The President of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, announced a series of radical actions as part of a solution plan against organized crime.The president reported the measures on a national chain, after meeting with the members of the Security Council, composed of the three branches of the State, the Prosecutor’s Office, the Armed Forces, the National Police and the Military Public Order Police.
The plan, which includes a decisive reform of the Criminal Code, indicates that the security forces must immediately plan and implement interventions in all municipalities of the country identified with the highest incidence of kidnapping, drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, arms trafficking, illegal association and laundering of assets related to these crimes.
In addition, an emergency security situation has been declared that orders the immediate construction of an Emergency Reclusion Centre, with capacity for 20,000 prisoners in a depopulated area, between the departments of Olancho and Gracias a Dios.
Honduran authorities also ordered the immediate capture of identified intellectual authors, leaders and members of maras, criminal structures, drug traffickers and extraditables. They have also ordered to establish control and recover order in the physical spaces taken by criminal structures in colonies and neighborhoods of areas that represent the highest criminal incidence.
Drug trafficking as an act of terrorism
The solution plan also urges Congress to reform the Criminal Code so that persons belonging to criminal gangs who commit crimes of kidnapping, drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, arms trafficking, illegal association and laundering of assets related to these crimes, are classified as terrorists.
In this context, parliamentarians will have to reform the Code of Criminal Procedure in order to ensure that the preventive detention measure is applied to all persons in the process of trial for the crimes described above, as well as to incorporate the collective trial measure for these crimes.
In the same way, measures will be taken to block communications in prisons, where authorized companies that market SIM cards and chips, if they refuse to comply with this resolution, their license will be cancelled legally. Congress will also tighten penalties for the commission of crimes against the life and physical integrity of the operators of the security and justice system: police, military, judges and prosecutors.
This article has been translated after first appearing in El Pais