RIGHTS-HONDURAS: Officers Implicated in Murder of Prosecutor

By Thelma Mejía Reprint | | Print |

Thelma Mejia

TEGUCIGALPA, Oct 6 1998 (IPS) - Military and police accomplices of thieves and drug traffickers are implicated in the murder of a chief prosecutor in northwestern Honduras, Prosecutor-General Eduardo Orellana maintained Tuesday.

Orellana said Pedro Garcia, age 31, was killed Sunday by hired assassins. The office of the public prosecutor is interrogating detainees, and “everything indicates that the crime was planned by people with links” to car thieves and narco-traffickers, among whom figure “military and police agents,” he declared.

“We will not rest until we find those responsible, because prosecutor Garcia was investigating important cases,” he added.

“I do not know whether it will be the last thing I do as prosecutor-general, but I promise you that I will not leave my post with this unresolved. Why didn’t they kill me, if I am the one who decides what work is to be carried out; why take their anger out on a prosecutor in the prime of life,” said Orellana.

The prosecutor-general said that among the cases being investigated by Garcia were the murder, four years ago, of a police captain who identified gangs of car thieves, and the murder of a community-level leader in the late 1980s.

Unidentified gunmen killed Garcia, chief prosecutor in northwestern Honduras, as he was returning to his home in the city of Santa Barbara Sunday.

Garcia had a foreboding that he would be killed, and a week before his death he had asked to be transferred to another area. His request was in the process of being handled, said Orellana.

Garcia’s murder “is the first committed against a member of the office of the public prosecutor, just when the office is dealing severe blows to organised crime,” Ramon Custodio, with the non-governmental Committee for the Defence of Human Rights in Honduras (CODEH), said Tuesday.

Since its creation four years ago, the office of the public prosecutor has been waging an all-out fight against corruption and impunity in this Central American nation.

“This is a warning and an attempt at intimidating the work of the prosecutors,” said Custodio. “The message is for all of us who are fighting against impunity to stop doing so. It is a way of challenging authority.

“The government and civil society should close ranks to keep organised crime from taking hold of this country,” he urged.

Custodio said he had evidence that military officers grouped in what is known as the Special Operatives Commando (COES) – a paramilitary group made up of active and retired members of the military, as well as common criminals – were implicated in Garcia’s death.

COES has been considered responsible for a wave of crime that began two years ago, especially kidnappings. But evidence enabling the group to be dismantled has not yet been obtained, even though several members have been captured.

Leo Valladares with the governmental National Human Rights Commission said Garcia was “the first civilian victim” of the fight against impunity this decade.

Valladares said Garcia had been carrying out an “exemplary” labour in Santa Barbara, where “he had practically identified the top bosses of the gangs, and had initiated legal proceedings against police and military officers.”

One of the officers he was referring to was current commander- in-chief of the Preventive Police, Andres Urtecho, now being tried in a Santa Barbara court for abuse of authority, attempted murder and threats against a former judge whom he had tried to blackmail into dismissing a case on auto theft.

Control of the armed forces – which for years formed a parallel government in Honduras, according to analysts – is just now passing into civilian hands.

Orellana did not rule out that active and retired military and police could be behind Garcia’s death, saying “we were getting ready to deal some heavy blows against some of those people.

“There is no doubt that his murder was designed to force us to desist. But I assure you that this murder will not rest in impunity, and that we will find both the perpetrators and the planners,” he declared.