Honduras will build a 20,000-capacity “megaprison,” President Xiomara Castro declared on Friday, as part of a slew of steps to fight the Central American country’s “security crisis.”
Castro, surrounded by members of Honduras’ National Defense and Security Council, stated in a late-night speech to the nation that the “plan of solutions against crime” was in response to popular complaints about escalating violence.

She stated that the armed forces and police must conduct “urgent interventions” in all locations with “a high incidence of crimes such as murder, drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, arms trafficking, illicit associations, and money laundering.”

The megaprison and nearly a dozen other measures in the proposal are similar to those in neighboring El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele’s anti-gang campaign has sparked criticism from rights groups while elevating him to one of Latin America’s most popular presidents.
Honduras is one of the world’s most violent countries, with 34 homicides per 100,000 people in 2023, about six times the global average.

According to armed forces chief Roosevelt Hernandez, the immediate building of the 20,000-inmate “Emergency Reclusion Center” in a depopulated area between the departments of Olancho and Gracias a Dios in the northeast has been ordered due to a “declared security emergency”.
About 21,000 convicts are now held in 30 prisons across Honduras, and they will be transported to the new institution “immediately,” according to Hernandez.

Defense Minister Manuel Zelaya said tenders would be published in two weeks for the construction of another jail on the Swan Islands in the Caribbean, which is already intended to house 2,000 inmates.
Zelaya also stated that there were plans to “intensify investigations and operations to locate, eradicate, secure, and destroy coca leaf and marijuana plantations and drug processing centers”.