2023-09-30 07:10:00
Known as El Muco, Milo or El Toro, Carlos Arita was one of the bloodiest hitmen of the Honduran drug trafficking clan known as Los Valle Valle.
The man made an unusual request to Miguel Arnulfo Valle, his employer. He asked to borrow for three days the backhoe machine that the boss had just bought to use on his extensive ranches in the Copán mountains in western Honduras, bordering Guatemala. The chief agreed and the man disappeared into the mountain for a week. When he returned to return the machine, he smiled: “Thank you, Don Arnulfo, I saved myself a lot of work,” he told him.
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The man’s name is Carlos Emilio Arita Lara and in Copán he is known as El Muco, Milo or El Toro. Although he has been in prison for eight years, seven of them in a prison in the United States, in Honduras we still hear stories of his days as a hitman for Los Valle Valle, one of the bloodiest drug trafficking clans in the country.
What El Muco did with the backhoe is a massive clandestine cemetery to bury all his victims, those he had killed on his own and those he had dispatched on the orders of Miguel Arnulfo and Luis Alonso Valle, his bosses and ringleaders until 2014. of the drug trafficking clan.
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The story of the backhoe machine is told by a former official from the area who has accompanied Infobae during several tours through La Entrada, El Espíritu, Santa Rosa and other towns and roads in Copán. “He was Los Valle’s trusted man for the hitmen,” he says.
“He had ordered it (the machine) for three days, but he had it for a week. He had been using it to make graves; not to be digging grave by grave, but to use the retro for that, to bury the people he was killing,” says the former official, who speaks anonymously for his safety and that of his family: the footprint of the Valle clan , although weakened since its leaders were extradited to the United States in the middle of the last decade, is still present in Copán and the group’s activities have regained strength during the government of President Xiomara Castro according to a police intelligence report al that Infobae has had access to.
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The Honduran police had news of the clandestine Arita cemetery in the Copán mountains, but they never intervened. Even, says a National Police officer who between 2012 and 2016 tracked Los Valle and his heirs, Honduran anti-drug intelligence knew that El Muco was not the only mortuary in Copán at that time.
When the Valles dominated Copán, their direct influence extended from La Entrada, a small city located on the highway that connects western Honduras, bordering Guatemala, and San Pedro Sula, the commercial capital in the north of the country. For almost two decades, Los Valle and his hitmen ruled here. And according to the investigations that US police agents and prosecutors have written in hundreds of pages attached to judicial proceedings once morest drug traffickers and Honduran politicians, one of the clan’s main arguments was always violence.
But even for Los Valle, the way El Muco exerted that violence was sometimes too much. A Honduran religious who was a parish priest in a church in Santa Rosa de Copán says that Carlos Emilio Arita had a small army of hitmen under his command whom no one dared to look in the face. “The majority were güirros (young people) who were armed and everyone was afraid of them,” says the priest, who claims to have heard stories regarding raping girls attributed to the El Muco group.
When their drug trafficking operation was already too visible for the Honduran and US authorities who had been tracking them since the beginning of the last decade, Los Valle had to make extra efforts to contain their chief hitman, according to the former Copán official. “The Valles kept him under control so that he did not drink (alcoholic beverages) because when he drank he would go crazy and make public scandals by firing his long weapons, frightening the population. When Los Valle got out of control they had to go disarm him and treat him because he would go completely crazy,” he says.
One of the leaders of Los Valle Valle. He was arrested in 2014 and extradited to the United States. Since 2016 he has been collaborating with the US authorities and his testimony is one of those implicating former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández in drug trafficking activities.
The Valles, in addition to El Muco, had other hitmen whom they commissioned to murder enemies, police collaborators and others with whom they wanted to leave messages. One of those murderers is a Guatemalan whom a Honduran police intelligence investigator only identifies as The Professor. His characteristic mark, according to the testimonies collected in Copán, is that this hitman took the time to explain to his victims why he was killing them.
“The professor was another hitman of Guatemalan origin who was the one who scolded the victims. He explained to them why he killed them and told them that they should not have done that because it bothered the bosses,” says the former official who knew Los Valle and some of his employees.
Miguel Arnulfo, Luis Alonso and José Inocente Valle Valle, a third brother of the clan, were arrested in October 2014. For months, the then president, Juan Orlando Hernández, wanted to secure the capture as an achievement of his anti-drug trafficking efforts, but subsequent investigations and testimonies from Honduran and American police of the time revealed that Hernández, in reality, had nothing to do with the capture operation, and that General Ramón Sabillón, then head of the National Police, did it behind the president’s back and in Close collaboration with the US DEA.
After the capture of Los Valle, as often happens in criminal organizations, there was a period of readjustment, sometimes violent, that left Carlos Emilio Arita, El Muco, as interim head of the clan, according to some police versions. There are, however, those who doubt that: “His thing was not to command, it was to kill,” says a Honduran researcher. The truth is that El Muco fled to Guatemala shortly following the capture of his bosses and from there he operated for a time, moving part of the hundreds of kilos of cocaine that continued to arrive in Copán. In October 2015, a year following Los Valle, El Muco also fell.
