the interests “of other people, who are not common criminals”.

According to Meza, the attack perpetrated against the courts of justice in Tegucigalpa are part of a wave of “anti-judicial terrorism”, which targets judges and prosecutors as its principal enemies.

A bomb that exploded in the court house killed one person and wounded 24. Responsibility was claimed by a group which calls itself CJ and which also has issued death threats to prosecutors and six judges that are handling cases of corruption, car robberies and violations of human rights by the military.

The political violence often is disguised as common crime, human rights activists say.

Recently, a group of supposed common criminals kidnapped Guillermo Villatoro, a businessman. The kidnappers said they were under the instruction of a certain “commander Paco”, who managed to escape, according to the police, when the group was surrounded in an anti-kidnapping operation.

According to CODEH, “commander Paco” is Joaquin Quintanilla, a former army sergeant who has been linked to paramilitary groups called Special Operative Commandos (COEs). The COEs allegedly are made up of policemen, ex-policemen and common criminals.

The COEs are said to be operating in Tegucigalpa and in the northern city of San Pedro Sula, the main economic enclave in the country and the centre of the kidnappings.

CODEH says the paramilitary squads have executed at least 20 former military agents linked to cases of the “disappearances” of 184 people for political reasons in the 1980s.

These executions, according to humanitarian organizations, seem to be part of a plan to eliminate those who are considered to be “living archives” of the violations of human rights committed during that decade.

Meanwhile in Honduras there are plans to transfer the police to civilian hands in 1997. This transfer is resisted by the military and the police, as they say there is not enough maturity in civil society to manage that armed institution.

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