41 Dead, Most Burned to Death, in Gang Attack in Honduras Women’s Prison

A deadly riot at a women’s prison in Honduras left 41 people dead on Tuesday, authorities said.

Honduras President Xiomara Castro tweeted that the “monstrous murder of women” was “planned by maras”, referencing the dangerous Central American street gangs Barrio 18 and MS-13, “with the knowledge and acquiescence of security authorities.”

The riot took place at a prison in the town of Tamara, roughly 30 miles northwest of the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa.

The Honduran government held a press conference on June 21 where they showed video snippets of guns and machetes found inside the prison after the day’s violence. Government officials also released photos from inside the prison showing the charred remains of the inside of a cell, along with an ominous image supposedly taken from prison security footage of a masked woman holding a gun while wearing a black T-shirt with a skull on it.

Authorities alleged that the attackers somehow removed the guards at the facility on Tuesday morning. No security officials were injured in the attack. The attackers then moved to an opposing cell block where their targets were located, and began the massacre. Over two dozen of the victims were reportedly burned to death, while the remainder were shot or stabbed.

“Organized crime has kidnapped the prison system in this country,” said Sandra Rodríguez, the prison system’s assistant commissioner at the press conference. 

Many prisons in Honduras are widely known to be in the control of local gangs, who use them as a home base of sorts where they run various rackets and collaborate with associates on the outside. These kinds of self-governed prisons have proliferated across Latin America and lead to numerous deadly riots in recent years. Over 100 prisoners died during a riot linked to rival gangs in Ecuador in 2021. 

But the riot at a women’s prison is representative of the often underreported and growing role of women in organized crime in Latin America. The Honduras prison system has seen a dramatic rise in female inmates in recent years, according to local media.

“The role of women in gangs has been changing, because before we generally say that in gangs they played a minor role, either as a lover of the gang leaders or also doing small procedures or small illegal actions” Joaquín Mejía, a Honduran human rights investigator, told VICE News. “But over the years, women gang members have been adopting, for example, the role of assassins. That is to say, they have been linked more to the acts of violence that men have been carrying out.”

But women in Honduras have not only been relegated to assassins and other low level members of the gangs. Infamously, a woman named Digna Valle, helped run one of  Honduras’ longest running and biggest drug trafficking organizations along with her brothers. Valle was arrested in Florida in 2014 before eventually being released after cutting a deal with the U.S. government. She currently lives freely in the U.S., while lower level female gang members continue to fill up Honduras’ weak prison system.

Mejia said that the women’s prisons function similar to the men’s prisons now in Honduras.

“Women gang members work inside prisons and also in the way that they are linked to their gangs or cliques outside the prisons,” he said. “But beyond that, the serious problem is that the country's prisons are totally abandoned.”

President Castro said that after the riot, “we will take drastic measures,” without providing additional information about how she intends to address lawlessness in the country’s prison system.