Honduras has become one of the world's most dangerous countries to grow up in. Every day, the papers are full of images of children who have been found with their arms tied behind their backs and shot in the base of the skull. Unreported World reveals the shocking claim that police are carrying out hundreds of executions of children and the government is doing little about it.
Honduras is a tiny country of seven million people, yet hundreds of thousands of children have to fend for themselves. Living on the streets and begging for food, they are blamed for a rising crime wave. Risking rape, beatings and scavenging to survive, they now face an even greater danger: death squads allegedly cleaning the streets.
Reporter Jenny Kleeman and producer George Waldrum begin their journey at a dump on the outskirts of the capital, Tegucigalpa. Dozens of children are scavenging, climbing up into the garbage trucks to find anything they can sell to buy food or the glue and paint thinner they sniff.
In parts of Honduras, family life has broken down. Fathers are often away, working illegally in the US and within families and there are high levels of physical and sexual abuse. Many children have left home and joined gangs. At night they congregate in some of the most dangerous parts of capital, not sure if they'll survive unscathed until the morning.
At a local shelter, most of the children interviewed by Unreported World claim they've seen other children brutally murdered in front of them. Menin Capellin, who runs the shelter, says that many of these deaths look like executions; with children shot in the back of the head, their hands bound, and sometimes evidence they've been tortured. He claims that 90% of the time, it's the police that are responsible and while it might not be official policy to murder young, poor children, it's tacitly accepted as is indicated by the fact that these deaths are not properly investigated and are allowed to continue.
The team moves on to the Aldea Nueva Suyapa district, where 16 children have been murdered recently. Ten-year-old Eddie tells Kleeman how he watched someone cut the throat of his best friend Dayron in broad daylight. A local man has been convicted of some of the killings, and at his trial the court was told that some businessmen hired him to get rid of problem children. But, none of them have ever been found.
The team is again told that the police may have been behind some of the killing and Kleeman makes contact with the former chief of the Police Internal Affairs Unit, Maria Luisa. Maria says that when she tried to investigate police involvement in the executions she lost her job, received death threats and someone tried to shoot her husband on their doorstep.
Maria Luisa claims that documents reveal the existence of a death squad called Los Magnificos inside the police force. High-ranking officers allegedly gave the squad lists of people, including children, they wanted killed. And she alleges that there is a conspiracy of silence to cover up the police involvement going right up to the President himself.
Unreported World puts these allegations to the Chief of Police, Escoto Salinas. He denies that it's an unofficial state policy, saying he has no idea where we this information has come from and doesn't know anything about the allegations. He says the police investigate these crimes rather than carrying them out.
Adults may be right to fear some children, but as Unreported World leaves Honduras, no one seems to be offering any solution in this terrible conflict between the country's generations.
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