2024-01-20 06:15:00
08/10/2019 Juan Orlando Hernández POLITICS CENTRAL AMERICA HONDURAS INTERNATIONAL PRESIDENCY OF HONDURAS
Judge Kevin Castel said no more at the beginning of the year, when he denied a new request from lawyer Raymond Colon, defender of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, to postpone for 45 days the trial for drug trafficking and arms trafficking, which is scheduled to begin on Next February 5th. Health reasons, Colon alleged, have prevented him from studying the extensive judicial file in depth. Castel denied it and, in the absence of possible last-minute appeals, everything is ready in the Southern District Court of Manhattan for a jury to hear the allegations once morest who was the most powerful man in Honduras for almost a decade and, according to The US prosecutors who accuse him turned his country into a narco-state in which political power was at the service of major cocaine traffickers, including Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the “Chapo” of Sinaloa.
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In May of last year, the team of prosecutors led by Damian Williams presented the court with a brief in which they summarize their case and advance evidence and testimony that they will present during the trial. The thesis presented in that document is that Juan Orlando financed his political career with money from drug trafficking, that once in power he established criminal relations with the main traffickers in the country and that, in the end, he took the place of those bosses. That, prosecutors allege, plunged Honduras into misery and violence.
“The drug trafficking that occurred with the support of Juan Orlando, and with the help of high-ranking officials…resulted in chaos and contributed directly to the crisis of criminal violence, corruption and poverty,” Williams and his followers wrote in a document of 96-page indictment that they presented to the court on May 1, 2023.
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From what was stated by the prosecutors it is understood that the United States, which at some point was one of the main political supporters of Juan Orlando Hernández, had suspicions of the criminal activities of the former president and his entourage at least since 2014. That year he surrendered to agents US federal agents Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, head of the Los Cachiros gang, one of the most powerful in Honduras since the beginning of the century, whose testimony was one of the first that directly involved the then president with criminal enterprises.
Also in 2014, US agents, supported by the then director of the Honduran police, General Ramón Sabillón, arrested the brothers Miguel Arnulfo and Luis Alonso Valle Valle, whom US prosecutors identify as heads of the most important drug cartel when Juan Orlando Hernández became president following winning the elections a year earlier.
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Sabillón, the police director who captured the drug traffickers, interrogated the Valles; They were the first to tell him that the brother of the then president was fully involved in the cocaine trafficking business.
File photo of the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, with his wife Ana García. EFE/Gustavo Amador
At the beginning of that year, Leandro Osorio, then head of police intelligence, received information that on a hill known as La Iguala, near Gracias, the city where the Hernández family were born, there was a laboratory where cocaine and marijuana were processed. . Osorio arrived at the scene and detained two people, including a Colombian, whom he referred to the Public Ministry (MP) office in Gracias. The police officer realized, very soon, that the prosecutors were dragging their feet on the investigation; He didn’t understand it until someone told him that those captured had the protection of “an important politician.” Osorio later discovered that that politician was Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, brother of the president.
The suspicions of the investigators, both those from the United States and the Hondurans who were able to investigate the most powerful man in the country, only grew from that 2014.
The captures of Los Cachiros and Los Valle Valle were followed in 2015 by the fall of Fabio Lobo, son of former president Porfirio Lobo, the predecessor of JOH, as Juan Orlando Hernández is known in Honduras. In 2017, Víctor Hugo Díaz Morales, alias el Rojo, another Honduran drug trafficker, was arrested in Guatemala. In 2020, Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez, a drug trafficker who later declared that he had been a partner of Hernández in a drug laboratory in northern Honduras, was arrested in Miami. For years, these men told agents from the United States Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI how they allied themselves with President Hernández and how he built his criminal empire.
Tony Hernández, JOH’s brother, was arrested in Miami in 2018. He was tried and sentenced to two life sentences in 2021. Several of the drug traffickers captured before him were witnesses at his trial; They told the story that, prosecutors hope, jurors will hear once more in the Juan Orlando trial, the story of a political group that financed its operation with drug money and ended up being the protagonist of the movement of cocaine through one of the crucial routes. of the continent, which connects the shipments that arrive by air from Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador to Central America with the exit to the north through Guatemala and Mexico.
US prosecutors describe him this way: “Juan Orlando…had incredible influence and allied himself with some of Honduras’ most notorious drug traffickers and allowed them to flourish under his control. These drug traffickers, while developing their operations, worked closely in connection with drug shipments and to neutralize common threats. They did this, in part, by paying bribes and providing support to high-level government and law enforcement officials. This symbiotic relationship, and the cycle of corruption and money it fueled, was at the heart of the charged conspiracy,” they say. At the head of this conspiracy, the agents place former President Hernández.
