How Honduras’s Narco-State Leaders Fell Out With Washington

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In late June, US authorities sentenced Honduras’s former president Juan Orlando Hernández to forty-five years in prison, on a series of drug and weapons-conspiracy charges. US prosecutors deemed the lawyer and businessman-turned-politician the leader of a “narco-state” where drug traffickers escape prosecution thanks to bribes, repression, and official favors. Hernández has sworn his innocence — labeling the verdict both “wrong and unjust.”

Hernández, a long-term US ally, has clearly now fallen out of favor with Washington. Yet this is owed not to his political record of aiding death squads, blatant corruption, nepotism, or even involvement in drug trafficking — but rather to the fact that his chosen successor, National Party candidate Nasry Asfura, lost the 2021 presidential elections. With the Honduran oligarchy kicked out of the presidential palace, Hernández and his allies could no longer ensure carte-blanche protection for US interests.

By the time Hernández was extradited to the United States on April 22, 2022, the former director of the Honduran police was already in US custody. Juan Carlos Bonilla, known as “El Tigre” and trained and educated at Fort Moore, Georgia, was on August 2 sentenced to nineteen years in prison in the United States in a Manhattan court, which added further embarrassment for his former chief.

Bonilla had been a “highly trusted” torpedo loyal to the Hernández tribe. According to a Justice Department press release, the president and his brother had “El Tigre” shielding their drug shipments while also conducting “special assignments, including murder” of a rival trafficker. In heading the Honduran police, Bonilla also organized the return of death squads, tasked with “socially cleansing” Honduras of environmental activists, indigenous spokespersons, and investigative reporters.

“As head of congress and then president, Hernández was the country’s most powerful political figure for more than two decades, but his tenure was roiled by persistent accusations of corruption among members of his inner circle, including his sister and his brother, Juan Antonio ‘Tony’ Hernández,” wrote InSight Crime after Hernández’s conviction.

When Hernández left office early 2022, the National Party lost access to Honduras’s seat of power for the first time in twelve years. This turning of the page for Honduras came through electoral mobilization, and not due to US pressure on its Central American ally. Already in 2015, Washington gave an “official green light” for Hernández’s Supreme Court reshuffle, which paved the way for his unconstitutional second term in office by swearing in friendly judges.

Hernández began his second term in 2017 atop a heap of killed and tear-gased protesters. This was also only possible thanks to blatant voter fraud. He was, on the other hand, blessed by US president Donald Trump, who labeled Hernández a “warrior against drugs” and a helping hand in disrupting and harassing migrants en route to the United States.

“Without U.S. support for his military, the ongoing American legitimation of his rule, and the money he was getting from the narcotics traffickers, he could not have survived as president for a single day,” concludes Honduras scholar Dana Frank.

Hernández’s legacy is widespread desperation and violence that hold Honduras at gunpoint and force many thousands of its citizens to flee north, toward the US. Mentions of Washington’s deep and verified involvement in Hernández’s illegal presidency and criminal activities has been lacking in the coverage around his trial. The former Honduran president was, nonetheless, a product of US foreign policy in Central America.

Hernández’s legacy is widespread desperation and violence that hold Honduras at gunpoint and force many thousands of its citizens to flee north, toward the United States. This is “blowback” to successive White House administrations that have for decades propped up corrupt politicians backed by US capital plundering the state’s treasures, only to intervene when a social revolution was brewing, threatening the economic and political status quo.

Honduras’s geographical position and natural resources made it what NACLA calls a perfect “testing ground for US imperialism.” Likewise, disgraced former president Hernández’s story reflects a geopolitical order in which advancing one’s political career has all too often depended on allegiance to US interests.

Hernández entered Honduras’s power circles in 2010, at a crucial time in the nation’s contemporary history. On June 28, 2009, progressive president Manuel Zelaya was ousted at gunpoint by military forces that had stormed the presidential palace in the capital, Tegucigalpa. Zelaya was abducted wearing only his pajamas and was forced onto a plane that ejected him to Costa Rica.

Hernández cemented his place in the inner circle of the succeeding US-supported military junta and subsequent neoliberal governments as president of the National Congress and a staunch conservative and National Party potentate. His rise went hand in hand with that of a growing network within both the political sphere and organized crime.

By the time that he was elected president in 2013, Honduras had fallen apart as a functioning state. The Central American nation experienced a tsunami of violence, with one of the world’s highest homicide rates and an influx of arms and weapons fueling organized criminal groups that benefited from surging poverty and violence.

