More than 350 trapped, die in Honduras prison inferno - The Seattle Times

The bodies of the inmates, shirtless and blackened by soot, lay in neat rows, belying the chaos from which they emerged.

Hundreds of relatives rushed the gates of the burned-out, 1940s-era prison in Comayagua, Honduras, anguished and anxious for any word, clashing with soldiers and police. As a prison officer stood on a balcony, reading out a roll call of the dead and survivors, faces turned away in tears.

It was the worst prison fire on record, with an official death toll late Wednesday of 358 people, most of them choking to death in their cells awaiting a rescue that never came. Guards with the keys were nowhere to be found, rescuers said.

Untold numbers among the inmate population of 856 — double the minimum-security prison's capacity — were hospitalized, and television reports showed inmates partly clad and writhing on stretchers.

Supreme Court Justice Richard Ordoñez said many bodies were found piled in the bathrooms, where inmates apparently fled to turn on the showers in hopes the water would save them.

Others bashed through the roof and kept running. They are now fugitives.

Honduran prisons are plagued by chronic overcrowding, poor sanitation, inadequate food and ramshackle quarters on a normal day, but things turned unimaginably worse Tuesday, when, officials say, an inmate set fire to his mattress.

And this nation, already sinking into turmoil from a wave of drug trafficking, suddenly was staggered by yet another crisis.

Honduras has the world's highest murder rate, according to the United Nations. The nation's institutions still are recovering from a 2009 coup. Police are committing assassinations. Criminal groups are extorting and kidnapping almost at will. The Peace Corps has withdrawn over concerns about crime. And prisons are so overwhelmed that the government in 2010 declared a state of emergency in the system, acknowledging nearly half of its prisons did not meet minimum requirements for penitentiaries.

"This isn't news to the Honduran government," said Vicki Gass, a senior associate at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). "The tragedy that happened last night could have been avoided. They've been told that they need to increase resources into the prison system and carry out prison reforms."

Given the violence, said José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch, "there's huge pressure to lock up real and suspected criminals, and unfortunately almost no concern for these prisoners' well-being."

Honduran President Porfirio Lobo said he was firing top administrators from the Comayagua prison and the broader system while officials sought more details.

"We will do a full investigation to determine what caused this sad and unacceptable tragedy," Lobo said in a televised statement.

According to the head of the prison system, Danilo Orellana, survivors said the blaze started when an inmate ignited his bedding, saying, "We will all die here!"

Survivors recounted horrific scenes of companions ablaze and people trapped in their cells. The fire burned out of control for 40 minutes before the first rescuers arrived at the prison, about 55 miles north of the capital of Tegucigalpa.

"We were asleep when we suddenly heard the screams of people on fire," said a survivor interviewed on the Televicentro television network outside the prison, where a proverb over the entrance reads: "Let justice be done even if the world perishes."

Family members, many of whom were in their pajamas, agonized throughout the day. The eight children of José Alejandro Morales gathered outside the prison gates early Wednesday waiting for an answer. Morales, sent to the prison two years ago on an armed-robbery charge, was not on the list of survivors, nor had he been confirmed dead.

Then, around 2:30 p.m., a fresh list of the dead began to circulate, and the children fell to their knees.

"Our lives are ruined," Doris Morales, a daughter, said after hearing his name. "He may have deserved to be punished, but he did not deserve this."

The bodies of many other prisoners had been incinerated, making identification nearly impossible. Inside the prison gates, the thud of hundreds of black body bags being dropped at the entrance by military personnel broke the afternoon air. The bags screeched as they were dragged along a gravel road, then heaved into a truck.

Conditions at Honduran prisons, like many in Central America, have worsened as drug gangs have set up staging grounds to move cocaine from South America to the United States.

While Latin American prisons in general are susceptible to fires and rioting, the problem in Honduras is particularly serious, according to human-rights groups and other monitors.

The country's 24 prisons are believed to be designed for roughly 8,000 inmates but house nearly 13,000, in part because of a 2003 anti-gang law that has swelled arrests, according to WOLA. The State Department's country-by-country report on human rights for 2010 described Honduran prison conditions as "harsh," citing reports of risks to inmate safety that include unsafe living conditions and torture.

Fires have broken out regularly. A May 2004 fire at a San Pedro Sula prison killed 104 inmates, most of them members of the notorious Mara Salvatrucha street gang. A year earlier, 86 inmates died in an El Porvenir prison fire near La Ceiba on the north coast.

Pompeyo Bonilla, public-safety secretary, acknowledged that organized crime has "logically" fed the prison population.

"We have to come up with an immediate response because we can't allow our country [to] go down that road," he said.

Information from McClatchy Newspapers and The Associated Press is included in this report.