One Party, Many Crimes: The Case of Honduras' National Party
COCAINE/
16 FEB 2021
BY HÉCTOR SILVA ÁVALOS AND VICTORIA DITTMAR
The party that has governed Honduras since 2010 has become a federation that welcomes politicians and officials involved in criminal businesses ranging from timber to drug trafficking to the misappropriation of public funds.
An informant working in the western department of Lempira looked at General Leandro Osorio and spoke: “I know a place where there are drugs.”
It was mid-January 2014 and Osorio was chief of intelligence for Honduras’ National Police. Osorio, who would later make some startling declarations about the case, asked for evidence and the informant promptly produced photos of what appeared to be a greenhouse hidden in the mountains.
The informant also provided the general with the coordinates but warned that the drugs and some of those who worked there were protected by a high-ranking police official and a very powerful politician.
The greenhouse was close to La Iguala, a small village embedded in the mountains of Opalaca, some four hours by car and another hour and a half on foot from Tegucigalpa. It was close to Gracias, the capital of Lempira and home of the Hernández clan.
A cocaine laboratory in Honduras
The clan was known for its small coffee plantations and its political ambitions. Juan Orlando Hernández is the head of the country’s ruling National Party and Honduras’ president since 2014. His brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, was an alternate congressman at the time. His other brother was a colonel in the army.
More:
https://insightcrime.org/investigations/one-party-many-crimes-honduras-national-party/
Honduran President, and friend of the Orange Blob from Hell, Juan Orlando Hernández
Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, enjoying an
amiable chat with lunatic racist fascists' target for
assassination, the Vice President to the Orange Blob from Hell.
Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, shaking the sweaty, smelly hand of the Orange Blob's Secretary of State.
Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez listens to then US Marine General John Kelly in 2014 as the US DEA was investigating the leader for ‘drug trafficking’. Photo: AP
Chief Of Staff John Kelly, during the Great Madness.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández in late January at the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa. (Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images)
By
Kevin Sieff
Feb. 12, 2021 at 6:00 a.m. CST
SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras — A week after another U.S. federal court filing implicated him in drug trafficking, the president of Honduras was in a helicopter zipping over a remote mountain range, scrolling through Twitter.
It was mid-January, and Juan Orlando Hernández was trying to calculate what Washington’s political transition meant for his country — and for him. He flicked past news of Donald Trump’s impeachment, past a Nikki Haley tweet about “liberal elites,” past a preview of Joe Biden’s inauguration.
For four years, Hernández had built his governing program around the demands of the Trump administration, which in turn had stayed out of Honduras’s domestic affairs. Now that arrangement was ending. Hernández, like other leaders around the world, was preparing for an extreme change in American foreign policy — and trying to figure out how to refashion himself from a Trump ally into a Biden one.
The stakes are higher for Hernández than perhaps any other world leader. Not only are the political and economic fortunes of his country inextricably linked to the United States but Hernández is one of the few sitting presidents ever to be implicated in drug trafficking by the U.S. Justice Department.
He has not been charged, but prosecutors have described evidence against him in multiple indictments, including one against his brother, Tony, a former congressman in Honduras who was convicted in federal court in Manhattan in 2019 of cocaine trafficking. In that case, the Justice Department said Tony Hernández had delivered a $1 million bribe from Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán to Juan Orlando Hernández in 2013. The president denies that allegation and any other alleged ties to drug trafficking.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/honduras-president-narcotrafficking-hernandez/2021/02/11/1fa96044-5f8c-11eb-ac8f-4ae05557196e_story.html