Justice for Prison-Torture Survivors

Justice for Prison-Torture Survivors

Five years ago, Carlos (center-left) and Arnulfo (center-right) were subjected to violent physical abuse at Renaciendo juvenile rehabilitation center. But an AJS investigator (left) and AJS lawyer Luis helped achieve a just outcome in the trial against the officers who abused them.

The day Carlos Merlo arrived at Renaciendo (Rebirth) Juvenile Rehabilitation Center in 2004, he was given the worst welcome he could imagine. One of the police officers told him to hold the tips of his fingers together facing up. The officer then hit them so hard with a wooden ruler that a few days later Carlos’s fingernails turned purple and fell off. A second officer kneed him in the stomach. He doubled over in his bed as fists rained down on his head and body.

This kind of torturous abuse was rampant at Renaciendo, so much so that the youth inmates pressed charges for human rights abuses against the police officers and an instructor. The charges, and the boys’ pleas for justice, were ignored for six months, until the staff of AJS’s Peace & Justice Project learned of the case.

Did you know?
With $3,000, you could hire a private investigator in the U.S. for three days...or you could pay for all the costs involved in having two AJS investigators, one AJS lawyer, and one AJS psychologist work from start to finish on a case like Carlos and Arnulfo's.

In 2007, AJS achieved the first conviction ever for human rights abuses against juvenile inmates in Honduras—an abusive Renaciendo teacher was sentenced to 10 years in prison. This July, thanks to AJS’s help, three of Renaciendo’s most violent police officers were also found guilty of human rights abuses.

Despite challenges presented by post-coup government-imposed curfews and police blockades, two of the more than 80 youth who lived at the center, Arnulfo Rodriguez and Carlos Merlo, came to Tegucigalpa to testify in the trial. A Peace & Justice investigator talked his way through police checkpoints and drove through a dangerous, unpaved mountain road to bring in Carlos, who lives near the Nicaraguan border.

The long trip from rural Olancho was worth it for Arnulfo, whose testimony helped seal the conviction. For him, the sentence means that justice was done. "They don't always listen to people like us," he said. "They treat you like you're ignorant.”

In recounting the horrors he lived through, Arnulfo says he still feels intense anger against those who abused him five years ago. He remembers how he felt seeing fellow inmates locked away in tiny cells for days at a time, and can’t forget how he suffered beatings and psychological torture. Before the trial both he and Carlos spoke by phone with an AJS psychologist, Ixchel, who helped them recover their mental strength, and face their abusers in the courtroom.

The AJS Peace & Justice project lawyer, Luis, accompanied the human rights prosecutor in all aspects of the case: gathering and presenting evidence, preparing witnesses, writing motions, and (Continued on page 2)
trying the case. Luis says that AJS purposefully works alongside the police and prosecutors to show that the notoriously corrupt Honduran legal system can function correctly.

Thanks to AJS’s investigations Renaciendo has been cleaned up significantly. The inmates no longer face beatings, torture, and humiliation. Luis says that this is due in part to the clear precedents that these two cases have set that human rights abuse will not be tolerated at any level.

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