COMAYAGUA, Honduras — 350 Honduran prisoners were killed in a fire that swept through a rural corrections facility Tuesday, and now reports indiciate that most of the prisoners had not been convicted of crimes.
The prisoners whose scorched bodies were carried out piece by piece Thursday morning from a charred Honduran prison had been locked inside an overcrowded penitentiary where most inmates had never been charged, let alone convicted, according to an internal Honduran government report obtained by The Associated Press.
The Honduran government report, which was sent to the United Nations this month, said 57 percent of some 800 inmates of the Comayagua farm prison north of the Central American country’s capital were either awaiting trial or being held as suspected gang members.
Honduran authorities said they are still investigating other possible causes based on prisoner accounts, including that the fire could have been set in collusion with guards to stage a prison break.
“All of this isn’t confirmed, but we’re looking into it,” said attorney general’s spokesman Melvin Duarte said.
Survivors told horrific tales of climbing walls to break the sheet metal roofing and escape, only to see prisoners in other cell blocks being burned alive. Inmates were found stuck to the roofing, their bodies fused to the metal.
From the time firefighters received a call at 10:59 p.m. local time, the rescue was marred by human error and conditions that made the prison ripe for catastrophe.
According to the report, obtained exclusively by the AP, on any given day there were about 800 inmates in a facility built for 500. There were only 51 guards by day and just 12 at night.
On the night of the fire, only six guards were on duty, four of them in towers overlooking the prison and two in the facility itself, Fidel Tejeda, a guard at the prison for 14 years, told The Associated Press. One of those guards held all the keys to the prison doors, he said.
This atrocity raises more concerns about the United State’s growing prison state, wherein millions of Americans are wrongly convicted, receive lengthy sentences for petty non-violent crimes and are forced to engage in what amounts to slave labor in over-crowded conditions. Without prison reform, millions of fellow citizens could be consigned to a fate similar to the Hondurans.