The National Defense and Security Council led by President of Honduras Xiomara Castro announced in a national broadcast Friday a sweeping plan to crack down on crime and safeguard national security.

The crime solution plan establishes several measures to be implemented. First, the Security and Defense secretaries, the Armed Forces, and the Military Police will immediately plan and execute interventions in municipalities with the highest incidence of major gang-related crimes, such as assassination, drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, arms trafficking, and money laundering.

Additionally, the plan includes the construction of an Emergency Detention Center with a capacity for 20,000 prisoners. Inmates who have been processed for major gang-related crimes and confined in the national prison system will be immediately transferred to this new detention center.

On top of that, the plan directs the national congress to reform the Penal Code to classify the people who commit some major gang-related crimes as terrorists and also modify the Criminal Procedural Code to allow pretrial detention for those who commit such crimes.

Less than a year ago, President Castro implemented measures to address violence such as training more prison guards, establishing a national curfew and giving more power to the Armed Forces to intervene in security matters due to murders that had been committed by gangs. All of these measures are related to the fact that Honduras has one of the highest homicide rates in all of Latin America.