ABSTRACT
Colonel Orlando Garcia Maradiaga took over as the Director of the National Penitentiary Institute of Honduras in May of 2015, about two and a half months before this interview took place. The presence of the military at the highest echelons of the 15,000-inmate and 1,600-employee national prison system was relatively recent, dating back only to August of 2014. The decision of Honduran President, Juan Orlando Hernandez, to replace civilian leadership with that of a temporary military leadership was influenced in no small measure by a tragic fire that killed 362 inmates in Comayagua prison in the country in 2014, and the resulting perception that the prison system in the country was spiralling out of control. This chapter relates the contents of the interview with Colonel Garcia, conducted in his office in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, and further contains information from a tour of La Tamara prison, a 4,300-inmate male facility housing about 29% of the country’s total inmate population.
