A year later, there are still survivors of the Honduras prison massacre…

Officials said 23 inmates were shot dead during the June 20, 2023, massacre at the prison in Tamara, just northwest of the capital Tegucigalpa. Another 23 were burned alive.

Twelve months after the horrific events, Samantha told AFP she had been sitting in her cell that morning when she heard “shots and screams”.

She and other prisoners cut a hole in the roof of the prison to escape the massacre.

“It wasn’t a good idea” and they ducked back inside when they came under fire, said Samantha, who like other survivors interviewed by AFP did not want to give her real name.

“We had no choice but to leave it to God. We were surrounded,” the 25-year-old convicted extortionist told AFP in the prison’s infirmary, only her eyes visible behind a black balaclava.

When the shooting ended, the wall behind me was “full of holes,” Samantha said.

A fellow inmate had been shot dead right before her eyes.

Inmate Wendy, 32, told AFP on Monday during a visit to the facility that women were being mowed down “left and right” of her, but “no one helped”.

And Rosario, 68, said she couldn’t believe only two of the 120 women in her cell block had died.

One of the two, she told AFP, “had only three days left in her sentence” when she was mowed down “in cold blood”.

Honduras is a country with particularly high levels of violence in its 25 prisons, which hold around 21,000 prisoners.

More than a thousand prisoners have been murdered in twenty years.

After the 2023 massacre, President Xiomara Castro declared a state of emergency and fired the security minister.

She replaced the prison’s guards – suspected of allowing in the weapons used in the attack – with members of an elite military police unit.

The unit was also deployed in the country’s other prisons, and since then there have been no major uprisings or riots among Honduran prisoners.

Seven Barrio 18 gangsters among the women rioters have been charged in the 2023 massacre – one of the deadliest ever as gangs have terrorized Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador in their battle for drug revenues and extortion.

As the fighting continues, Castro announced last week that her government would build a “mega prison” with a capacity for 20,000 people, modeled after El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, who has been responsible for reducing gang violence in his country in recent years. country.

Neighboring Honduras remains one of the most violent countries in the world, with a murder rate of 34 per 100,000 inhabitants last year – almost six times the world average.

Castro has described it as a “security emergency.”

On Monday, 100 new guards arrived at the women’s prison, joining 260 members of the elite military police unit temporarily tasked with overseeing 661 inmates in a facility with room for just 400.

The arrivals are members of a specialized new force of about a thousand men being trained to take over prison security in Honduras.

Deputy prison director Dinora Molina told AFP this week that the cell blocks were being enlarged to transform the facility into “a dignified place.”

Last week, 100 Barrio 18 members were transferred to another prison to separate them from their MS-13 enemies.

“They’re gone… we feel calmer,” said Samantha, who has served less than half of her 11-year sentence.