International roundup

By Agencies
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Mexico announced on Monday it has arrested the former head of a federal anti-kidnapping unit in connection with the disappearance of 43 students in 2014.

Gualberto Ramírez was head of the anti-kidnapping unit for the attorney general’s office when the students from the Ayotzinapa teachers college in southern Mexico went missing.

Assistant Interior Secretary Alejandro Encinas wrote that Ramírez faces charges of disappearance, torture and conspiracy for the botched investigation into the abductions, which are defined as “disappearances” under Mexican law, because only remains of three of the victims have been identified.

Security forces abducted the students from buses in the city of Iguala on Sept. 26, 2014, and turned them over to a local drug gang, which apparently killed and burned them.

Encinas also wrote in his Twitter account that eight soldiers detained in the case last week have been charged by civilian prosecutors with disappearance. 

The soldiers are being held in a military prison, and could continue there.

Recent revelations implicate the military in the disappearances, but the motive for the students’ abduction remains unclear, though there is growing evidence it may have involved police and military collusion with drug traffickers.

Initial investigations into the alleged perpetrators were so botched with torture, mishandling of evidence, coercion and forced confessions that many of the charges against the suspects were later dismissed.

HONDURAS

A crackdown in Honduras on gangs in the nation’s prisons is eerily similar to one carried out last year in neighboring El Salvador by President Nayib Bukele, observers said Tuesday.

Like authorities in El Salvador, police in Honduras who launched a prison sweep this week have distributed dramatic videos of tattooed inmates being frog-marched around, though their videos have lacked Bukele’s slick production values and media savvy.

“It’s the same phenomenon,” said retired police commissioner Henry Osorto, but added that the crackdowns should be scrutinized to see whether “standards and international treaties are being violated.”

Rights groups in Honduras cited apparent abuses as prisoners were forced to sit spread-legged, half-naked and nestled against one another in open prison yards. And as they did in El Salvador, officials in Honduras angrily brushing off criticism, saying the street gangs abused civilians more.

“These criminals violate people’s human rights, they kill, kidnap and extort money, who is defending those rights?” Honduran military police commander Ramiro Muñoz said in an interview with local media.

That was strikingly similar to Bukele’s dismissal of complaints from rights groups about El Salvador’s prison crackdown in 2022, when he bragged that inmates were “sleeping on the floors, and eating two meals a day” after he took away mattresses, reduced food supplies and halted visits and internet service in prisons.

“They didn’t say anything when the criminals killed dozens of Salvadorans, but they jumped when we started detaining them,” Bukele said of rights groups at the time.

Honduras also showed a bit of the same vengefulness: alongside the heaps of weapons found in prison raids, military police also seized inmates’ guitars, musical devices and video games.

President Xiomara Castro has decreed a state of emergency in some provinces, and deployed soldiers to patrol the streets.

 The government distributed video Tuesday of police tearing down a cyclone fence that a gangs had erected in a town in northern Honduras to mark its territory.

And like El Salvador, two days of strict military-style searches of jails in Honduras turned up some surprises.

One heavily-tattooed leader of the violent MS-13 gang in Honduras was found in a prison different from the one he was officially assigned to. 

That, and the heaps of weapons found in inmates’ cells, could only be explained by prison mismanagement and corruption.

“The prison system in Honduras is a corrupt school for criminals, and we are going to dismantle it and give people security,” Defense Minister Jose Manuel Zelaya Rosales wrote in his social media accounts. He is the nephew of former president Mel Zelaya, who is married to Xiomara Castro.