TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — Honduras plans to build the only island penal colony in the Western Hemisphere and send its most feared gangsters there, turning a page in neighboring El Salvador’s ruthless approach to murder, robbery, rape and extortion.
Honduras’ progressive president once promised to address gang violence through systemic reforms to governance and the criminal justice system. Now, President Xiomara Castro plans to build an isolated prison for 2,000 gang leaders on the Islas del Cisne archipelago, 155 miles off the coast, as part of a larger crackdown following the massacre of 46 gang-related women in a prison.
Island prisons were once common in Latin America, with facilities in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama, and Peru. Deadly riots, brutal conditions, and daring prison breaks captured the imaginations of filmmakers and authors before the island’s last prison. closed in mexico in 2019.
In Honduras, authorities are betting that a return to the past will help stem the wave of violence, but skeptics say such measures are little more than optics and fail to address the root causes of endemic violence.
“A new prison is pretty useless if you don’t first regain control of the ones you already have,” said Tiziano Breda, a Latin America expert at Italy’s Affari Internazionali Institute. «Criminal gangs have shown throughout their history that they can adapt.»
Last month, 46 women They died in a fight between gang members in a prison. Many of the dead were sprayed with firearms and hacked to death. Some female prisoners were locked in cells, where they were doused with flammable liquid and burned in the worst atrocity at a women’s prison in recent history.
Castro said he would «clamp down» in response and crack down on the Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha gangs, or MS-13, which have terrorized the nation for years.
The only way to communicate with the Islas del Cisne is by satellite, said José Jorge Fortín, head of the Honduran military, in an interview with The Associated Press. Officials hope that will prevent gang leaders from running their operations from inside prisons. Escape would be difficult as it takes about a day to reach the island by boat from the mainland.
“It’s as far away as they can get, so these gang leaders feel the pressure once they’re on the island,” Fortin said. «The idea is that they lose touch with everything, contact with the whole of society… and they can really pay for their crimes.»
Fortin did not specify the cost of the project or when officials expect it to be ready, but said Castro ordered the facility to be built as quickly as possible.
Since the bloodshed, Castro’s social media has been abuzz with images of gun seizures and men with gang tattoos sitting on the ground with their legs apart, half-naked and hunched over, surrounded by heavily armed police officers.
The images mirror those of neighboring El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele has imprisoned one in every 100 people in the country, dumping thousands into a “mega-prison.” Bukele has said that inmates will never see the light of day again, even as human rights group Cristosal estimates that only 30% of inmates have clear gang ties, fueling accusations of human rights abuses and democratic decline.
Steep drops in violence in El Salvador have spurred a kind of pro-Bukele populist fervor across Latin America.
«If another country has done something right, why not copy it?» said Fortin. «We are not going to allow this… atmosphere of terror to continue.»
But Breda, the expert, said the move is steering the country away from policies like rooting out corruption, demilitarizing and policing the community that could make a long-term difference in addressing the root causes of gang violence.
Honduras’ security policy «has become even more reactive and myopic, imitating what is happening in El Salvador to contain the damage to its public image,» Breda said.
The proposed measures are being welcomed by many Hondurans, such as 30-year-old biologist Said Santos, who said that «ending the crime problem once and for all here in Honduras would be ideal for this country.» But, he added, the government must proceed with caution.
Meanwhile, regional biologists worry that the project will come at the expense of the island’s highly biodiverse ecosystems at a time when the Caribbean is already being ravaged by the effects of climate change.
Largely uninhabited, the prison site has been designated as an environmental protected territory for more than three decades. Last week, the Honduran Association of Biologists issued a statement calling the facility a «threat» to nature on the island, whose lush landscapes and sparkling blue waters teem with life.
“A prison is incompatible with the ecosystems, species, scenic beauty and climatic conditions of the archipelago,” the organization wrote.
Lucky Medina, Honduran secretary of natural resources and the environment, told the AP that the maximum security prison will be built «in harmony with nature.» He added that officials will follow environmental protections, but the facility will definitely be built.
«It’s totally viable,» he said.