NORTHERN TRIANGLE: Murder rates down in Honduras & Guatemala
Two of the three countries in Central America’s Northern Triangle — Guatemala and Honduras — have seen their homicide tallies fall in the first half of this year. The third, El Salvador, has seen its own rise, posing new questions about the ‘truce’ that virtually halved the rate in 2012. These developments are of particular importance at present, as they may influence immigration courts in the US that have to rule on asylum requests.
The sharpest fall was recorded in Honduras, the country with the highest homicide rate in the world. The security ministry reports that there were 2,838 homicides in the first six months of the year, or 18% fewer than the 3,462 recorded in the same period of 2013.
The government of President Juan Orlando Hernández has set in motion a plan to field 5,000 new police officers over the next year-and-a-half in the country’s 32 most violent municipalities, at a rate of 250 every two months starting in October. Much of the effort will be focused on the most violent of them all, San Pedro Sula, where national police director Ramón Sobillón says the homicide rate is ‘slowly falling’.
Part of the recruitment and training drive is the result of the ‘cleansing’ process that has led to the dismissal of 1,057 officers over the past year and the voluntary retirement of another 247. The dismissals were for a number of causes: leaving their posts (700), failing the ‘confidence’ tests (276), not fulfilling obligations (51), commission of grave faults or criminal offences (30). The ‘cleansing’, which began in November 2011, continues; the authorities reckon that the number of dismissals will have reached 2,000 by the end of this year.
A worrying development has been reported by the Observatorio de la Violencia (OV) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras (Unah). In the first five months of the year there have been at least 33 multiple killings (usually called massacres) that have jointly claimed 117 victims. This compares with the total for the whole of 2013: 36 multiple killings that claimed 180 victims — most of which remain unsolved.
The departments with the highest numbers of multiple killings in January-May are Cortés, with 16 cases, Francisco Morazán (4), Olancho (3), Atlántida (2), Colón (2) and Copán (2).
|
Homicides in the Northern Triangle |
||||
|
January-June |
||||
|
|
||||
|
Country |
Source |
2013 |
2014 |
% variation |
|
El Salvador |
IML1 |
1,048 |
1,857 |
77.2 |
|
Guatemala |
Inacif2 |
3,122 |
2,849 |
-8.7 |
|
Honduras |
MinSeg3 |
3,462 |
2,838 |
-18.0 |
|
|
||||
|
1Instituto de Medicina Legal. 2Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Forenses. 3Security ministry. |
||||
In Guatemala the forensic sciences institute, Inacif, reports 2,746 homicides in the January-June, 8.7% down on the same period of last year. President Otto Pérez Molina says his government has already managed to bring down by 10 points the rate per 100,000 inhabitants from the 40 recorded when he took office in January 2012, and he has set himself the target of lowering it to 20 by the end of his mandate in January 2016.
At least one private analyst, Carlos Mendoza of Central American Business Intelligence, while not quite agreeing with Pérez Molina’s claim, believes that by the end of this year the rate could be brought down to 31.5 per 100,000 inhabitants, a level which has not been seen for the past 11 years.
While recognising that the government has made considerable efforts to stem violence across the country, another analyst, Édgar Gutiérrez, director of the Instituto de Problemas Nacionales (Ipnusac), says that it is hard to discern trends because basic data is inadequate. ‘Last year,’ he says, ‘they were saying that the homicide rate was falling, then four days later [they] had to suspend the campaign based on that because violence rose again.’
Interior minister Mauricio López Bonilla attributes the results obtained so far to the increase in the strength of the national police from 20,000 to 32,500, the acquisition of new armament and equipment and the installation of 1,018 video surveillance cameras in the capital’s Zone 18. López Bonilla acknowledges the shortcomings on the data side, and has resorted to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to help establish a unit of criminal statistics and strategic analysis, to improve the situation.
Another side to the government’s efforts is the establishment of combined military-police task forces to fight organised crime in border areas. The first one of these, the Fuerza de Tarea Tecún Umán, was based last year in San Marcos, to operate along the border with Mexico.
A second one, the Fuerza de Tarea Institucional Chortí, created in April has been deployed in Zacapa, to operate along the border with Honduras. This second unit will have 200 national police officers, 100 soldiers, and agents of the public prosecution service and the tax office.
El Salvador’s institute of legal medicine, IML, reports that there were 1,857 homicides in the first six months of the year, 77% more than in January-June 2013. It has noted that the daily average (which the media have adopted as the favourite yardstick) has remained at 10.3, but that in June it rose to 12.6. However, IML director Miguel Fortín cautions, ‘We cannot yet talk about a trend this year; we can only point to an increase on last year.’ This said, the toll has returned to ‘pre-truce’ levels.
Fortín draws attention to the fact that 2012 began with a very high homicide rate, ‘then it fell as a result of what was called a truce [between the street gangs] and it remained low — apparently, because we have seen that the disappeared are still there and that every day we find more bodies.’
Another problem is that, as in Guatemala, there is ambiguity about the reported data. The IML reports on the strength of ‘necropsies related to criminal acts or investigations’ — when the latter might not result in the determination that the death was indeed an intentional homicide, the category used for rate comparisons. Assumptions can be made on the strength of the number of deaths caused by firearms, but these too are necessarily tentative.
In June the department with the highest number of homicides was San Salvador 125 cases, with 48 in the capital, 17 in Soyapango — the two most violent municipalities), next came Usulután (32 cases). The third municipal hotspot was Ilobasco in Cabañas, with 15 cases.
- “The government of President Juan Orlando Hernández has set in motion a plan to field 5,000 new police officers over the next year-and-a-half in the country’s 32 most violent municipalities, at a rate of 250 every two months starting in October. Much of the effort will be focused on the most violent of them all, San Pedro Sula, where national police director Ramón Sobillón says the homicide rate is ‘slowly falling’.”
- “In Guatemala the forensic sciences institute, Inacif, reports 2,746 homicides in the January-June, 8.7% down on the same period of last year. President Otto Pérez Molina says his government has already managed to bring down by 10 points the rate per 100,000 inhabitants from the 40 recorded when he took office in January 2012, and he has set himself the target of lowering it to 20 by the end of his mandate in January 2016.”