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09/05/2004:

"Marked for death, the tattoo gang kids: Rebel youths pay a terrible price under zero tolerance, Honduras-style"

For the street children of the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, escape comes in two ways. The first is by way of a solvent-based glue called Resistol which they inhale to induce a four-hour long high.

But there is a more final exit that the street children dread - murder at the hands of the city's so-called 'death cars' and dumped in skips, dustbins and ditches.

It is not just the street children, who beg and sell their bodies on the streets of Honduras, who are victims. Other youths too are victims of a social cleansing that is sanctioned by a large proportion of the country's society.

They are Honduras's tattooed gang members with affiliations to the Los Angeles gangland. They are the number one enemy of the country's literate classes, denounced by politicians and in the media, and exterminated by police and private death squads.

Some 700 children have died in the last two years, according to Amnesty International which has been running a campaign against child murder in Honduras.

And some of these killings have been on a large scale. The latest took place on 17 May when 105 prisoners, largely young gang members with the Mara Salvatrucha gang, were locked into the El Porvenir prison in the textile-producing city of San Pedro Sula and burned alive.

It follows a similar mass killing at La Ceiba in northern Honduras last year when 51 members of the 18th Street gang were summarily shot, and their wing set on fire.

But while it has been the prison fires that have drawn the most attention, it is the constant attrition against the country's youth that is still alarming Amnesty.
Full Article:Guardian UK

"Rebel" youths? I guess it's revolutionary to try to survive.