Honduras: 'We are burying kids all the time' | Maras | gangs | World news | The Guardian: "Honduras inter-gang clashes account for 40% of killings. Imagine Lord Of The Flies with cocaine and Glocks. Private security guards are estimated to account for 25%. These are poorly paid men – in some cases moonlighting police – who guard buses, liquor stores, supermarkets and other gang targets. In the crime-weary capital, shooting a suspect is more likely to earn applause than prosecution, so guards tend towards the trigger-happy.
Contract assassins – 'sicarios' – account for 15%. For just a few hundred dollars, sometimes less, they will pump bullets into your problem. Some are gang members, some are police. Targets range from wealthy businessmen who have crossed a colleague to drug-sniffing kids bothering a neighbourhood. The fundamental problem, Capellín says, is the state's inability to deter and investigate crime. 'There is total impunity.' Of the thousands of youth murders in the past decade, fewer than 50 had been solved.
From Mexico down to South America, senior politicians and police commanders say the maras are links in the narco-trafficking chain and must be eradicated. But critics argue that the heavy-handed deployment of police and soldiers is a strategy that has failed across the region. 'They talk about insecurity but tackle the symptoms and not the causes,' Capellín says. 'What about families' insecurity about food, health care, housing, work?'
'Gangs have become convenient scapegoats on which to blame the problems,' says Rodgers, 'and through which those in power attempt to maintain an unequal status quo.'"
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