MEXICO CITY — Relatives, lawyers and women’s rights groups in Honduras demanded justice Monday as they awaited a verdict in a sex-trafficking case surrounding the 2022 disappearance of Angie Peña, which they say exposed the impunity and corruption that allow widespread gender violence in the Central American country.
Four men are on trial for crimes related to Peña’s disappearance. A Honduran court is expected to announce a verdict Monday. Lawyers representing the family have questioned the lack of transparency of the investigation and trial, which was not open to the press or general public. It alleges police and at least one judge helped facilitate the criminal network, without naming the officials. “It’s not just Angie. It’s all those women around Angie. There are many.”
Peña, 22, disappeared on Jan. 1, 2022, after taking a Jet Ski ride while on vacation with her family in Roatan, an island off the coast of Honduras. Initially, authorities investigated her disappearance as a possible accident, but the case expanded into a trafficking investigation after the Jet Ski she used was found in Belize, some 90 nautical miles away.
Peña’s family said it has received death threats, and the August killing of Dereck McNeil, a key protected witness, further exposed the dangers of seeking justice in Honduras. “There are many more women and girls who have been victims of trafficking networks, and those cases are silenced, they go unpunished,” said Kenia Paz, a lawyer for the Legal Team for Human Rights who represents Peña’s family. The Honduran public prosecutor’s office has said the suspects are all part of a sex trafficking network that included minors and that the group also carried out other crimes, including drug trafficking. Julissa Villanueva, a former vice minister of security who was involved in the investigation, said that prosecutors have mishandled the case from the start. They have tried to push a “tunnel vision” explanation of what happened, she said, that hides the larger criminal structure around it, which she compared to Epstein’s sex trafficking network. “There are connections with other larger networks, and only by making them public will this family be able to get justice,” she said.
