By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Sep 11 1999 (IPS)

The Honduran police are suspected of carrying out execution-style murders of alleged gang members, the photos of whose tortured corpses have lately covered the title pages of local newspapers.

The bodies were all found with point-blank bullet-holes in the forehead, multiple fractures and no fingernails.

The extrajudicial executions have been committed along the Atlantic coast, particularly in the cities of El Progreso, La Lima and San Pedro Sula, where the families of the victims have unsuccessfully sought police investigations of the killings.

The night of Aug 18, Wilmer Alberto Bonilla, 17, was hanging out with friends in the Centroamericana neighbourhood of El Progreso, 270 kms north of the capital, when he was snatched and carried away by two men in a car with no license plates.

Two days later, Bonilla’s body was found in a thicket, hands and feet bound and a bullet-hole in the forehead. Five other youths were killed that same day.

All of them were members of a gang known as “La 18”, blamed for the murder two weeks previously of Melvin Geovanny Velásquez, another supposed gang member and the son of a police sergeant.

According to reports in possession of the General Office of Criminal Investigation, the police sergeant was behind the deaths of Bonilla and his friends.

Porfirio Escobar, chief of the El Progreso Preventive Police, said that since the exact sites where the youths were killed had not yet been determined, the “investigation has been complicated.” But he pledged that police would come up with evidence.

Bertha Oliva, with the Committee of Families of the Detained- Disappeared in Honduras (Cofadeh), told IPS that the police responses were identical to those heard in the 1980s, when they “killed people, did nothing to clarify the cases and enjoyed impunity.”

A 1994 report by the governmental Human Rights Commission found that death squads were responsible for the “disappearance” of 184 people in Honduras for political and ideological reasons in the mid-1980s.

Death squads, paramilitary groups largely made up of “off- duty” members of security forces, operated in Honduras, as well as neighbouring El Salvador and Guatemala and other Latin American countries, in the 1970s and 1980s.

The death squads worked in close association with the police and military, targetting individuals or groups deemed “subversive.”

This decade, off-duty members of security forces have been accused of staging “social cleansing” operations in Guatemala, Brazil, Honduras and other countries in the region, involving execution-style murders of street children and alleged criminals.

“We know there are police groups in charge of executing these people, as part of a social cleansing” campaign, said Oliva, who maintained that death squads were also operating in southern and central Honduras. She said complaints had been filed with the office of the public prosecutor and the ministry of security.

This year more than 25 alleged gang members have been the victims of summary executions, according to Cofadeh.

Around four years ago, the phenomenon of gangs began to emerge in Honduras, where at least 150 now operate. Gang members hang out listening to rock music, commit burglary and armed robbery, or practice Satanic rites, according to a study by local non- governmental organisations that address issues relating to childhood and adolescence.

Police have been blamed from the start for the execution-style killings of youngsters, which began by targetting street children. But there was hope that the practice would disappear once the new civilian police force began to operate early this year, after three decades under military authority.

Human rights groups say the new civilian police force has kept long-time practices of human rights violations and impunity alive, however, because no purge was carried out prior to the change.

Constitutional amendments that went into effect early this year reduced the traditionally strong power of the military in Honduras, with the elimination of the post of commander-in-chief of the armed forces, which were put under control of a civilian defence minister, and other measures.

Excerpt:

By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Sep 8 1999 (IPS)

The Honduran police are suspected of carrying out execution-style murders of alleged gang members, the photos of whose tortured corpses have lately covered the title pages of local newspapers.

The bodies were all found with point-blank bullet-holes in the forehead, multiple fractures and no fingernails.

The extrajudicial executions have been committed along the Atlantic coast, particularly in the cities of El Progreso, La Lima and San Pedro Sula, where the families of the victims have unsuccessfully sought police investigations of the killings.

The night of Aug 18, Wilmer Alberto Bonilla, 17, was hanging out with friends in the Centroamericana neighbourhood of El Progreso, 270 kms north of the capital, when he was snatched and carried away by two men in a car with no license plates.

Two days later, Bonilla’s body was found in a thicket, hands and feet bound and a bullet-hole in the forehead. Five other youths were killed that same day.

All of them were members of a gang known as “La 18”, blamed for the murder two weeks previously of Melvin Geovanny Velásquez, another supposed gang member and the son of a police sergeant.

According to reports in possession of the General Office of Criminal Investigation, the police sergeant was behind the deaths of Bonilla and his friends.

Porfirio Escobar, chief of the El Progreso Preventive Police, said that since the exact sites where the youths were killed had not yet been determined, the “investigation has been complicated.” But he pledged that police would come up with evidence.

Bertha Oliva, with the Committee of Families of the Detained- Disappeared in Honduras (Cofadeh), told IPS that the police responses were identical to those heard in the 1980s, when they “killed people, did nothing to clarify the cases and enjoyed impunity.”

A 1994 report by the governmental Human Rights Commission found that death squads were responsible for the “disappearance” of 184 people in Honduras for political and ideological reasons in the mid-1980s.

Death squads, paramilitary groups largely made up of “off- duty” members of security forces, operated in Honduras, as well as neighbouring El Salvador and Guatemala and other Latin American countries, in the 1970s and 1980s.

The death squads worked in close association with the police and military, targetting individuals or groups deemed “subversive.”

This decade, off-duty members of security forces have been accused of staging “social cleansing” operations in Guatemala, Brazil, Honduras and other countries in the region, involving execution-style murders of street children and alleged criminals.

“We know there are police groups in charge of executing these people, as part of a social cleansing” campaign, said Oliva, who maintained that death squads were also operating in southern and central Honduras. She said complaints had been filed with the office of the public prosecutor and the ministry of security.

This year more than 25 alleged gang members have been the victims of summary executions, according to Cofadeh.

Around four years ago, the phenomenon of gangs began to emerge in Honduras, where at least 150 now operate. Gang members hang out listening to rock music, commit burglary and armed robbery, or practice Satanic rites, according to a study by local non- governmental organisations that address issues relating to childhood and adolescence.

Police have been blamed from the start for the execution-style killings of youngsters, which began by targetting street children. But there was hope that the practice would disappear once the new civilian police force began to operate early this year, after three decades under military authority.

Human rights groups say the new civilian police force has kept long-time practices of human rights violations and impunity alive, however, because no purge was carried out prior to the change.

Constitutional amendments that went into effect early this year reduced the traditionally strong power of the military in Honduras, with the elimination of the post of commander-in-chief of the armed forces, which were put under control of a civilian defence minister, and other measures.

Excerpt: