Organizers of a planned Cesar Chavez/Peace Walk in Pasadena will host a planning meeting at noon on Thursday at El Centro de Accion Social, 37 E. Del Mar Blvd. The event is scheduled for March 31 and the keynote speaker will be Victor Griego, a longtime community and labor organizer who worked with Chavez and the United Farmworkers Union. El Centro Executive Director Randy Jurado Ertll and Ariel Kirkland from the Flintridge Center will host Thursday’s meeting. For more information, call (626) 792-3148.– Bill Kisliuk, bill.kisliuk@latimes.com

Twitter: @bkisliuk

Angered by a prison fire in Honduras that officials say killed more than 350 trapped inmates, rights advocates on Wednesday decried dangerous and overcrowded conditions that they say have long typified the country’s neglected prison system.

Officials said at least 356 people were confirmed dead by late Wednesday, after the blaze a day earlier consumed half the prison in the town of Comayagua in central Honduras. The toll is the highest from any prison fire in modern history.

Rights advocates called for reforms of Honduran prisons, which for many years have been beset by chronic overcrowding, poor sanitation, inadequate food and ramshackle quarters. Honduran authorities have promised to earmark more funds to fix the problems but failed to do so, activists say.

“This isn’t news to the Honduran government. The tragedy that happened last night could have been avoided,” said Vicki Gass, a senior associate at the Washington Office on Latin America, or WOLA. “They’ve been told that they need to increase resources into the prison system and carry out prison reforms.”

New York-based Human Rights Watch urged an “overhaul” of Honduran prisons, saying the country’s spiraling homicide rate has sent the number of arrests soaring, leading to worse crowding.

In Comayagua, investigators sought to identify scores of bodies, many burned beyond recognition after a prisoner reportedly set fire to his mattress late Tuesday. Inmates suffocated or burned to death in their cells when rescue workers were unable to find guards with keys. Some prisoners escaped by ripping open the roof.

The prison reportedly held about 850 inmates, who grew crops in nearby fields. Television video showed emergency workers racing on foot in midnight darkness and later carrying burned survivors, some bearing broad patches of charred skin.

The head of the Honduran prison system, Danilo Orellana, told the Associated Press that survivors said the blaze started when an inmate ignited his bedding, saying, “We will all die here!”

Comayagua Gov. Paola Castro, who once worked at the prison, told reporters that an inmate telephoned her shortly before the fire, vowing to set the place ablaze and to kill everyone inside, the news service said.

Survivors were treated in hospitals in Comayagua and in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, about 38 miles to the south.

Honduran President Porfirio Lobo announced he was firing top administrators from the Comayagua facility and the broader prison system while officials sought more details about what happened.

“We will do a full investigation to determine what caused this sad and unacceptable tragedy,” Lobo said in a televised statement.

Hundreds of anguished family members gathered at the prison gates to learn about the fates of the inmates, but information was mostly in short supply. The relatives clashed briefly with police, according to news reports from the scene.

The blaze was the latest in a series of deadly fires and riots in Honduran prisons in recent years. Rioting by inmates is common in Honduras and elsewhere in Latin America, where prison conditions are generally squalid and unsafe.

More than 100 inmates died in a riot and fire at a Honduran prison in San Pedro Sula in 2004, and at least 69 were killed in a disturbance a year earlier in La Ceiba. Nine people died in a riot in October last year.

“This reflects the utter crisis, deterioration and failure of the so-called penitentiary system, which isn’t really a system at all but a collection of decrepit, badly constructed, foul-smelling jails,” said Victor Meza, a former Honduran interior minister who runs a think tank called Honduran Documentation Center.

Severe crowding is attributed to a crime epidemic in Honduras and a deeply flawed justice system that sweeps up suspects, then often leaves them to languish behind bars.

The country’s two dozen prisons were built to hold up to 8,000 inmates but instead accommodate up to 13,000, owing in part to a 2003 antigang law that has swelled arrests, according to WOLA.

Honduras, which like much of Central America has become a drug-trafficking highway to the United States, suffers one of the world’s highest homicide rates. Judicial institutions, including prisons, are poorly administered and underfunded.

