A fire at the la granja penitentiary in Comayagua, Honduras killed 361 last February. Guards refused to release prisoners from their cells, while police shot bullets and tear gas at family members trying to save relatives trapped inside. National police stopped firefighters and rescue workers from entering the prison for almost an hour.

Honduras is a key thoroughfare in the narco-corridor between Colombia and Mexico, and its economy and state apparatuses have long been permeated by drug power and its associated forms of violence. Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world, at 82.1 per 100,000 residents. The national prison system, originally designed to hold 8,000, houses 13,000 inmates in 24 prisons. Some cells are packed with over 60 inmates. A mere 53 percent of the prisoners have been convicted, fewer than 397 of the 858 that were in Comayagua before the blaze. Yet a Honduran media narrative depicting hardened, violent gang members and drug traffickers caught in unfortunate circumstances — if not receiving their just desserts — deflected blame from state officials. Another unhappy event in a hapless country, but certainly not a political one.

That asphyxiating evening, however, encapsulates the anatomy of a much wider, still-unfolding crisis that began with a June 2009 coup d’état. In pre-dawn hours, the military overthrew the social-democratic government of Manuel Zelaya and replaced him with Roberto Micheletti, a figure from a competing faction of Zelaya’s own Liberal Party. After Honduras was expelled from the Organization of American States (OAS) for the interruption of democratic rule, fraudulent elections designed to provide the regime with a legitimate face were carried out in November of that year. Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, of the National Party, won and was inaugurated amid mass protests in the streets of Tegucigalpa.