Last Friday, February 23, At the trial of Juan Orlando Hernández, the prosecution presented several notebooks belonging to a drug trafficker in which he recorded every payment he made, among others to politicians, that might be the last straw for the former Honduran president, tried for drug trafficking in New York.
The narcobooks would be the only physical evidence in the hands of the prosecutor’s office regarding drug trafficking payments to Honduran politicians and officials.
They were seized from trafficker Nery Orlando López Sanabria, also known as Magdaleno Meza, on June 6, 2018 in a military police operation in the Department of Cortés (north) following a tip-off.
Miguel Reynoso, one of the detectives from the Anti-Drug Trafficking Directorate, who participated in the operation, reported that The notebooks, along with other documents, as well as weapons, money (US$193,220) and jewelry, had appeared in one of the hidden compartments of one of the three vehicles intercepted in the police operation carried out at a military base, that belonged to López.
“We reviewed the notebooks and made photocopies.” They were looking, in response to the prosecutor’s office, for “transactions related to drugs and other crimes,” Reynoso said.
Among the various recipients of money were the names of Tony Hernández, brother of the former president and JOH, the acronym by which the former president of Honduras is known.
“The name and what was found caught my attention,” said the former detective, whose expertise in the handling and security of the documents was questioned by the former president’s defense, whose strategy is to question the reliability of collaborators with justice. US.
These same accounting books already served to sentence Tony Hernández to life imprisonment on March 30, 2021, and later his collaborator Geovanny Fuentes, in the court of the southern district of New York, where the testimonies of some defendants, including the drug trafficker Alexander Ardón, who is serving a sentence in the United States – have laid bare the close links between drug trafficking and Honduran politics.
The former Honduran president is accused of creating a narco-state during his two terms in office (2014-2022) and of accepting millions of dollars in bribes from drug trafficking in exchange for giving protection to its leaders to import more than 500 tons of cocaine into the United States. .
If he is found guilty of the three charges once morest him – drug trafficking conspiracy and weapons trafficking and possession – He might be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.
In the operation where the drug booklets were seized, five people were arrested, including López and his wife Erika Bandy.
violent deaths
López was brutally murdered on October 26, 2019 by gang members in a maximum security prison in Honduras when he had decided to collaborate with the DEA, the US anti-drug agency.
His wife Erika Bandy followed the same fate in June 2023 when she was regarding to conclude her parole and planned to travel to the United States.
In an interview she gave to the digital media InSight Crime, Bandy said that her husband had sent a message to one of his lawyers from prison and told him that he was willing to be a collaborator with the US government. “I have a lot to offer to help,” she said, according to the outlet.
Later, a lawyer for Tony Hernández would have visited them in jail to extract information from them. “If you kill Magdaleno, I have all the information,” he told her, according to the media.
The prison director, Pedro Ildefonso Armas, and a lawyer who had worked for the couple were also murdered.
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