Hondurans Called Right-Wing Ex-President a “Narco-Dictator.” Trump Plans to Pardon Him — but Threatens War on Venezuela

In a th floor courtroom overlooking Manhattan s frigid winter skyline dozens of immigrants sat in on the trial of their former president the once untouchable symbol of a narco-dictatorship that reorganized of the establishment s judicial police and military leadership to collude with drug traffickers It wasn t Nicol s Maduro though the Venezuelan president had likewise been indicted in the Southern District of New York It was Juan Orlando Hern ndez the former Honduran president who as U S prosecutors explained in their closing arguments in paved a cocaine superhighway to the United States In a monthlong trial we covered from New York that winter Hern ndez was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons charges earning him a -year prison sentence Now as B- s plow the skies near Caracas and U S President Donald Trump announces the closure of Venezuelan airspace via social media Hern ndez is poised to have his conviction erased A key asset likely working in his favor is something Maduro pointedly lacks a long-running allyship with the United States Before his prosecution Hern ndez spent years promoting Washington s goals of militarization and migrant crackdowns as a friend of Barack Obama Marco Rubio and Trump Trump informed on Truth Social on Friday that he would grant a full and complete pardon to Hern ndez who has been according to a multitude of people that I greatly respect treated very harshly and unfairly The message doubled as an endorsement of Honduran presidential candidate Nasry Tito Asfura a member of Hern ndez s conservative National Party who as of Monday afternoon was effectively tied with another conservative candidate after Sunday s voting In his endorsement-and-pardon announcement Trump threw in a threat to cut off aid to the country if Hondurans elected a rival candidate He was the president of the country and they basically commented he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country Trump narrated reporters on Air Force One on Sunday He claimed to have spoken to Hondurans who commented it was a Biden administration setup and I looked at the facts and I agreed with them They basically revealed he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country Hern ndez was first directly named as a prospective co-conspirator during the drug trafficking trial of his brother Juan Antonio Tony Hern ndez in Emil Bove a deputy attorney general for the Trump administration until September worked on both their prosecutions in the Southern District There are a lot of reasons this administration might want to curry favor with Juan Orlando Hern ndez and people close to him but none of them point to the fight against drugs announced Todd Robinson a retired diplomat who served majority of of late as assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs under former President Joe Biden News of the impending pardon came as a shock to civil servants with knowledge of Hern ndez s episode Robinson commented But with Trump he added if you get in his ear and there s specific kind of benefit to him or someone close to him then your event will be heard It is not hard to put two and two together and get four The State Department did not straightaway respond to requests for comment Related U S Attacked Boat Near Venezuela Multiple Times to Kill Survivors While Hern ndez awaits his freedom the U S has taken to extrajudicially executing civilians accused vaguely of being low-level drug runners leaving Venezuela including as first released by The Intercept striking the same boat twice in September in an apparent war crime known as a double tap Beyond killing at least people this fall the U S is positioning military equipment around Venezuela ostensibly according to the Trump administration to dismantle Maduro s narco-state In a November announcement designating the C rtel de los Soles which doesn t appear to formally exist as a Foreign Terrorist Organization Rubio alleged that the cartel is headed by Nicol s Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela s military intelligence legislature and judiciary The language could have come from the mouth of U S prosecutors as they condemned Hern ndez In fact as Hern ndez s trial revealed the same institutionalized collusion between state forces and criminals that Rubio attributes with sole ideological fervor to Maduro has been well documented by U S investigators among U S -tied governing body executives in Honduras When Hern ndez took the stand last year he cited his ties to U S bureaucrats so frequently the prosecution objected at least times We get it the judge noted at one point exasperated The defendant has visited the White House and met several Presidents Making sense of Hern ndez s journey from the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa to a prison cell in Manhattan alongside Sam Bankman-Fried requires going back years to June when a military coup ousted center-left President Manuel Mel Zelaya under the passive watch of U S functionaries and turned the already violent Central American country into the bloodiest on the planet As wars between gangs drug traffickers and corrupt guard forces set fire to a problem of undocumented migration Hern ndez known by his initials JOH presented himself as a savior Before El Salvador s Nayib Bukele rose to power and incarcerated nearly percent