The hellhole our village idiot wants to make into a state

[Scooter]

TEGUCIGALPA — A massive fire swept through an overcrowded prison in Honduras and killed more than 350 inmates, many of them trapped and screaming inside their cells.

A senior official at the attorney general’s office, Danelia Ferrera, said 357 people died in the blaze that began late on Tuesday night at the prison in Comayagua, about 75 km north of the capital Tegucigalpa.

“It’s a terrible scene … Our staff went into the cells and the bodies are charred, most of them are unrecognizable,” Ferrera told Reuters, adding that officials would have to use dental records and DNA in many cases to identify those killed.

It was one of the worst prison fires ever in Latin America.

“We heard screaming from the people who caught on fire,” one prisoner told reporters, showing the fingers he fractured in his escape from the fire. “We had to push up the roof panels to get out.”

The director of the Organization of American States said Wednesday he was sending a delegation to Honduras to investigate the cause of the fire.

Jose Miguel Insulza expressed dismay over the deadly blaze, the worst at any prison in the world in the past decade, as he launched an OAS probe into the “dramatic events” at the overcrowded prison in central Honduras.

Survivors described wrenching scenes of inmates clutching each other in desperation while being engulfed by choking smoke and flames, in what is the world’s deadliest prison blaze in a decade.

“They tried to save themselves by hurling themselves into the shower, sinks” and any other source of water they could find, one survivor said.

“We are pulling out bodies,” said prisons director Danilo Orellana about the fire in the country’s overcrowded prison system that also left score of inmates injured.

“The situation is serious. Most have suffocated,” Orellana said of the fatalities, adding that the fire did not appear to have been caused by a riot.

Radio reports said the dead and missing totalled 402 people — almost half the prison’s inmates.

Lucy Marder, head of forensic services in Comayagua, said police reported that one of the dead was a woman who stayed overnight and the rest were prisoners, but she said some of the presumed dead could have escaped.

Local media reported that the Comayagua fire department chief also died in the blaze..

Witnesses said some of the inmates escaped the blaze by jumping from the prison rooftop, and there were reports that some of them had fled the facility and were on the loose.

President Porfirio Lobo announced he was suspending the officials who ran the prison while an investigation was underway into what caused the blaze, which he called “a lamentable and unacceptable tragedy.”

Photos published by local media showed grisly images of charred bodies scattered throughout the corridors of the fire-ravaged facility.

Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world, according to the United Nations, and there are frequent riots and clashes between members of rival street gangs in its overcrowded prisons.

The gangs, known as ’maras’, started in the United States and then spread down into Central America, with members covered in distinctive tattoos and involved in drug trafficking, armed robbery and protection rackets.

Soldiers, police and anxious relatives surrounded the Comayagua prison on Wednesday morning and television images showed weeping relatives pressed against a chain link fence as they waited for news.

They clashed with police and then stormed into a prison.

An AFP correspondent witnessed men, women and children rushing through the gates of the prison in Comayagua when police withdrew after failing to contain the crowd of rock-throwing family members, who gathered at the facility hours after a huge fire roared through the cells, asphyxiating many prisoners.

The prison housed more than 800 inmates — well above its capacity.

The country’s 24 overcrowded penal facilities officially have room for 8,000 inmates, but actually house 13,000.

The appalling living conditions are a cause of the frequent riots which break out across the region, and a source of frustration for exasperated relatives.

“This is desperate, they won’t tell us anything and I think my husband is dead,” a crying Gregoria Zelaya told Canal 5 TV as she stood outside the prison.

“My brother Roberto Mejia was in unit six,” said an emotional Glenda Mejia. “They’ve told me that the inmates from that unit are all dead,” she told AFP.

Next to her, Carlos Ramirez was waiting outside the facility for word about his brother Elwin, imprisoned on a murder conviction, who also was housed in unit six.

“I haven’t been told anything,” Carlos Ramirez said, his voice breaking.

Officials here expressed sympathy with the relatives’ frustration, but urged them to be patient.

“We understand the pain of the families, but we have to follow a process under the law,” Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla told local media.

“We call for calm. It is a very difficult situation,” he said.

Local firemen said they were prevented from entering the prison due to gunshots. But Daniel Orellana, head of the prison system, said there was no riot.

“We have two hypotheses, one is that a prisoner set fire to a mattress and the other one is that there was a short circuit in the electrical system,” he said.

