Valentina Oropeza Colmenares @orovalenti
BBC News World
Delma Ordóñez went to the “dead zone” to negotiate an agreement. The “dead zone” is a security area between two walls where inmates who try to escape from the Women’s Center for Social Adaptation arrive, located about 20 kilometers from Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras.
However, on Tuesday June 20 it became a shelter for 74 inmates who managed to escape a fire and a shooting occurred in that women’s prison. Although they were wounded, sunstroke, and thirsty, it was the only place where they felt safe.
The authorities turned to Delma Ordóñez, an activist for the defense of human rights inside the Honduran prisons, to convince them to leave the “dead zone”.
Ordóñez not only represents relatives of the inmates. He also visits them frequently and knew all the victims personally.
That morning 46 women burned and shot died in a confrontation between members of the Barrio 18 group and the Mara Salvatrucha.
Honduran President Xiomara Castro described the riot as a “monstrous murder of women”dismissed the Minister of Security and appointed an oversight board for the prison.
In this first-person account, Ordóñez shares the testimonies he collected from inmates who survived the bloodiest riot that ever occurred in a women’s prison in Honduras.
“Stop peeling potatoes”
The girls in module 1 of the prison say that on Monday [19 de junio] A piece of paper appeared under the gate that said: “Stop peeling potatoes.” In the jargon of that place it means that they were ready because something was coming.
That same Monday, some say they smelled gasoline.
In the Women’s Social Action Center there is a population of 916 inmates. 103 of them lived in module 1, where the girls of the Mara Salvatrucha are, the module that was attacked. In the rest of the modules, from 2 to 7, live those of Barrio 18.
It must be remembered that the majority of the prison population in Honduras does not belong to any structure (mara), but those that are in the structures face each other.
Some girls had been telling me for a long time that everything was tense. Some yelled at each other: “Bitches, we’re going to kill you!”. Or they would tell them: “Get out of here, this is our territory. We don’t want them here.”
Last week, some prisoners who moved from module 1 to module 2 had problems. They were expelled from module 1 because they are lesbian and bisexual. They told me: “We are afraid, they yell at us that we are infiltrators.”
On Tuesday at 7:00 in the morning they called the roll call, as is done every morning, to verify that no inmate was missing.
The attack
When those who live in module 1 came out, they discovered that they had taken four custodians hostage and those from other modules took advantage of the opening of the gate to enter.
Many of those who lived in module 1 are wives of gang members who were captured by the police when they arrested their partners. Some don’t even know how to use a weapon.
There are others who are elderly people, there was one with diabetes who was in a wheelchair. She had already had one leg amputated and she had gangrene on the other.
The girls say they started hearing shots and they all ran away. They say they saw rifles, machetes, picks like those used by bricklayers, and stones.
A group of women went into a bathroom and blocked the entrance with a mattress to make it more difficult for those who came from outside to enter.
One of them told me that she saw another prisoner take out a glass jar of mayonnaise filled with gasoline with a wick and throw it against the mattress that protected the entrance to the bathroom.
Those were the 23 bodies they found together, it seems they were hugging. And then 23 more riddled bodies were found.
As shots were heard in the corridors, a column of very dense black smoke was made. They all say that nothing could be seen anymore.
That was the smoke that the relatives who were waiting outside to go inside saw. On Tuesdays, the relatives of the inmates who live in modules 1, 2, 3 and 4 bring the food.
Those who were inside took advantage of the smoke to escape. Those were the 74 that made it to the dead zone. They climbed like monkeys over that wall, threw themselves from the top and many suffered fractures.
All the inmates I spoke to told me that the authorities were not doing anything, that there were prisoners walking around with weapons and no one stopped them.
At first they wouldn’t let us in. There were firefighters, police and military everywhere.
The relatives yelled at me at the door: Module 3, module 6? To see if the people in those modules had been attacked.
Then the rescue people began to come out. No one wanted to go into the area of the fire. “You only look at the bones,” one of the boys who was recovering the bodies told me. It was a gruesome scene, the smell was unbearable.
Later they told us that they found knives, machetes, pistols, an AR-15 rifle and an Uzi. Also grenades.
It is curious because men face live bullets. But what happened between the women, with so much violence, we had not seen.
the dead zone
I had never been in the dead zone. I got there around 3:00 in the afternoon and they had been there since 8:00 in the morning more or less, bringing sun and no water.
There were 67 inmates. The others had been taken to the hospital because they had very serious injuries. The girls hugged me and cried. We knew that you were not going to leave us alone.”, they told me. They had vomited, had a headache, and had injuries.
They told me: “We are not going to move from here.” And I would answer: “Trust me, I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you.”
The negotiation was very difficult, they requested the custody of the preventive police because they thought that the prison police had opened the padlocks.
It was difficult to convince them to leave because all that property is surrounded by people from Barrio 18 and they told them they were going to drop a bomb on them. In the end we managed to get them out and take them to a place where they could clean themselves and eat.
Nobody imagines what we live in those hours. When I got home, I sat on a bench and started crying.
I asked the Lord where I got the strength to live all that.
Remember that you can receive notifications from BBC Mundo. Download the new version of our app and activate them so you don’t miss out on our best content.
- Do you already know our YouTube channel? Subscribe!
See original article on BBC