The State Department’s country report on human rights for 2010 described prison conditions in Honduras as “harsh,” citing reports of risks to inmates that include unsafe living conditions and even torture.

The report says: “The ready access of prisoners to weapons and other contraband, impunity for inmate attacks against nonviolent prisoners, inmate escapes, and threats by inmates and their associates outside prisons against prison officials and their families contributed to an unstable and dangerous penitentiary system environment.”

Security Minister Pompeyo Bonilla said the growing presence of organized crime in Honduras has “logically” fed the country’s prison population.

“We have to come up with an immediate response because we can’t allow our country, Honduras, which has had three incidents of this kind, to go down that road,” he said Wednesday in a television interview.

Honduras is not alone. Prison conditions have worsened across the region as inmate populations swell, in part because of crime sweeps aimed at tackling the growing presence of international drug traffickers and homegrown street gangs.

In Mexico, where President Felipe Calderon declared war on drug cartels in 2006, thousands of drug suspects have been housed in poorly run state prisons because the federal installations lack space.

By 2010, the ranks of federal prisoners in Mexico had quadrupled in four years to more than 12,000, Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said at the time.

ken.ellingwood@latimes.com

Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Mexico City and special correspondent Alex Renderos in San Salvador contributed to this report.

MEXICO CITY — The increasing drug and organized-crime violence in Central America has led the Peace Corps to pull out of Honduras and stop sending new volunteers to Guatemala and El Salvador, the organization announced Wednesday.

Peace Corps officials said they had taken stock of the worsening conditions and decided to withdraw their 158 volunteers from Honduras in January and scuttle plans to send 29 recruits to complete their training.

“We are going to conduct a full review of the program,” Aaron S. Williams, the director of the Peace Corps, said in a statement.

In Guatemala and El Salvador, officials decided to keep the 335 volunteers already in those countries but not to send the 76 recruits who were to begin training there next month. The trainees will be sent to other countries, the corps said.

Kristina Edmunson, a Peace Corps spokeswoman in Washington, said the moves stemmed from “comprehensive safety and security concerns” rather than any specific threat or incident. However, Peace Corps Journals, an online portal for blogs by Peace Corps volunteers, has an entry referring to a volunteer’s being shot in an armed robbery.

There was no immediate reaction from the governments.

All three countries have endured a rash of violence primarily related to drug traffickers using Central America as a staging point to ship cocaine to the United States from South America.

A wave of violence has struck particularly hard in Honduras, whose institutions are still recovering from a coup in 2009.

It has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world — the highest by some measures — and this month, Alfredo Landaverde, the country’s former antidrug and security adviser who often denounced corruption, was shot to death.

Ms. Edmunson said that from time to time, the corps withdraws or restricts work in the 75 countries in which it has volunteers.

WHEN I was 14, my mother told me not to panic if a police officer stopped me. And she cautioned me to carry ID and never run away from the police or I could be shot. In the nine years since my mother gave me this advice, I have had numerous occasions to consider her wisdom.

One evening in August of 2006, I was celebrating my 18th birthday with my cousin and a friend. We were staying at my sister’s house on 96th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan and decided to walk to a nearby place and get some burgers. It was closed so we sat on benches in the median strip that runs down the middle of Broadway. We were talking, watching the night go by, enjoying the evening when suddenly, and out of nowhere, squad cars surrounded us. A policeman yelled from the window, “Get on the ground!”

I was stunned. And I was scared. Then I was on the ground — with a gun pointed at me. I couldn’t see what was happening but I could feel a policeman’s hand reach into my pocket and remove my wallet. Apparently he looked through and found the ID I kept there. “Happy Birthday,” he said sarcastically. The officers questioned my cousin and friend, asked what they were doing in town, and then said goodnight and left us on the sidewalk.

Less than two years later, in the spring of 2008, N.Y.P.D. officers stopped and frisked me, again. And for no apparent reason. This time I was leaving my grandmother’s home in Flatbush, Brooklyn; a squad car passed me as I walked down East 49th Street to the bus stop. The car backed up. Three officers jumped out. Not again. The officers ordered me to stand, hands against a garage door, fished my wallet out of my pocket and looked at my ID. Then they let me go.

