The Deadly Results of a D.E.A.-Backed Raid in Honduras

[Judi Lynn]

By ANNIE BIRD and ALEXANDER MAIN
JULY 2, 2017





WASHINGTON — It was a dark, moonless night. A small passenger boat had nearly reached the end of its six-hour journey upriver when helicopters appeared overhead and another boat came into view. Shots were fired, hitting several passengers. As terrified men, women and children leapt into the water, they were fired on again by a machine-gunner perched in a helicopter. Four people were killed, two of them women, another a 14-year-old boy. Several more were injured.

It could have been another tragic scene of carnage from Syria, South Sudan or some other war-torn place. But this grisly incident occurred in the otherwise peaceful Miskito indigenous community of Ahuas, Honduras, during a May 2012 counternarcotics mission involving agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, a United States-vetted Honduran police unit and machine-gun-equipped State Department helicopters.

The D.E.A. and Honduran police said that the passenger boat carried drug traffickers who fired first. Local residents told a different story, of a water taxi carrying unarmed travelers with no links to drug trafficking.

Weeks later we traveled to Ahuas and worked with local human rights defenders to piece together the boat passengers’ accounts. A grieving mother described how her teenage son was shot dead before her eyes. A nurse told us about her deceased pregnant sister and her struggle to care for her orphaned niece and nephew.

More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/02/opinion/-dea-honduras-drugs.html