Colombian security experts to help Honduras combat police corruption

Colombian security experts met with the president of Honduras Monday to help clean up the country’s corrupt police force, Latin American media reported.

The group of experts, led by the famed ex-director of police, Rosso Jose Serrano, visited the home of Honduran President Porfirio Lobo Sunday to “offer security advice and improve cooperation within the national police force,” a press release put out by the president’s office said.

Honduras now has the highest murder rate in the world, according to a global homicide report published by the United Nations in 2011. It is “by far the world’s largest primary transhipment point for cocaine,” an anonymous U.S. official working in the Central American country told the Washington Post later that year.

Numerous sources suggest the country’s police force has been no help: among other crimes, Honduran police have been accused of weapons theft, cooperating with drug trafficking groups and murder, crime analysis think tank Insightcrime.org reported at the start of 2012.

Serrano faced similar problems during his time as Colombia’s national police director in the 1990s. Besides dismantling three major drug cartels under his five-year tenure and capturing notorious Cali crime lords Miguel and Gilberto Rodriguez, Serrano is also well known for sacking 300 officials and 2,500 agents for corruption and ties with drug trafficking groups.

In the press release, Honduras’s minister of security said the group planned to meet with the country’s National Defense Council and Human Rights Commissioner. He would not specify how long the delegation of security experts, which included other high-ranking Colombia security officials, would remain in Tegucigalpa.

 

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