Along with Juan Orlando Hernández, two other former Honduran officials will sit in the dock during the trial that begins in two weeks. They are Juan Carlos Bonilla Valladares, alias El Tigre, former director of the National Police (PN) and head of hitmen in the service of JOH according to the Americans, and Mauricio Hernández Pineda, another former police officer and cousin of the former president, who received up to USD 200,000 for each shipment of cocaine he protected.
Several of the drug traffickers captured since 2014, including those who surrendered voluntarily to the United States, such as the “cachiro” Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, are expected to be brought to the New York court to serve as witnesses. In charging documents, prosecutors offer testimony from at least four of them.
Fabio Lobo, the son of former President Porfirio Lobo, will also testify, as confirmed on January 17 by the Pro-Honduras Network, a non-profit organization formed by Hondurans living in the United States that has closely followed the trials of drug traffickers in their country. since these began in the middle of the last decade.
In September 2017, Lobo was sentenced to 24 years in prison following a trial in the Southern District of New York, the same one in which JOH will be tried. During the hearings in the Lobo case, drug trafficker Devis Leonel Rivera, of Los Cachiros, testified that the former president’s son helped him move drugs from the northeast of Honduras to the west of the country, where the cocaine was delivered to the Los cartel. Valley Valley. Rivera describes how the shipments were protected by caravans and armored vehicles managed by Lobo, who always said that he did everything with the blessing of the Hernándezes.
Prosecutors will present evidence that Lobo arranged a meeting with Los Cachiros to offer protection from Honduran officers, with Hernández’s permission, to the cocaine shipments. One of those who collaborated with drug traffickers, according to American investigators, is Julián Pacheco Tinoco, minister of security during the time of JOH.
What the US prosecutors intend to say during the trial, if what is stated in the indictment is taken into account, is that Juan Orlando Hernández became the most powerful politician in Honduras thanks, in large part, to drug money. In their accusation, the Americans claim that the main local coca cartels, such as the Valles, the Cachiros and others, in addition to the Sinaloa Cartel, financed JOH’s rise to the presidency and, from there, the symbiosis with the Organized crime gave Hernández the necessary power to do many other things, from controlling the entire state apparatus to being re-elected irregularly in 2017. While all this was happening, the cocaine route continued to widen.
JOH demonstration. Thousands of people took to the streets to protest in November 2017 once morest the illegal re-election of President Juan Orlando Hernández. At least 33 died, supposedly at the hands of state agents.
Juan Orlando Hernández’s main argument has been that he was always a reliable ally of the United States, from the administration of Barack Obama to that of Donald Trump, and that everything he did was always known to the Americans. His defenders have advanced that this will be the former president’s most important line during the trial.
Douglas Farah, president of IBI Consultants in Washington, DC, believes that, in effect, the United States long suffered from “conscious blindness” toward Hernández and his criminal activities. “For a long time, the United States had solid information regarding Juan Orlando, regarding Tony Hernández, but there was a part of the government that thought he was a very valuable asset to lose… He was a drug trafficker, but he was our drug trafficker,” says Farah, who was Correspondent in Central America for media such as The Washington Post in the 80s and is one of the most respected voices on the Central American region in the US capital.
The truth is that, when Hernández stopped being president in January 2022, the Department of Justice, to which the New York district attorneys are attached, already had a criminal case once morest him. When he left power, things took a turn for the worse. On February 8, the United States canceled his visa. Washington immediately requested extradition, which was approved and executed in April of that year. Since then, JOH awaits trial in New York.
On April 21, when Hernández was extradited from Tegucigalpa, the Department of Justice issued a statement describing Hernández as one of the most important drug lords on the continent in recent years: “He participated in a corrupt and violent conspiracy of drug trafficking to facilitate the importation of hundreds of thousands of kilograms of cocaine into the United States… He received millions of dollars to use his public office, law enforcement and the military to support drug trafficking organizations in Honduras, Mexico and elsewhere ”.
The United States had previously accused powerful foreign officials of collaborating with drug trafficking or enriching themselves from it. Manuel Noriega, the former strongman of Panama, was singled out for his ties with drug traffickers, as he did with Mexican soldiers and politicians. Never, however, has the American justice system so clearly accused a former president of putting all the power of the State at the service of a criminal enterprise of this magnitude.
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