On October 2, 2015, Guatemalan police captured a Honduran man who identified himself as Porfirio Montúfar Arita in the port city of Izabal, in the border area with Honduras. The investigations had determined that it was, in fact, the hitman from Los Valle. Like his former bosses, El Muco was extradited to a US prison, where his testimony fueled the cases of US justice once morest Hondurans, including former President Hernández.
Stories regarding El Muco survive in Copán, from La Entrada to the mountains surrounding El Espíritu, the village from which Los Valle originate and where they had their headquarters for two decades. One of them is the day when the head of Los Valle hitmen slipped away from a police post, known as Tepemechín, with a shipment of drugs across a river that continued up the mountain to the rural roads that lead to El Espíritu. .
The police post can be seen from a small cafe, Café San Juan, located on the southern bank of the road that leads from La Entrada, one of the main commercial enclaves in the area, to Copán Ruinas, a tourist town that houses vestiges of the Mayan civilization and is on the border with Guatemala. Sitting in front of one of the coffee tables, the former Copaneco official points to the post and remembers the escape from El Muco. “There were shots, but he managed to flee through the basin of the Tepemechín River, which is a tributary of the Chamalecón.” Through those rivers, this story says, El Muco reached the foothills of the Cerro Azul National Park, to El Espíritu, where at that time there was no law other than that of Los Valle.
The captures of the leaders of the Valle clan and its chief hitman were followed by the fall of Alexander Ardón, former mayor of El Paraíso, a town adjacent to El Espíritu. For years, Ardón and Los Valle had shared routes in western Honduras. Towards the east, another clan controlled the traffic, that of Los Hernández, the family of the then president, as determined by the investigations of the prosecutor’s office of the Southern District of New York in the file opened once morest Juan Orlando Hernández for drug trafficking and arms trafficking. for which the former president awaits trial in a jail in the American city.
Almost a decade following the fall of Los Valle, and following the consolidation of drug trafficking that continued in Honduras at the hands of Hernández’s political power, the map of organized crime has been reconfigured in western Honduras, which continues to be the point of departure of thousands of tons of cocaine that continue to pass through the Central American corridor.
In its most recent report on the situation of human rights in the world, the State Department in Washington notes, for example, that violence attributable to drug trafficking continues to be one of the main problems in Honduras.
Spirit Church. Facade of the Catholic temple of El Espíritu, Copán, where according to a local version the Valle Valle family hid money.
“Criminal groups, including drug traffickers and local and transnational gangs, were among the perpetrators of violent crimes and committed homicides, acts of torture, kidnappings, extortion, human trafficking, intimidation and other threats of violence…”, the report reads. chapter that the State Department dedicated to Honduras in its 2022 report. The government of Xiomara Castro, the report adds, “investigated and prosecuted some of these crimes, but impunity is widespread.”
Castro, elected president of the country following two years of Juan Orlando Hernández’s mandate, came to power in January 2022 promising strong actions once morest drug trafficking and government corruption. One of her promises was to establish in Honduras an international commission to support the investigation of highly corrupt and drug-related crimes, but the negotiation with the United Nations, called to support the international organization, has dragged on.
There are also allegations that Castro’s government has kept in power military personnel who have been linked to drug trafficking, such as Elías Melgar Urbina, who, according to an investigation by The Intercept, had relations with drug trafficker Giovanni Fuentes. , accused in the United States of, among other things, running a drug laboratory with former President Hernández. Castro kept Melgar in high positions in public security and dispatched Ramón Sabillón, the police officer who had arrested Los Valle in 2014.
During the first days of their mandate, Castro and Sabillón made effective the extradition of former President Hernández to the United States. In March 2023, former Honduran deputy Midence Oquelí was extradited, whom the Americans accuse of having worked with Los Cachiros, another of the large drug trafficking clans in Honduras. Oquelí was close to Manuel Zelaya, the president’s husband and one of the strong men of the current Honduran government.
Far from the corridors of Honduran power, and despite the change of government, drug trafficking has once once more relocated to Copán. This was told to Infobae by a US official who knows the current situation of drug trafficking in Central America and two Honduran researchers.
From El Paraíso, the town where former mayor Alexander Ardón ruled, his children continue to control the family businesses. In the case of Los Valle, a line of investigation indicates that Digna Valle, sister of Miguel, Luis and Vicente, continues to pull the strings from Texas, where she lives calmly following serving time in the United States and having given testimony in several cases. opened by American justice. Another researcher assures that it is the children of the old leaders who rule now.
A report from Honduran police intelligence, to which Infobae had access, supports the thesis that Luis Valle, son of Luis Alfonso Valle, and Yosari Valle, daughter of Miguel Arnulfo, are the ones who now hold the reins, most of the time since Guatemala, whose porous border with Copán allows them to come and go without major problems, as their parents did before. The intelligence of Honduras adds something else: the heirs are more violent than their parents; They look more like Carlos Emilio Arita, El Muco, the old hitman who built a clandestine cemetery with a backhoe.
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