But the fact that teenage boys were falling under general suspicion led to police abuses. One ex-policeman who worked in La Ceiba later said that in cases involving kidnappings, “the policy was to exterminate the kidnappers. If a search was legal, the people who were arrested were brought before the Public Ministry, along with the evidence, but there were ten legal searches out of every hundred. Other times, they detained four, eliminated three, and presented one to the Ministry.”