The corruption and embezzlement accusations against Hernández and his closest kin and allies were, at this point, neither new nor unthinkable to US policymakers. Out of office — and with Xiomara Castro, wife of the ousted former president Zelaya, elected the new Honduran president in November 2021 — the noose tightened fast around Hernández. In April 2022, Castro approved his extradition to the United States.

Ex-president Hernández’s network of allies within the political and judicial branches could not, in the end, prevent an extradition to the United States. It remains to be seen what President Castro and her administration will do to halt the staggering political and economic influence of domestic organized crime groups by adapting what outsiders refer to as “Bukele-like” policies, inspired by neighboring El Salvador’s authoritarian leader. Ex-president Hernández’s network of allies within the political and judicial branches could not, in the end, prevent an extradition to the United States. It is also too early to predict where President Castro’s initiated anti-corruption commission in Honduras (CICIH) will land — and how far within the Honduran power structures it will reach.

Honduras post-Hernández must “address the fight against drug trafficking and organized crime comprehensively by dismantling illicit networks, not only prosecuting kingpins,” says human-rights advocacy group the Washington Office on Latin America. “Since criminal organizations such as drug-trafficking networks ultimately readjust their structures to continue operating, there is a crucial need for an independent criminal justice system and for the public prosecutor’s office to strengthen its capacity to investigate, prosecute, and eradicate them.”

The general situation in Honduras “is so bad that many people are moving from place to place around the country in a bid to escape both criminal groups and the military police,” writes Amnesty International. The sad thing is that so many of Honduras’s current miseries can be traced back to the US-supported coup in 2009.

In early 2010 — six months after President Zelaya’s ousting and a few years before Hernández entered the Presidential Palace in Tegucigalpa — I visited what is known as the Mosquito Coast, close to the Nicaraguan border.

I had come here to learn the reactions to the coup from the people living along the isolated and long-forgotten coast next to roadless forests — far away from the political corridors of Tegucigalpa’s power chambers or the sprawling ranching community in Honduras’s central region, where the oligarchy resided. Few dared to talk to outsiders, let alone foreigners.

Those who uttered any views on a political system that had been captured by a right-wing junta with the support of the Obama administration — under a then-celebrated president who had just received the Nobel Peace Prize — made it clear that “La Moskitia” was being swarmed by South Americans, collectively dubbed “Los Colombianos,” interested in fishing and equipped with modern speedboats and satellite phones.

“But they never set out with any nets or fishing rods — which makes it difficult to fish, at least around here,” one elder Honduran fisherman told me.

The local population knew how to decipher the signs on the political sky. The Zelaya administration’s left-leaning policy became a serious threat to the Honduran oligarchy. It was guilty of such crimes as subsidies to small-scale farmers, increased spending on health care and education, doubling the minimum wages for public employees, action to reduce unemployment, and public links to other “Pink Tide” governments in Latin America. This was also a challenge to US foreign policy, established in 1823 as the “Monroe Doctrine,” in which Washington’s power players deem the Western Hemisphere as its rightfully controlled “backyard.”

Before he was ousted, Zelaya attempted to put a consultative, nonbinding poll on the coming November’s ballot papers. Voters would decide if they wished to see a real referendum (a “Fourth Ballot,” Cuarta Urna ) to reform Honduras’s 1982 constitution, which had decentralized power in the wake of a brutal military regime. A new constitution might have meant Zelaya cementing some of his political reforms, to the fury of the Honduran oligarchy. Whether this was a real democratizing measure or an attempt to hold on to power via proxy candidates continues to be debated among scholars.

“It is important to note that Zelaya was not eligible to run in that election,” says Mark Weisbrot, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). “Even if he had gotten everything he wanted, it was chronologically impossible for Zelaya to extend his term in office. But this did not stop the extreme right in both Honduras and the United States from using false charges of tampering with the constitution to justify the coup.”

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton refused to use the term “military coup” to describe the reality in Honduras, which would have legally obligated the US to stop foreign aid. The White House didn’t condemn the military’s violence against civilians who took to the street to protest Zelaya’s ousting.

President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton refused to use the term ‘military coup’ to describe the reality in Honduras. Washington’s political motives were clear, though, as an embassy cable to Clinton stated that “there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court, and National Congress conspired on June 28 [2009] in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup.”

Neither is there any doubt that US officials had knowledge of the Honduran military’s brewing coup plot. Mere hours before Zelaya’s abduction at gunpoint, US-trained Honduran generals attended a party thrown by the US Embassy’s defense attaché. Kenneth Rodriguez, commander of the US forces in Honduras, met privately with the coup leader, Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, that same night.

It is unlikely that US Army personnel would act on a whim and accept the fate that awaited President Zelaya without reporting back to Washington via the US Embassy. The country was, according to Honduras scholar Dana Frank, “the first domino that the United States pushed over to counteract the new governments in Latin America.”

As Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky put it, “Alarm bells ring across the political spectrum in Latin America.” After Honduras, a parliamentary coup took place against Paraguay’s progressive president Fernando Lugo in 2012, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff was impeached in 2015, and Brazil’s current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sentenced to a now-annulled prison sentence in 2017.

Obama, hailed as the US president of “hope” and “change,” oversaw all three modern coups that overthrew left-leaning governments in favor of undemocratic, conservative, and US-friendly replacements.

Barack Obama, hailed as the US president of ‘hope’ and ‘change,’ oversaw all three modern coups that overthrew left-leaning governments in favor of undemocratic, conservative, and US-friendly replacements. Far away from whispering conspiracies in those late hours of June 2009, fishermen along Honduras’s Mosquito Coast look back at a lost opportunity — a moment where a new path suddenly appeared, leading to a new life, only to be demolished and lost.

“The Zelaya government not only brought Honduras back from the dead,” says another fisherman, “but we were also given back our dignity, stolen from us throughout many decades by politicians who only saw politics as a way to enrich themselves.”

In November 2009, “elections” were boycotted by the entire opposition and most of the voters. They had been preceded by repression of journalists, environmental activists, and left-wing politicians. It was this vote that brought José Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo to power. Things were back to “normal,” and Honduras’s position as a US ally and client was restored. But only a minority of the electorate cast their votes.

In La Moskitia, as the fishermen explained to me, things changed rapidly for the worse “Fishing” picked up — at least for the newcomers specializing in a new brand of delicacy called “godsends” or “white lobster”: shipments of cocaine. Some locals got their hands on these floating riches.

‘The Zelaya government not only brought Honduras back from the dead,’ says another fisherman, ‘but we were also given back our dignity, stolen from us throughout many decades by politicians who only saw politics as a way to enrich themselves.’ “There was this old woman in the village who thought it was deodorant and who had it chalked under her arms while she made her way to the market,” one source told me. “But she was in the minority. Most people sold off the ‘lobsters’ and became rich overnight. The whole social structure and power dynamics, not just here but all over the Atlantic coast, were changed forever.”

Honduras’s fall into political decay and lawlessness has been swift. The homicide rate, which was already the world’s highest, doubled after the coup, along with an increase in political repression. Assassinations of opposition political candidates, land-right champions, and LGBTQ activists surged.

“Femicides skyrocketed. The violence and insecurity were exacerbated by a generalized institutional collapse. Drug-related violence has worsened amid allegations of rampant corruption in Honduras’ police and government,” lamented Weisbrot. “While the gangs are responsible for much of the violence, the Honduran security forces have also engaged in a wave of killings and other human rights crimes with impunity.”

The convicted Juan Orlando Hernández is today looking ahead to a long stint in prison for smuggling drugs into the United States, in a case that resembles that of Panama’s ex-dictator and drug smuggler Manuel Noriega — a CIA-paid US ally who Washington turned against in 1992 and had extradited. Hernández can also look back at a time in office when he headed Honduras’s US-led “war on drugs” with funds that, among many things, nourished private militias that protected lands for Miguel Facussé, a late Honduran oligarch labeled a “drug trafficker” in US Embassy cables as early as 2004.

Facussé’s properties were used as transit sites for drug smugglers along the Mosquito Coast. It mattered little, though, as he stood on the right side of the political aisle; this was fateful for the status quo that the Zelaya administration, in all earnest, had started to shake up.

Mere months prior to the 2009 coup, the Zelaya administration had come to an agreement with peasant organizations to launch a “high-level review of the corrupt land transactions” in eastern Honduras, where Facussé’s business empire, Dinant Corporation, is a dominant agricultural and palm oil producer. Subsequent administrations put an end to those projects, and instead, Dinant Corporation was granted a multimillion-dollar loan by the World Bank.

The Honduran state works ‘perfectly well for those in control of it.’ Honduras’s postcoup regimes have also benefited from the work of Dinant Corporation’s “Goon Squads,” partly funded by earmarked anti-drug dollars. They have had free rein to assassinate peasant leaders and social activists in the same regions as Honduras’s US-trained anti-drug military units operate.

Whether Honduras has already crossed the threshold and has become a “failed state” depends on whose perspective you look at it from, according to Dana Frank. The Honduran state works “perfectly well for those in control of it.” That is, she writes, “the landowners and drug traffickers and oligarchs and transnational corporations and US-funded and trained military, and the corrupt public officials who served them.” Juan Orlando Hernández was one of them who fell out of favor.

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