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• A version of this post ran on the author's blog, Honduras Culture and Politics. The views expressed are the author's own.

The Fundacioé por la Paz y Democracia (FUNPADEM), in San Jose, Costa Rica, released the results of a public survey of public sentiment about security in Latin America.  Honduras is one of the countries where the survey took place, and the results about public sentiment are reported in LAPOP 2014.
What the survey reported is that 66.4 percent of Hondurans feel safe in their community, which is better than Costa Rica where only 51.4 percent of those surveyed felt safe in their community. The Director of FUNPADEM told the press:

FUNPADEM Director Randall Arias lamented the attitude of the residents of northern Central America who favor mano dura [iron fist] policies over crime prevention:

Only 38.8 percent of Hondurans have confidence in their police force. Note that the question did not distinguish between the National Police and the Militarized Police. Furthermore, 31.3 percent of Hondurans reported to FUNPADEM that they had been victims of a crime in the last year. 
It should come as something of a shock to our gentle readers to learn that Arturo Corrales [Honduras's former security minister and now foreign minister], acting as a government representative, wrote FUNPADEM a stern letter demanding that they correct the information reported in their survey results, calling it erroneous because it doesn't correspond with official government statistics.
Specifically he rejects their aside on the homicide rate in Honduras, which admittedly uses 2012 numbers. Mr. Corrales wrote:

Corrales further wrote:

Remember what Corrales is objecting to here is that according to FUNPADEM, 31.3 percent of Hondurans report being a victim of a crime.  Corrales doesn't seem to understand the difference between that and his official crime statistics, which document only 18 percent of Hondurans having been victims of a crime.
That Hondurans might not be reporting all crimes, particularly because of a lack of confidence in the police and the lack of investigation of crimes by police appears never to have crossed his mind. He concluded his letter demanding that FUNPADEM correct their statistics and publicize the new results.
FUNPADEM responded that they used the latest World Health Organization and UN numbers for any reported crime statistics. They offered to let Corrales publish an article in their newsletter detailing all the crime fighting steps Honduras has taken over the same time period, but they stand by their reporting of public sentiment... 
In the meantime, Corrales is gearing up his foreign ministry to "correct" what FUNPADEM  reported.

– Russell Sheptak, the co-author of the blog Honduras Culture and Politics, specializes in the study of colonial history and economic anthropology in this little-reported corner of Central America.