December 25, 2004
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December 25, 2004
Gunmen Kill 28 on Bus in Honduras; Street Gangs Blamed
By GINGER THOMPSON
EXICO CITY, Dec. 24 – Gunmen thought to be street gang members opened fire at a city bus in Honduras on Thursday night, killing 28 people, including 4 children, who were on their way home from work and last-minute Christmas shopping.
The attack happened about 7 p.m., the authorities said, in one of the poorest sections of the northern Honduran city of San Pedro Sula. About six men in a dark-colored pickup truck cut in front of the moving bus, which was packed with more than 70 passengers, and opened fire with automatic weapons.
A spokesman for the Security Ministry, Leonel Sauceda, said 28 passengers, including 4 children ranging in age from 2 to 15, had been killed. An additional 29 passengers were wounded.
The attackers left a large note taped to the bus windshield. In it, Mr. Sauceda said, the gunmen claimed they were members of a leftist guerrilla group, the Cinchoneros, which had long been thought to be defunct.
The note cursed President Ricardo Maduro; the president of Congress, Porfirio Lobo Sosa; and Security Minister Óscar Álvarez, Mr. Sauceda said. It blamed the government’s anticrime campaigns for the attack and warned that there would be more bloodshed.
Mr. Sauceda said the government was investigating all leads. But he said most of the evidence gathered so far indicated that the attack had been committed by street gangs, known as maras, which have caused a devastating crime wave across Central America and Mexico over the last decade.
The police arrested one suspect on Thursday night, Mr. Sauceda said. He would not identify the man except to say he was a member of the Mara Salvatrucha, one of the country’s largest gangs.
The suspect, Mr. Sauceda said, was driving a truck that matched the description of the truck involved in the shooting and was carrying a .38-caliber pistol. The truck was full of spent casings from automatic weapons, he said.
Flanked by the ministers of security and defense, President Maduro addressed the nation on television on Thursday night and said his government would not bow to such attacks.
“This is a barbaric and cowardly act like few we have seen in the history of Honduras,” he said. “We will punish those responsible with the full weight of the law. “We will not rest. We will not back down.”
The police have estimated that there are more than 100,000 gang members in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico. The two largest gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha and the Mara 18, were started in Los Angeles among the children of men and women who fled Central America during the civil wars of the 1980′s.
In a crackdown against gangs during the mid-1990′s, the United States began deporting thousands of gang members back to their native Central America. There, they began organizing new groups, and their violence turned poor neighborhoods into battlefields. Two years ago, the homicide rate increased by 50 percent in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, the authorities said.
In response to the violence, Mr. Maduro opened a crackdown against gangs – known as Mano Dura, Spanish for Tough Hand – that punishes gang members with as much as 12 years in jail. And he ordered the military to join the police in huge raids in gang neighborhoods.
More than 1,300 suspected or convicted gang members have been arrested, Mr. Sauceda said. And the homicide rate has plummeted.
“The gangs thought they were in control of the country, but now they are watching their members go to jail, and they are desperate,” he said of the bus attack on Thursday.
There was some speculation on Friday that the attack was revenge for a fire in a gang cellblock in May that killed 107 suspected members of the Mara Salvatruchas. A year earlier, another suspicious fire in a gang cellblock at a prison called El Porvenir killed 68 members of the Mara 18.
An independent investigation into the fire at El Porvenir found that at least 59 of the victims had been stabbed, shot or burned to death by guards and soldiers.
In the Chamelecón neighborhood, where the bus attack happened, residents said Friday that they did not know whom to blame or whom to trust.
The attack occurred four blocks from a clinic where nurse practitioners remove tattoos from young men and women struggling to get out of gangs. On Thursday night, the clinic turned into an emergency room for victims from the bullet-riddled bus. On Friday, the nurses there were distributing tranquilizers to distressed relatives of the dead.
“What do we think? We don’t know what to think,” one nurse, Suyapa Bonilla, said by telephone. “It could be the gangs. It could be the police. It could be some other mafia.
“The only thing we know,” she added, “is that no one feels safe anymore.”
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