Tensions High in Honduras After Bus Massacre

Mourning for 28 people on a bus killed by gunmen Thursday night in the industrial hub of San Pedro Sula cast a pall over Honduras on Christmas Eve, as officials puzzled over what the slayings might mean.

Four children were among the dead.

President Ricardo Maduro beefed up security and appealed for international help in solving the crime. Attacks on two former Honduran congressmen Friday, though apparently unrelated, heightened tensions.

“We are crying, we are sad, we are outraged by this kind of savagery,” Maduro told reporters after visiting the scene of the bus ambush. “Christmas has been stolen by criminals with sick minds.”

A rising tide of crime has swept over Honduras for most of the last decade, fueled by the increasing power of gangs, which have an estimated 30,000 members, and of narcotics-dominated organized crime.

Among the mourners was Edwin Gutierrez, 32, a carpenter whose 10-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter were killed on the bus as they returned from Christmas shopping. His wife was seriously wounded.

Speaking with reporters at the hospital where his wife was being treated, he agonized over not taking his family Christmas shopping as they had asked, because he had too much work to do.

“I always took them in my car but this time I couldn’t,” Gutierrez said. “It’s a disgrace.”

Security Undersecretary Armando Calidonio said 1,500 extra police and army troops had been mobilized to patrol San Pedro Sula and 1,200 more were on the streets of the capital, Tegucigalpa. Security was especially tight at shopping malls in San Pedro Sula.

Survivors and witnesses said about half a dozen armed men in a van stopped the bus at 9 p.m. Thursday as it plied its normal route through a working-class barrio. The gunmen first killed the driver and the fare collector, then sprayed the entire bus with hundreds of machine gun rounds.

A letter left at the scene of the shootings was signed Cinchonero People’s Liberation Movement, the name of a leftist guerrilla group active in the early 1980s.

But Maduro and other officials downplayed the possibility that guerrillas were responsible, saying the group had not surfaced in 20 years and that no similar attacks had been reported.

Others said the massacre might have been a warning from organized crime to force the government to back away from an aggressive campaign against drug traffickers and gangs. Calidonio said the government had confiscated 10 tons of cocaine in the last 15 months and cut kidnappings by 90%.

The letter left at the crime scene warned of consequences to politicians who favored instituting the death penalty for those convicted of certain homicides. It singled out Porfirio Lobo Sosa, a candidate in next year’s presidential election who has said he favors capital punishment.

Other officials said the attack may have been a botched robbery. Police said 13 passengers were killed in three bus robberies last year.

A member of the Mara Salvatrucha gang was arrested as a suspect in Thursday’s killings, but President Maduro, in remarks to reporters, declined to speculate on whether gangs were responsible for the attack. He offered a reward of $53,000 for information leading to capture of the killers.

“We want to be accurate, and for that we are not putting the blame on anyone yet,” Calidonio said. “This was a planned crime.”

Many San Pedro Sula residents were in a state of near-panic Friday, caused as much by the mystery surrounding the crime as the enormity of the bloodletting.

“This is a condemnable act because it is bringing hatred and uncertainly to the society without anyone knowing why,” said Berta Oliva, general coordinator of the Committee for the Families of the Arrested and Disappeared, a human rights group, in Tegucigalpa. She said the massacre typified the “corruption and impunity that rules the country.”

The bus was attacked in a poor neighborhood where most of the residents work in maquiladoras, border factories that use cheap local labor to assemble export goods, mainly apparel.

Two violent incidents Friday further raised tensions in the country. Gunmen, apparently targeting former Congressman Javier Sierra, opened fire inside a San Pedro Sula barber shop, killing the barber and a youth and injuring the youth’s mother.

Sierra was unhurt, but one of his two sons was wounded.

In an unrelated incident 60 miles south of San Pedro Sula, another former congressman was wounded when he tried to intercede in a carjacking.

Times staff writer Kraul reported from Mexico City and Times researcher Renderos reported from San Salvador, El Salvador.