Across Honduras, prisons are filled to double their capacity. More than 100 prisoners were killed in a fire in the textile manufacturing town of San Pedro Sula several years ago, and survivors said later that guards fired on prisoners trying to escape the fire.

Honduras clocked more than 80 homicides per 100,000 people in 2009, a rate 16 times that of the United States, according to a United Nations report last year.

The country is also a major drug trafficking transit point for South American cocaine moving north to consumers in the United States and authorities say there is increasing presence of violent Mexican drug cartels in the country.

A political crisis ripped through Honduras in mid-2009 when a widely-condemned coup toppled the democratically elected president but the country has been trying to heal divisions since the election of President Porfirio Lobo later that year.

[dgs49]

For the ignorant and uninformed, please explain the title of this thread.

[Rick]

He's poking fun at Liberty...

[loCAtek]

I dunno, the sooner the involvement of the US into Latin America, the better;

It may save the Republic of Mexico...

[Lord Jim]

More great news from America's prospective 51st State:

A total of 176 Honduran police officers have been arrested in a purge against corruption and organised crime, the authorities there say.

The security ministry said the officers were suspected of offences including murder, kidnap and drug dealing.

The arrests follow public outcry over the release of four policemen accused of murdering two students.

Earlier this week President Porfirio Lobo sacked his top police commanders and deployed troops to combat crime.

"We have to get rid of the rotten apples in the National Police," Mr Lobo said on Wednesday.

The Congress has begun debating a new law to reform the police force and tackle corruption.
Outrage

The officers arrested in the purge on Wednesday belong to the same unit as the officers accused of murdering two students a week ago.

The release of the suspected killers, who have gone into hiding, provoked outrage in Honduras.

Four other officers suspected of involvement are still in custody.

There has also been anger over the recent revelation that 300 automatic rifles plus ammunition had been stolen from a police station.

Honduras has been suffering soaring levels of violent crime, which the police have been unable to contain.

According to a UN report it had the world's highest murder rate in 2010, with much of the killing linked to criminal gangs.

It is also a major transit route for drug traffickers moving South American cocaine north to Mexico and on to the United States.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-15586060

To put that 176 number in perspective, Honduras has a population of about 8 million. The US population is nearly 320 million. That would be like 7,040 cops being rounded up nationwide here on charges of "murder, kidnapping and drug dealing"...

And of course these are just the ones who didn't have enough pull to avoid arrest. Probably freelancers who weren't kicking back enough of their take....

[Scooter]

It sounds so much like Louisiana, no wonder the village idiot wants them to become a state.

[Lord Jim]

If we're going to make Honduras a state, hell, we might as well bring in Somalia too....

[Sean]

Excuse me Jim, I thought that Australia was first in the queue to become a state...

[Crackpot]

I hear they're refusing to pay tribute so...

[Gob]

We're waiting for Andrew to be voted President first.

[Scooter]

Vote? He don't need no stinkin' vote!

[Gob]

THE Honduran government has pardoned a convicted murderer who helped save hundreds of inmates during a prison fire that killed 360 people last week.

The President, Porfirio Lobo, announced he would pardon Marco Antonio Bonilla, also known as Shorty, for releasing trapped prisoners from the blaze that destroyed Comayagua jail.

While guards panicked and left screaming men to die, Mr Bonilla - who was outside his cell when the fire began - used a set of keys to unlock several barracks, each housing about 100 men. He also used a bench to smash open other locks.
''He put himself at incredible risk trying to save lives during the tragedy,'' Mr Lobo said during a televised meeting with ministers.

Mr Bonilla, who was not available for immediate comment, reportedly had just a few months left to serve of a murder sentence.

Reports said the 50-year-old worked as a nurse at the jail and was allowed to live apart from other prisoners.

Comayagua contained about 850 men - twice its official capacity - and 359 male prisoners died in the fire, as well as one woman who was visiting her husband.

One report said Mr Bonilla had picked up keys dropped by a fleeing guard. Another said he had wrested keys from a guard paralysed by the horrifying sights and sounds. ''Shorty was the only one with honour,'' Rosendo Sanchez, a survivor, said.

The list of incompetence - an overcrowded jail, incompetent guards, firefighters unable to quench the flames quickly, clumsy handling of relatives' anguish - made Mr Bonilla the only candidate for hero for a traumatised nation.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/free-shorty ... z1nEwClnXY

[liberty]

It sounds so much like Louisiana, no wonder the village idiot wants them to become a state.

