Femicide in Honduras

[waltky]

Women gettin' killed in Honduras...

Living in fear of femicide in Honduras
Tue, May 31, 2011 - According to those who loved her, Grace Gonzalez was a hard-working, happy woman who liked to laugh too loudly and dress too brightly. Her enchiladas, she declared, were the best in the barrio. Last month, neighbors watched in silence as her bloodstained body was wheeled out of the front door of the small house she shared with her two daughters on the outskirts of the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa.

Hours earlier, a man had come into her house and tried to rape her 15-year-old daughter, Rosa. When Grace tried to protect her child, he held her down and slit her throat. Almost a month after she buried her mother, Rosa says she does not expect justice. What she does expect is for her mother’s murderer to come back and kill her too. “I told the police that I knew the man and saw him kill my mother, but since then they have done nothing. There is no investigation. They tell me that he has left Honduras, but I don’t believe them,” she says. “Now this man knows I went to the police so he will come back and kill me too. There is nobody who will stop him. Women die here all the time and nobody does anything.”

Women are being killed in Honduras at a rate of one a day in a wave of gender-based murders — or “femicide.” Gender-based violence is now the second-highest cause of death for women of reproductive age in this tiny Central American country. Human rights campaigners say that more than 2,000 women like Grace have been killed in the past five years. A report launched last week by the international development charity Oxfam Honduras and a Honduran non-governmental organization, the Tribunal of Women Against Femicide, says that women are dying because of a deadly mixture of gun crime, political instability and the “systematic indifference” of the police. Convictions for these crimes are rare — between 2008 and last year, there were 1,110 reported cases of femicide, yet only 211 made it to court. Only 4.2 percent of these cases resulted in a conviction.

The report says the number of women being killed in Honduras has dramatically spiked since a rightwing military coup deposed former Honduran president Manuel Zelaya in July 2009. On Friday last week, Zelaya returned to the country after two years in exile in a move that sparked nationwide celebration and hopes for a return to order. However, in the month after the coup, there was a 60 percent rise in the number of femicides, with the bodies of more than 50 women found in the two largest cities, Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. The report also accuses the government of Honduran President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, voted in three months after the coup, of inaction and complicity in the growing wave of murders.

“Since the coup in July 2009, we’ve seen a sharp rise in gender-based killings, with many of these crimes simply going unreported,” Maritza Gallardo of Oxfam Honduras says. “We don’t even really know just how many women are being killed because families of victims are afraid to report violence and murders because they realize the legal system simply does not work anymore and gives impunity to those responsible for the killings.”

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[Contumacious]

The report says the number of women being killed in Honduras has dramatically spiked since a rightwing military coup deposed former Honduran president Manuel Zelaya in July 2009. ]

Siendo una milicia bien preparada necesaria para la seguridad de un estado libre, el derecho del Pueblo a tener y portar armas no será vulnerado").

La Segunda Enmienda a la Constitución de los Estados Unidos

 

[waltky]

Beauty queen and sister found dead...

Honduran Miss World contestant and sister found murdered
Wed Nov 19, 2014 - A Honduran beauty queen has been found shot dead in a suspected crime of passion just days before she was due to compete in the Miss World pageant in London, police said on Wednesday.

The bodies of Maria Jose Alvarado, 19, and her sister Sofia, 23, were found buried near a river in the mountainous region of Santa Barbara in western Honduras, said Leandro Osorio, head of the criminal investigation unit. Police suspect that Plutarco Ruiz, Sofia's boyfriend, shot and killed the elder sister in a fit of jealousy after seeing her dancing with "another person or something similar," then shot Maria Jose and buried the bodies, Osorio said. "This is the main hypothesis we have for this crime, based on the witnesses and investigations we've done," he added. Police took Ruiz and Aris Maldonado into custody on Tuesday, confiscating two pistols and their pick-up truck and identifying them as the homicide's main suspects, he said.

On his Facebook page, Maldonado lamented "these very difficult and unjust moments of life" but did not make reference to any details of the double homicide. Ruiz has yet to comment publicly on the allegations. Alvarado, a student who aspired to become a career diplomat, had been due to take part in the Miss World pageant that starts on Thursday and culminates in the final in London on Dec. 14. The sisters went missing Nov. 13, when they were seen leaving a birthday party for Ruiz at a local water park in a car without a license plate in Santa Barbara, a coffee-growing region where drug gangs are active.

Maria Jose Alvarado during a beauty contest in San Pedro Sula April 26, 2014. Alvarado has been found murdered just days before she was due to compete in the Miss World pageant in London.

On Wednesday night, police arrested the water park's owners on suspicion of being accomplices in the crime, Osorio said. Drug cartels use Honduras as a staging post for U.S.-bound cocaine from South America, aggravating violence in the impoverished Central American nation that has helped spark a surge in illegal immigration to the United States. Honduras has the world's highest murder rate at 90.4 per 100,000 people, according to a report by the United Nations, well ahead of second-ranked Venezuela at 53.7.

Last April, Alvarado was crowned Miss Honduras World 2014, beating 18 other contestants to the top spot. She said she could not live without lip gloss or the website Wikipedia.org, according to her official biography on the Miss World competition page. The daughter of a lower middle class family from Santa Barbara, Alvarado had worked as a model for local department stores. Julia Morley, chairman of the Miss World Organisation, said the pageant was "devastated by this terrible loss of two young women who were so full of life." The group said it would hold a service with the Miss World contestants on Sunday to honor the two women, and say prayers for them and their family.

Honduran Miss World contestant and sister found murdered Reuters

 

[Katzndogz]

It was the boyfriend.

 

[whitehall]

Half the Hondurian fugitives from justice are probably in the US having crossed our open borders. Barry probably has them set up with pocket money and drivers licenses as we speak.