Country Report: Honduras

Country Background

Honduras, with a population of 6.5 million, is the least developed and least industrialized country in Central America. It is one of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere, where almost half of the country lives on less than $1.00 a day. A history of political strife and major natural disasters is crippling to an economy troubled by 30 percent unemployment (not including underemployment). Honduras' economy depends on the sole export of two agricultural products: coffee and bananas.

Causes of Slavery

Human rights abuses have always been common in Honduras due to corruption within the government, general lack of resources, and the larger population's limited access to human rights information and education. Although conditions have improved since the 1980s, human rights continue to be ignored. Honduras was, and in some cases still is, notorious for its extrajudicial killings by police force. Corruption within the police force facilitates the conditions for slavery to persist. Its judiciary system is poorly staffed, inefficient, and subject to corruption, thus furthering human rights abuses.

The Process of Enslavement

Honduras is both a country of origin and transit for trafficking women and children. Honduras is known for its sex tourism industry. Victims are trafficked within borders as well as among neighboring countries, including Guatemala and Mexico. Crime rings with networks throughout Central America facilitate trafficking. Sexually exploited Honduran women and children have also been discovered working in the United States. In Texas, for instance, a raid in April 2000 cracked down on a prostitution ring run by Honduran men, where victims were kept as sex slaves. Honduran women and children were subject to sexual exploitation and debt bondage. Homeless girls are easily lured into prostitution rings by traffickers who promise that they will receive basic necessities in exchange for their work.

Organized crime groups traffic Honduran women and children under false pretenses, such as job promises or educational scholarships. The victims then find themselves in debt bondage and forced prostitution or crime rings. Debt bondage, the most common form of modern-day slavery, occurs when an individual becomes human collateral and the slaveholder exerts physical ownership; victims are forced to work to pay off debt either inherited or supposedly accumulated. But a slaveholder often makes it impossible for his victim to pay off this debt during the victim's lifetime. Thus, the debt is passed on through generations. Even a country as far as Canada has been the destination for trafficked Hondurans, where 250 Honduran children, mainly boys, were forced into selling illicit narcotics. Professional smugglers pay for the cost of transportation of victims between Honduras and Canada, where these victims are then turned out into the streets to work as drug dealers in order to pay off their travel and accommodation expenses.

Response on the Ground

Casa Alianza is a non-profit organization operating through Central America as well as Mexico. It has played a crucial role in combating sexual exploitation of women and children and has succeeded in capturing and conducting investigations of sex traffickers such as Daniel Gary Rounds.

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