Teacher Who Abused Juvenile Inmates Sentenced

Historic First Conviction Ever in Honduras for Torture of Juvenile Imates—Thanks to AJS's Intervention

“ The LORD looked down from his sanctuary on high...to hear the groans of the prisoners.” —Psalm 102:19-20

One day in October 2004, José Milton Ventura, a teacher at the chronically dysfunctional Renaciendo ("Rebirth") Juvenile Rehabilitation Center outside Tegucigalpa found two inmates smoking marijuana. Furious, he asked them who had sold them the marijuana. When they told them, he, along with two police guards and the center's director of security, rounded up the smokers and the alleged dealer and began beating them.

These four staff members of an institution whose goal is supposedly to rehabilitate troubled youths beat the juvenile inmates with wooden clubs. They beat them so severely that one inmate, who was struck on the hands, subsequently lost all his fingernails, and another suffered fractures in his hands and one of his arms. They broke five thick wooden rulers in the course of beating on of the inmates on the buttocks.

If the Association for a More Just Society's Peace & Justice project had not intervened, this horrible beating would have gone unpunished.

However, for several years AJS has been making an ongoing effort to improve conditions in this rotting, underfunded, mismanaged juvenile rehabilitation center. And when project staff heard about the horrible beating that had taken place, they knew they had to act.

Peace & Justice project staff pressured the police to open an investigation, and an AJS-supported investigator helped police verify the tortured inmates' testimony and track down evidence to be used in a trial.

Once the trial phase began, project staff rented vehicles and drove them to prisons spread across three different Honduran states to transport court officials, police, and the victims and fellow inmates who had witnessed the beatings, all of them now graduated to adult prisons, to court hearings in Tegucigalpa. Without AJS's aid the severely underfunded Honduran justice system would not have been able to arrange for these victims and witnesses to participate in the trial, which would then have had a much lesser chance of success.

Instead, in the first days of June 2007, Ventura, the teacher who participated in the beatings, was convicted. He will serve from 5 - 10 years in prison for torturing inmates of a juvenile rehabilitation center.

"This is really a historic conviction," says the Peace & Justice lawyer in charge of the case. "This is the first time in the history of Honduras that a perpetrator of torture or abuse against juvenile inmates has been convicted. This is a big step forward for human rights, especially of prisoners, in Honduras."

July 2009 Update: Three police officers convicted of participating in torture
Read the update here.

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