Honduras: A young gay man was brutally murdered, but there is no investigation.

According to sources, everything seems to indicate that this crime, like the 337 homicides of LGBTI+ people registered since 2009 in Honduras, will remain unpunished.

October 18, 2019

By Sarai Alvarado, from Tegucigalpa

Illustration: Florencia Capella

A young man was murdered and his body dumped on the side of the road leading to the old public landfill in the Suyapa neighborhood of Choloma, a violent city in the northern department of Cortés, Honduras, 312 kilometers (193 miles) from the capital, Tegucigalpa. His partially clothed body lay in the street on the morning of October 7. His legs had been bound with a blue rope that also encircled his neck and hands with a tourniquet knot, a common sign in hate crimes. The young man—whose identity we are withholding—had been tortured and thrown from a moving vehicle, according to agents from the Directorate of Police Investigations (DPI), who collected the initial evidence at the scene.

Two weeks after her death, there has been no significant progress in the investigation, according to a police source at the DPI, in a country where between 13 and 16 violent deaths are reported daily. Two of these daily deaths are of women, and at least one per week is a member of the LGBTI community, according to the Violence Observatory of the National Autonomous University of Honduras (OV-UNAH).

Some of his friends said the young man was a member of the LGBTQ+ community. But his family denies this and emphasizes the fact that he was the father of a one-year-old baby. “He was a cheerful young man, and his personal life was very much his own,” his relatives said. They added that they didn't want to delve further into the matter out of fear. They felt it wouldn't do them any good, since “neither the National Police nor the prosecutors from the Public Ministry are interested in investigating crimes, especially not crimes like this.”

The autopsy revealed the brutality of the crime

The brutality of the crime was revealed at the autopsy table. “The cause of death was asphyxiation by strangulation,” a forensic source informed Presentes, a fact confirmed in the forensic report. No prosecutor from the Public Ministry (MP) has yet requested to proceed with the legal process and bring the case before a court.

In addition to the scientific findings, the murdered young man had several bruises caused by a blunt (not sharp) object. His ears were lacerated, one cut, the other pierced in several places. It is inferred that before dying, the victim was subjected to cruel treatment and torture with bladed weapons. He was forced to kneel and dragged, and his skin was torn, according to the source who had access to the autopsy report.

The young man was born in the municipality of Omoa, Cortés department, in the northern part of Honduras. He came from humble, simple origins, was 24 years old, and was raising a child, according to information provided by the family and by the Lesbian Feminist Network, “Cattrachas”, dedicated to research and communication for political advocacy and the defense of the human rights of the LGBTTI community in Honduras.

Violence and hate crimes go unpunished

So far, according to the sources consulted, everything seems to indicate that this crime, like the 337 homicides of LGBTQ+ people registered in Honduras since 2009, will remain unpunished. Statistics compiled by Cattrachas indicate that, of the 337 violent deaths or unpunished homicides, 39 victims were lesbians, 107 were transgender, and 190 were gay men, with one person missing. This does not include the at least four more violent deaths reported in late September and so far in October, which will increase the statistics for the last half of 2019.

For murders of LGBT+ people since 2010, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has demanded that the State of Honduras pay attention to the patterns that are repeated in the violent deaths of LGBTI+ people, reported Erick Martínez, an LGBTI rights activist at the Center for Research and Promotion of Human Rights (Ciprodeh).

Martínez adds that most victims of violent deaths are sex workers. She stated that “transgender women are the most vulnerable to these hate crimes. They are visible because of the work they do and more exposed to the crime that exists in Honduras.”

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