Listen Queenie, you can say whatever you want, but at the moment you are demonstrating your ignorance of Louisiana. We are not the hellhole, outside of New Orleans, you think we are. For your information in spite of Louisiana being a poor state we have a modified socialized medical system. For example, the LSU Hospitals accept patients with and without insurance and charges them according to their ability to pay. I am proud of my state; we do a lot with a little. Unlike you I do not see the Hondurans as inferior; if they had the advantages of our governmental system they could do it too.

[rubato]

The only things of any cultural value in Louisiana, other than as negative examples, are in New Orleans and Cajun country. If all the rest of it was sucked into a giant sinkhole the world would never notice.

yrs,
rubato

[Crackpot]

how can something be sucked into itself?

[Sue U]

Although I haven't been there since Katrina, New Orleans has always been one of my favorite cities. The weather is subtropical, the people are hospitable, you can't get a bad meal and every bar has a live band. What's not to like? Laissez les bons temps rouler.

[dales]

[Rick]

I'm tellin a lie this big...

[rubato]

Huey Long made his bones with the NORTHERN part of the state. Not New Orleans.


yrs,
rubato

[Scooter]

Listen Queenie, you can say whatever you want, but at the moment you are demonstrating your ignorance of Louisiana. We are not the hellhole, outside of New Orleans, you think we are.

I did not call Louisiana a "hellhole". Jim posted an article about widespread corruption in Honduras and I said what you just quoted, that it sounded a lot like Louisiana. Because your state has had a culture of corruption that knows no equal in the United States, except maybe Chicago. You wish to deny it?

NEW ORLEANS -- A couple of months ago, an obscure New Orleans tax assessor was ticketed for allegedly using flashing blue police lights illegally mounted on his car to weave his way through a traffic jam.

As public corruption allegations in Louisiana go, it was strictly penny-ante stuff. This is, after all, a legendarily crooked state where a former governor has been keeping a federal prison cell warm for more than six years for extortion, racketeering and fraud; a recently defeated congressman is about to go on trial for allegedly stashing $90,000 in loot in his kitchen freezer; and a suburban New Orleans mayor is under scrutiny for receiving gift cards, a hunting bow and a gun cabinet bought with donations to a Toys for Tots Christmas fund.

Yet the minor story of the tax assessor with the police emergency lights was major news here in the newspapers and on radio, television and Internet message boards. And that, local corruption fighters are daring to hope, is a measure of progress.

"We used to say that in Louisiana we like our food spicy and our politicians colorful," said Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a corruption watchdog group. "But lately we have noticed a shift in the public's attitude toward corruption. It's no longer a spectator sport. People don't want to tolerate it anymore."


The beleaguered citizens of Illinois may be squirming over their newfound visibility in the pantheon of corrupt states, thanks to the extravagant malefaction allegedly committed by the recently ousted governor, Rod Blagojevich.

But for genuine, savory, infused-in-the-gumbo style public venality, Louisiana still has Illinois, and most of America, beat. Ranked according to corruption convictions per capita from 1998-2007, Louisiana is No. 3, well ahead of Illinois at No. 19. (Only Washington, D.C., and North Dakota ranked higher -- and those results were skewed because of the extremely small populations in those locales.)

The jobbery here is so much like elevator music -- ubiquitous, inevitable and part of the background of daily life -- that the state legislature declined to pass a law in the last session that would have cut off state pensions for public officials convicted of corruption. Why, the prudent legislators reasoned, should they have to pay twice if they get caught stealing from the public purse?

Consider just a few of the more spectacular recent corruption cases:

The former president of the New Orleans City Council is serving a three-year federal prison sentence for taking $15,000 in bribes and kickbacks for a parking garage contract.

The former chief executive of the state's property insurance corporation was indicted in December for allegedly stealing up to $100,000 in public funds.

The former head of the Louisiana Film Commission is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to accepting $60,000 in bribes.

A former state senator is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering.

In the past six years, the U.S. attorney for the New Orleans district has issued 236 corruption indictments, and many more may be on the way.

Prominent scandals under investigation by the FBI include a federally financed New Orleans housing agency set up to rehabilitate houses damaged by Hurricane Katrina that allegedly spent millions but did little or no work, and a City Hall contract to install a network of crime-surveillance cameras that the New Orleans inspector general says resulted in $4 million in mysterious overpayments for a system that mostly doesn't function.

