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New York Metropolis, New York – The defendant, greying and pale after two years in a jail cell, lowered his head in a closing prayer as the decision was learn.
For nearly three weeks, defence legal professionals for former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez had tried to steer jurors in a federal courtroom right here that the state’s witnesses of convicted drug traffickers and murderers have been liars and their testimony – that they operated underneath the previous president’s safety as a part of a “narco-state” – was untrustworthy.
However Hernandez’s prayers would go unanswered and his attorneys’ phrases unheeded as jurors discovered the ex-president responsible on all three counts of medication and weapons prices, concluding a fall from grace so epic that it mirrors that of late Panamanian President Manuel Antonio Noriega, who was convicted 32 years in the past in a federal courthouse in Miami of accepting thousands and thousands of {dollars} in bribes from the Medellin drug cartel.
Like Noriega, Hernandez was as soon as a staunch United States ally in its “Conflict on Medicine”. Representing a deeply conservative Honduran political celebration, Hernandez portrayed himself as a regulation and order candidate in his 2013 presidential marketing campaign, promising to cut back the circulate of unlawful medicine into the nation and the violence that stemmed from it.
He did neither, in keeping with the Honduran folks, and as an alternative ushered in a interval of state repression focusing on dissidents and the nation’s Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean inhabitants, probably the most notable of whom was the environmental activist Berta Caceres, who was assassinated in 2016 by an area enterprise govt with ties to the federal government.
So unpopular was Hernandez that many Hondurans gloated when he was arrested by US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) brokers three weeks after he left workplace in January of 2022 and extradited to the US to face trial three months later. His case enthralled Honduran expatriates who crammed the benches within the Twenty sixth-floor Manhattan courtroom every day, some laughing uproariously when Hernandez testified that he had no connection to drug trafficking and that his accusers have been “skilled liars”.
Exterior, dozens of Hondurans flocked to Columbus Park, which sits throughout from the federal courthouse in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighbourhood, tying a sea of Honduran flags to the park’s fence. When the decision was introduced, the expatriates erupted in music, some holding up their cell telephones to livestream the celebration to mates and relations in Honduras whereas others held a vigil for dozens of Hondurans killed by safety forces and assassins underneath Hernandez’s authorities.
A kind of attending the vigil was Norma Martinez, a barely constructed lady with purple earrings. In 2021, her daughter Keyla, a nursing scholar, was raped and killed by Honduran Nationwide Police, sparking nationwide outrage and protests.
“Justice has been achieved for the 1000’s of victims whose blood was spilled underneath his narco-dictatorship,” she instructed Al Jazeera. “Although within the case of Keyla, there’s no justice and I don’t really feel absolutely happy, not less than we will say Hernandez is in jail.”
‘Narco-dictatorship’
For years, many in Honduras thought Hernandez, often known as JOH, was untouchable, together with, apparently, the person himself.
Elected in 2013, he promised to deploy army and police forces to implement a “Mano Dura”, or “Iron Fist” technique to fight road gangs.
Proof offered at trial means that his 2013 marketing campaign was supplemented with thousands and thousands of {dollars} in donations from drug traffickers.
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In 2017, after overseeing a change within the structure that allowed him to run for a second time period, Hernandez was re-elected in a poll that worldwide observers mentioned was riven with irregularities though US President Donald Trump’s administration endorsed the official end result. Mass protests adopted. They have been met with a surge in repression, and safety forces killed dozens of individuals within the days after the vote.
In 2018, DEA brokers arrested Hernandez’s brother, Antonio “Tony” Hernandez, within the US. Incensed by widespread allegations of drug trafficking in addition to suspicions that he received re-election via fraud, many Hondurans started referring to the Hernandez authorities as a “narco-dictatorship”.
When US President Joe Biden’s administration took workplace in 2021, it made a degree to keep away from public conferences between US officers and Hernandez, although coaching and collaboration between US and Honduran safety forces on anti-drug operations quietly continued. Hernandez left workplace in January 2022, and he was arrested at his dwelling in Tegucigalpa the subsequent month by native police accompanied by DEA brokers. He was extradited to the US three months later.
For a lot of, the court docket proceedings have been seen as a trial not simply of Hernandez but in addition the system of lawlessness and impunity that’s related to Honduras’s prime politicians. On the identical time, the court docket case raised questions concerning the relationship between US politicians and a right-wing elite in Latin America relationship again to the 1954 coup d’etat that ousted Guatemala’s democratically elected president.
‘Shove coke proper up the noses of the gringos’
Defence attorneys for Hernandez asserted that the state’s witnesses couldn’t be trusted as a result of they sought to cut back their very own sentences via plea offers with the federal government. The prosecutors additionally emphasised the criminality of their witnesses — which included drug traffickers in US prisons who cumulatively have been liable for dozens of murders — by saying that “these have been the lads the defendant selected to work with.”
Witness testimony targeted on corruption that started within the late 2000s when Hernandez was a congressman. The witnesses asserted that the president and his brother manipulated the powers of the state to consolidate their management of the northbound cocaine commerce – Honduras is a key route for deliveries from Colombia – whereas negotiating pacts between regional drug-trafficking clans.
The prosecutors moreover supplied a number of photographs of the previous president with drug traffickers, together with one with the leaders of the Valle Valle drug clan on the South Africa World Cup in 2010.
In virtually each case, former drug traffickers described receiving safety from army and police forces in addition to from judges, prosecutors and politicians.
