Caribbean & Central America - August 2016 (ISSN 1741-4458)

The homicide rate in Honduras continues to fall, but is still running at almost 14 murders a day. Four-fifths of all homicides are committed with a gun.

According to the security ministry, there were 2,917 murders in Honduras in the first seven months of the year, a fall of 5.5% year-on-year over the same period of 2015, when there were 3,097 victims. The daily homicide rate thus averaged 13.6 in January-July, down a point on the year-earlier period (14.6). The most violent month to date this year was April, when there were 483 registered homicides and the ‘least violent’ was February, with 353.

The most violent cities remain the capital, Tegucigalpa, and the second city and main business hub, San Pedro Sula, in the north of the country, with 541 and 469 murders respectively in the first seven months. Also very violent are Comayagüela (north of the capital), Choloma (the third largest city, in the department of Cortés [also home to San Pedro Sula]) and La Ceiba (Atlántida department), a port on the Caribbean coast notorious for drug trafficking. On official data, there were 5,092 homicides overall in the country in 2015. This is the tally for officially-recorded homicides, and is therefore likely to be an underestimate, as some murders go unrecorded. The Violence Observatory at the Autonomous University of Honduras (OV-UNAH) put the homicide rate at 60 per 100,000 people in 2015, down from a peak of 92 in 2011 (then the world’s highest).

While young men remain the most vulnerable to violence linked to street gangs, organised criminal gangs and drug trafficking, Honduran women also suffer undue violence. This mostly stems from domestic abuse, but there is also a severe problem with femicides in the country, including political femicides. As we reported last month [RC-16-07], it is estimated that a woman is murdered every 13 hours, amounting to over 4,018 deaths in 2014-2015, on data jointly compiled by local NGOs, OV-UNAH and United Nations (UN) Women.

Honduras is awash with guns and over 80% of local homicides are carried out with a gun, according to the Small Arms Survey, published annually by the Graduate Institute of Geneva. Migdonia Ayestas, coordinator of OV-UNAH, estimates that there are more than double the legally-registered number of guns circulating in the country. The registered number is about 400,000 – meaning that there are at least 1.2m firearms (and probably more) on the streets of a country with a population of 8.1m – meaning one gun for every seven people.

In the US, there are at least 75 civilian guns per 100 people, according to the Small Arms Survey; but in the US, these guns are more likely to be registered. Elsewhere in Latin America, there are 30-50 guns per 100 people in places like Mexico and Venezuela, according to the Small Arms Survey. As in Honduras, these countries have a big problem with unregistered illegal circulation, and so the true number is almost certainly higher.

Since 2004, the OV has been monitoring decommissioning efforts. As part of its efforts to improve internal security, the government led by President Juan Orlando Hernández, in office since January 2014, has stepped up these efforts. The inter-institutional security force (Fuerza de Seguridad Interinstitucional [Fusina]) decommissioned 6,700 firearms in 2014-2015, with a further 1,400 removed from circulation to date this year, according to Ayestas. This amounts to just six weapons a day on average – a drop in the ocean compared to the 800,000-plus illegal weapons floating around the country. Meanwhile the weapons being decommissioned are ever-more high calibre. In the first seven months, Fusina decommissioned 9mm, 38mm and 44mm handguns, AK-47, AR-15 and M-16 automatic rifles and Uzi submachine guns. Fusina estimates the value of the total arsenal seized since 2014 at over HNL100m (US$4.37m).

• US State Department updates travel warning

On 4 August, the US State Department issued an updated travel warning for Honduras, noting that kidnapping, crime and violence remain “critically high”. The Department notes that the US embassy in Tegucigalpa has recorded 37 murders of US citizens since 2011, with three since January 2016. US citizens are advised not to travel to Gracias a Dios at all, noting that the embassy has restricted US government personnel travel to the remote Caribbean coast department “due to credible threat information against U.S. citizens by criminal and drug trafficking organizations”. Tourists are also warned of the dangers of kidnappings, car-jackings and sexual assault.