Several months ago, this country’s government imposed a state of emergency to curb violent crime. More recently, it announced its intention to build a new, remote prison to secure the most dangerous criminals. In the meantime, its security forces have taken to displaying inmates seated front to back on the ground of prison courtyards—faces down, heads shaved and legs splayed, all under the close watch of heavily armed military police officers in a brutal show of force.
One might be forgiven for thinking immediately of El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele has launched an unprecedented dragnet against criminal gangs, arresting around 70,000 people amid complaints of arbitrary detentions and massive human rights abuses. The country in question, however, is Honduras, where upon taking office in January 2022, President Xiomara Castro promised to “demilitarize” public security and instead adopt community policing methods and a preventative approach to violence. What explains her U-turn?
From Promises to Hard Realities
Signaling a break from the 12-year rule of the right-wing National Party, which had expanded the role of the military in a wide range of fields, the left-wing Castro campaigned in the 2021 presidential election on the promise of a fresh start in the security realm. She pledged to put the National Police back in the driver’s seat and focus on addressing the socioeconomic “root causes” that push so many young Hondurans into joining criminal organizations. She also vowed to uproot the corruption that reached a zenith under her predecessor—former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who is now awaiting trial in New York on drug and weapons-trafficking charges—by installing a United Nations-backed anti-impunity commission.
Upon taking office, Castro found the first few months of her presidency dominated by a political crisis that erupted in Congress over the election of its leadership and the appointment of a new Supreme Court, with security taking a back seat as a policy priority. Nonetheless, she did take some steps to follow through on her campaign pledges, replacing a military-led anti-gang task force created by Hernandez with a police unit and handing authority over jails back to the National Police. She also promoted the creation of “citizens’ participation tables,” or meeting spaces where police representatives could discuss public safety concerns with community leaders and design strategies in response. These changes alone, according to authorities, explained why homicides dropped by more than 10 percent in 2022 to 3,489—or 35.8 per 100,000 inhabitants—from 3,942 in 2021.
The ‘Bukele-ization’ of Security Policy
However, homicides are only one measure of the overall security situation, and today Hondurans still identify violence as the third main problem facing the country. That remains unchanged from 2018, after Hernandez and his predecessor—former President Porfirio Lobo, also of the National Party—oversaw a decline in homicide rates from 93.2 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2011 to 41.4. So while homicides fell during Castro’s first year in office, Hondurans continued to face the plague of criminal activities, while feeling ever more unprotected by security forces. In fact, the National Police—whose personnel Hernandez reduced by a third—was ill-equipped and ill-prepared to meet the task Castro initially gave it. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that fewer than one in every three Hondurans trust the police.
Castro is trying to use Bukele’s recipe as a way to contain the damage to her public image inflicted by the recent violence, but she could become the proof that it is not a one-size-fits-all model.
Meanwhile, criminal groups took advantage of this transition period to expand their operations, particularly when it came to extortion, which by November 2022 the country’s leading business federation claimed was “out of control.” The charge was echoed by the then-chief justice of the Supreme Court, while the transport sector paralyzed the main cities with strikes to complain about the perceived sense of defenselessness. As a result of the public outcry, Castro shifted from forward-looking, ideology-driven ideas and back toward reactive, iron-fist measures that progressively sidelined the police once again. In November 2022, she announced the imposition of a state of emergency and launched a “war on extortion,” mimicking the rhetoric and methods employed by Bukele in El Salvador, hoping to exploit its apparent efficacy, but especially its popular appeal.
A series of high-profile episodes of violence pushed her to progressively harshen the crackdown and increasingly rely on the military to carry it out. Even before the state of emergency, the assassination in July 2022 of Said Lobo—former President Porfirio Lobo’s son—by a heavily armed commando led Castro to announce she would deploy the military police to patrol the streets, despite having campaigned on the promise to dissolve the force, which was accused of committing widespread abuses in repressing protests after the disputed 2017 presidential election. In June 2023, in response to a heinous massacre in the female prison of Tamara that left 46 inmates dead—over 20 of them burned alive—Castro handed control of the prison system to the same force.
Different Leaders, Different Countries
Due to the popularity of Bukele’s model, an increasing number of Latin American politicians are promising to implement it, but so far Castro is the only one who has put her words into action. There are, however, some crucial differences between the two cases. First, Castro continues to insist she is committed to respecting human rights, even if tasking the military with controlling jails points in the opposite direction. Moreover, the magnitude of the crackdown is still far smaller than the campaign of mass arrests launched by Bukele. As noted before, the government in El Salvador has arrested 70,000 people, and it just inaugurated a newly constructed prison that can house 40,000 inmates. By contrast, in Honduras, arrests are in the realm of a few thousands, even if a very small percentage of them involve people accused of extortion; only 25 of the 1,348 arrests during the first month of the state of emergency, for instance, were related to extortion, according to the national Human Rights Commissioner.
This has to do with the second difference: institutional capacity. Bukele can count on over five security officers per 1,000 citizens, or around twice the amount available to Castro in Honduras. The Salvadoran forces are also tasked with patrolling a much smaller and more densely inhabited country, whose criminal landscape is dominated by three gangs with clearly defined spheres of influence and where authorities actually control the prisons.
That in turn explains the third difference: results. Although Castro’s measures are increasingly copying Bukele’s, they have not prevented criminal groups from regrouping and striking back, even after the military police took over jails, dealing a blow to her credibility. Notably, only 23 percent of the respondents in a recent poll disapproved of the state of emergency, but 77 percent feel equally or more unsafe than before it was declared, despite authorities’ claims to have reduced homicides by 18 percent nationwide and 74 percent in the northern departments of the country.
Castro is understandably trying to use Bukele’s tested recipe as a way to contain the damage to her public image inflicted by the recent violence, but she could well become the proof that it is not a one-size-fits-all model. And in doing so, she is increasing her dependence on the military to enforce public order, something for which she used to adamantly criticize Hernandez. That’s all the more regrettable, as the path she initially took during her first months in office was not so much wrong in its substance as in its timeframe, having been rushed into implementation without the necessary preparatory steps.
She still has the chance to recalibrate, drawing a clear roadmap for a more orderly and gradual transition that returns public security to civilian control, while strengthening the police and judiciary’s investigative capacities as well as internal oversight, and fostering violence-prevention initiatives that draw on local successes. At the same time, her government should widen the scope of the incoming U.N.-backed anti-impunity commission to address the nexus between the state and criminal organizations, something that proved crucial to reducing violent crime in neighboring Guatemala when a similar commission was operating in the 2010s.
Instead of becoming a flawed copy of Bukele and failing to fulfil her campaign promises to boot, Castro might be better off following through on her initial intention of spearheading an alternative security model, for Honduras and the region.
Tiziano Breda is a research fellow for the Italian think tank IAI, focusing on crime and politics in Latin America. He was formerly an analyst with the International Crisis Group covering Central America for over four years.