Jose Sanchez, a former accountant for the rice firm Graneros Nacionales, alleged that Hernandez made frequent visits to the corporate’s headquarters within the metropolis of Choloma. Sanchez mentioned that on a number of events whereas Hernandez was president of the Honduran Congress after which president of the nation, he would meet the proprietor of the corporate, Fuad Jarufe, and the convicted drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes to debate a cocaine laboratory within the close by mountains.
“We’re going to shove coke proper up the noses of the gringos,” he testified Hernandez mentioned.
Sanchez additionally testified that he noticed a field of bulletproof vests from the one hundred and fifth Infantry Brigade of the Honduran army in Hernandez’s dwelling in San Pedro Sula and a trafficker brandished a submachine gun as they drove to trade forex for a cash laundering scheme, saying how he wished an opportunity “to make use of this little toy from (his) mates within the army”.
The accountant alleged that Hernandez would ask him to alter US {dollars} from Fuentes, the drug trafficker, into lempiras, the Honduran forex, so the corporate might launder bribes.
The scheme was a part of what the prosecutors alleged was a bigger sample of gathering donations from numerous drug traffickers.
An imprisoned Honduran politician, Alex Ardon, testified that he met a number of occasions with Tony Hernandez, culminating in a gathering late in 2013 at a mansion in western Honduras, the place Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman handed over $1m for Juan Orlando Hernandez’s 2013 presidential marketing campaign. In trade, the candidate agreed to guard cocaine shipments from the DEA.
One other state witness, the drug kingpin Leonel Devis Rivera Maradiaga, is linked to not less than 78 murders in addition to collaborating with Hernandez. He testified that in 2012, he acquired a telephone name after which two video calls from his brother whereas at a celebration with one other drug trafficker. Within the calls, he mentioned, he noticed Hernandez at a collection of tables with the traffickers “as if it have been a non-public assembly”. One of many traffickers, Neftaly Duarte Mejia, instructed Rivera Maradiaga that “he’d already given him ($100,000) in addition to his personal helicopter to make use of for his (2013 presidential) marketing campaign.”
Lower than per week later, Rivera Maradiaga mentioned he and a Honduran congressman, Oscar Najera, delivered $250,000 to Hernandez’s sister, Hilda, in Tegucigalpa.
USS Honduras
The imprisoned drug trafficker Fabio Lobo described a 2013 assembly through which he and Tony Hernandez drove to a petroleum station exterior Tegucigalpa, the place the president’s brother accepted a bag crammed with $4m from a person in one other automotive.
“We received the bundle our mates, the Valles (drug clan), despatched,” Tony allegedly mentioned to his brother on speaker telephone as they drove again from choosing up the cash.
Lobo mentioned the person who handed the money to Tony Hernandez was the identical who, on June 6, 2018, was arrested in a caravan of armored vehicles containing a cache of weapons, $200,000 and “Narco-libretas” (narco-booklets) embossed with the initials of the president and his brother.
Hitmen, often known as “sicarios” in Spanish, from the MS-13 road gang have been utilized by police to offer armed safety for drug shipments, in keeping with the previous intimate companion of Alexander Mendoza, or “El Porkie”.
After being arrested in 2019, Mendoza escaped custody in a violent shootout that killed 4 folks. The boys who freed him have been carrying uniforms of the identical elite army police unit that was touted by Hernandez’s defence as proof of his anti-drug document. That unit stands accused of extrajudicial killings and collaborating with MS-13.
Mendoza’s ex-girlfriend testified that she often overheard him on the telephone with Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla, a police commander with shut ties to the army and Tony Hernandez who was identified for organising dying squads liable for “social cleaning”. Tony Hernandez pleaded responsible to drug trafficking on February 7.
She mentioned she overheard Mendoza say to different gang members: “Name ‘El Tigre’ if there’s an issue. He’ll repair this.” At one juncture, she mentioned, “El Tigre” supplied Mendoza with a big cache of military-grade weapons.
The DEA started investigating Juan Orlando Hernandez as early as 2014, in keeping with Lobo. That 12 months, he and the army commander Julian Pacheco Tinoco had a collection of conferences to debate utilizing army intelligence to guard drug routes. On the third assembly, when Lobo launched him to 2 Mexican traffickers linked to the Sinaloa Cartel, Pacheco Tinoco stormed out of the room. He acknowledged the traffickers as DEA informants.
Though a number of office-based analysis analysts spoke to the court docket, no lively DEA discipline brokers working in Honduras testified.
The US continued to offer safety help to Honduras till 2020, funneling weapons, coaching and applied sciences whereas sponsoring “depuraciones”, or cleanups, of the police.
“Juan Orlando mentioned he did a cleanup of the Nationwide Police and army police, however that was completely false. It wasn’t true,” Martinez instructed Al Jazeera.
“What they did do was eliminate sincere individuals who did serve the folks and go away solely the police who would do the work of pushing medicine, permitting medicine to maneuver.”
What will not be typically mentioned publicly is the position that the US performed in Hondurans’ struggling. Chilly Conflict warriors in Washington dubbed the Central American nation the “USS Honduras” in reference to its use by the CIA as a staging floor to launch assaults towards Nicaragua’s leftist authorities. Equally, a CIA-trained paramilitary group often known as Battalion 316 tortured and killed leftist Hondurans.
And extra just lately, US President Barack Obama’s administration was ambivalent in opposing the 2009 coup that toppled average President Manuel Zelaya after he had raised Honduras’s minimal month-to-month wage to a modest $300.
The legacy of US meddling in Honduras, many say, is a nation that struggles to manipulate itself.
“It’s good to have justice,” Alexis Castellanos, a Honduran immigrant residing in New York, mentioned amid the din of shouting and singing at Columbus Park following the decision, “however it’s a bit bit unhappy that we have to do it right here. We will’t have justice in our personal nation.”