"I am absolutely certain we have increased the paranoia level on the part of those who would abuse the public trust," said U.S. Attorney Jim Letten, who cemented his reputation as a corruption fighter as the prosecutor who sent former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards to prison. "If you're a corrupt public official, we want you to be nervous. You will never know if the businessman or woman you are trying to shake down is wearing a wire."

Law enforcement officials believe that the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when 80 percent of New Orleans flooded after the city's crumbling levees failed, was a turning point. Residents and businesspeople returned to New Orleans determined to cleanse their hobbled city of the mildew of decades of public corruption.

Suddenly victims started picking up their phones to report attempted shakedowns, or sliding incriminating documents over law enforcement transoms, officials say.

And in 2007, Louisiana voters elected Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal on a reformist anti-corruption platform -- and Jindal promptly pushed through a package of legislative reforms including expanded whistle-blower protections, new limits on lobbyist gifts to lawmakers and prohibitions against state officials taking state contracts.

"The average person out there understands now that public corruption has adversely affected his or her quality of life, whether it's the crumbling streets they drive on, the dismal state of the public school system, the crime rate or the lack of jobs," Letten said. "The tolerance of corruption was partly a belief that it was a way of life, that it was so entrenched and endemic that it was untouchable and unreachable. Now the average citizen believes that something can be done about it."

Of course, not everything has changed.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who campaigned for office seven years ago as a reformer, has lately been resisting news media requests to release his official city e-mails and refused City Council demands to fire the official who oversaw the crime-camera contract that is now under investigation. Nagin's office also put up numerous administrative and financial roadblocks as the city's first inspector general tried to set up his newly created office in 2007.

But the current inspector general, Leonard Odom -- who worked as the inspector general for the Chicago Housing Authority from 1996-2002 -- has not been deterred.

On a wall in his office is a sprawling work-in-progress: an attempt to diagram, with scores of yellow Post-it notes, every arcane, off-the-books board, commission and agency in New Orleans' tangled city bureaucracy. So far, investigators have found more than 140 agencies that are not included in any city audit.

"Here's one: something called the Delgado Albania Plantation Commission," Odom said, pointing at a random sticky note. "They get about $37,000 a year, but we don't know what they do. But we're going to find out."

For your information in spite of Louisiana being a poor state we have a modified socialized medical system. For example, the LSU Hospitals accept patients with and without insurance and charges them according to their ability to pay.

Perhaps, if government contracts didn't have their budgets padded with so much graft, the money saved could be used to help even more sick people.

I am proud of my state; we do a lot with a little.

The federal government carries the tab for half of your state budget. If California and some other states that are currently in trouble were subsidized to that extent, they'd be laughing all the way to the bank instead of worrying about bankruptcy. If your state has been able to do "a lot", it's because you have been living high on the hog off everyone else's money, a substantial portion of which made its way into the hands of criminals.

Unlike you I do not see the Hondurans as inferior, if they had the advantages of our governmental system they could do it too.

Before attempting to put words in my mouth, it would have behooved you to remember which one of us stated that their ignorance meant that Hondurans could not be trusted to vote intelligently. Hint - it wasn't me.

This isn't about inferiority or superiority. It's about a country that has a LOT of problems that are not going to solved by raising an American flag to wave over Tegucigalpa. They haven't been solved, indeed, in some ways they have gotten worse, in 30 years of democratic rule already based largely on the U.S. model. If a new system of governance were the solution, then it would have been solved long ago because, on paper at least, Hondurans are governed by pretty good law. But in a country where the entire law enforcement sector has been brought into disrepute among the populace because, for whatever reason, they simply don't do their jobs, what possible change will a Honduran see with a new set of laws that are as meaningless as those they supposedly live under? And of course, many of the things wrong with Honduras - law enforcement and administration of justice, education, water supply and sanitation, etc. - would remain under the jurisdiction of Honduras were it to become a U.S. state, so the American "governmental system" isn't going to help a whole heck of a lot.

And even if it could, where is the money coming from? Let's stick with the situation in the OP, prisons, as one example. Bringing Honduran prisons to U.S. standards would mean replacing all but one, which was built a few years ago, because most of the others were built in the 19th century without ever having gone through substantial renovation. That will only be a few billion, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. It costs an average of over $31,000 per year to house an inmate in a U.S. prison, that's $85 a day. Do you know how much Honduras spends each day on its inmates? 50 cents. This is probably an area in which federal courts will demand wholesale improvements, so where is the money coming from? And of course, similar issues apply to schools, water and sewage treatment and delivery, electricity infrastructure, and on and on and on and on and on.