I was stopped again in September of 2010. This time I was just walking home from the gym. It was the same routine: I was stopped, frisked, searched, ID’d and let go.

These experiences changed the way I felt about the police. After the third incident I worried when police cars drove by; I was afraid I would be stopped and searched or that something worse would happen. I dress better if I go downtown. I don’t hang out with friends outside my neighborhood in Harlem as much as I used to. Essentially, I incorporated into my daily life the sense that I might find myself up against a wall or on the ground with an officer’s gun at my head. For a black man in his 20s like me, it’s just a fact of life in New York.

Here are a few other facts: last year, the N.Y.P.D. recorded more than 600,000 stops; 84 percent of those stopped were blacks or Latinos. Police are far more likely to use force when stopping blacks or Latinos than whites. In half the stops police cite the vague “furtive movements” as the reason for the stop. Maybe black and brown people just look more furtive, whatever that means. These stops are part of a larger, more widespread problem — a racially discriminatory system of stop-and-frisk in the N.Y.P.D. The police use the excuse that they’re fighting crime to continue the practice, but no one has ever actually proved that it reduces crime or makes the city safer. Those of us who live in the neighborhoods where stop-and-frisks are a basic fact of daily life don’t feel safer as a result.

We need change. When I was young I thought cops were cool. They had a respectable and honorable job to keep people safe and fight crime. Now, I think their tactics are unfair and they abuse their authority. The police should consider the consequences of a generation of young people who want nothing to do with them — distrust, alienation and more crime.

Last May, I was outside my apartment building on my way to the store when two police officers jumped out of an unmarked car and told me to stop and put my hands up against the wall. I complied. Without my permission, they removed my cellphone from my hand, and one of the officers reached into my pockets, and removed my wallet and keys. He looked through my wallet, then handcuffed me. The officers wanted to know if I had just come out of a particular building. No, I told them, I lived next door.

One of the officers asked which of the keys they had removed from my pocket opened my apartment door. Then he entered my building and tried to get into my apartment with my key. My 18-year-old sister was inside with two of our younger siblings; later she told me she had no idea why the police were trying to get into our apartment and was terrified. She tried to call me, but because they had confiscated my phone, I couldn’t answer.

Meanwhile, a white officer put me in the back of the police car. I was still handcuffed. The officer asked if I had any marijuana, and I said no. He removed and searched my shoes and patted down my socks. I asked why they were searching me, and he told me someone in my building complained that a person they believed fit my description had been ringing their bell. After the other officer returned from inside my apartment building, they opened the door to the police car, told me to get out, removed the handcuffs and simply drove off. I was deeply shaken.

For young people in my neighborhood, getting stopped and frisked is a rite of passage. We expect the police to jump us at any moment. We know the rules: don’t run and don’t try to explain, because speaking up for yourself might get you arrested or worse. And we all feel the same way — degraded, harassed, violated and criminalized because we’re black or Latino. Have I been stopped more than the average young black person? I don’t know, but I look like a zillion other people on the street. And we’re all just trying to live our lives.

As a teenager, I was quiet and kept to myself. I’m about to graduate from the Borough of Manhattan Community College, and I have a stronger sense of myself after getting involved with the Brotherhood/Sister Sol, a neighborhood organization in Harlem. We educate young people about their rights when they’re stopped by the police and how to stay safe in those interactions. I have talked to dozens of young people who have had experiences like mine. And I know firsthand how much it messes with you. Because of them, I’m doing what I can to help change things and am acting as a witness in a lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights to stop the police from racially profiling and harassing black and brown people in New York.

It feels like an important thing to be part of a community of hundreds of thousands of people who are wrongfully stopped on their way to work, school, church or shopping, and are patted down or worse by the police though they carry no weapon; and searched for no reason other than the color of their skin. I hope police practices will change and that when I have children I won’t need to pass along my mother’s advice.