of his country s population Hern ndez promised iron-fist ruthlessness and made a constellation of military police special forces units with the help of the FBI while granting ever more power to the Honduran military The U S welcomed him as an ally not just for his collaboration in drug war militarization but for his willingness to help crack down on immigrants as well as business-friendly neoliberal policies Related The Poll Fraud in Honduras Follows Decades of Corruption Funded By the U S War on Drugs Corruption and violence flourished in Hern ndez s Honduras where political and economic elites in the shadow of one of the largest U S military bases in Latin America for decades have systematically weaponized the state to protect both criminal networks and transnational corporate interests In Hern ndez claimed a second presidential reelection which the Organization of American States denounced for widespread irregularities sparking protests that were squashed with murderous crackdown as dozens were killed by safety forces Human rights abuses abounded Land and water defenders organizing their villages against mining agribusiness and tourism megaprojects were assassinated disappeared and incarcerated on trumped up charges The same military police units he created were implicated in widespread accusations of torture and extrajudicial killings as well as collusion with organized crime A year later his brother Tony a congressional deputy for the conservative National Party was arrested in the U S He was convicted on drug trafficking charges and sentenced to life in prison in Countless Hondurans now fleeing in caravans took to referring to his administration as a narco-dictatorship According to accusations first presented in the trial of the drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes Hern ndez promised to shove drugs right up the noses of the gringos He was arrested at his home in Tegucigalpa in February less than a month after he left office from his contested second term leaving the reins of the violence-plagued state to left-leaning Xiomara Castro Two months later the former drug war hawk was escorted to a plane in shackles and extradited to the U S where his defense organization argued that convicted criminals tied to the drug contract were unreliable observers depraved people and psychopaths who longed to punish Hern ndez for working with the US to take down cartels The U S establishment countered that the meticulous detail of their workings with Hern ndez and his brother was itself indicative they had participated in the president s racket one that directed heavily-armed members of the Honduran National Police and Honduran military to protect drug shipments as they transited Honduras It was implausible they argued to believe that Hern ndez was oblivious to the conspicuous criminality of his younger brother Tony already in jail for drug trafficking charges The Biden administration celebrated Hern ndez s conviction as a triumph and Robinson the former assistant secretary of state pointed to declining opioid deaths in fresh years as the fruit of the administration s efforts to attack root causes of the drug transaction including limiting traffickers abilities to move money If these networks can t access their money it makes it a lot harder for them to control municipalities and to suborn justice systems We started to move the needle on synthetic opioid deaths in those four years and it was precisely because we worked with countries on a global level he explained If these networks can t access their money it makes it a lot harder for them to control municipalities and to suborn justice systems We were doing the diplomatic spadework to get those people sanctioned by international financial networks Over the program of the trial which reached a fever pitch during his testimony the former president had been eager to underscore his anti-drug collaboration with Obama and Trump as well as officers like John Kelly then head of U S Southern Command and later adviser to Trump who he claimed to have met with to times His administration organized U S training and funding for the TIGRES an elite police force later accused of hunting down anti-election fraud protesters at the beginning Hern ndez s second term the Maya Chorti Interagency Task Force a binational group of soldiers and police charged with stemming drug and migrant flows between Honduras and Guatemala and the FNAMP an FBI-trained military unit that was later accused of extrajudicial killings We re stopping drugs like never before Trump noted with Hern ndez at a gala in Miami in In October publicity emails show U S Southern Command Adm Craig Faller meeting Hern ndez and underscoring that U S and Honduran drug war efforts were flourishing because of the trust of both of us working together In when damning revelations emerged in the trial of his brother implicating JOH as a probable co-conspirator in the drug business the then-president paid over half a million dollars to a lobbying firm to wipe his cocaine-tarnished image in Washington The lobbyists known as BGR Group set off on an aggressive publicity campaign to assure journalists and congressional staffers of Hern ndez s anti-drug record The firm had also hosted campaign fundraisers and contributed to then-Sen Marco Rubio It s not hard to find traces on the internet of Rubio already one of the largest part powerful forces of U S foreign guidelines in Latin America meeting with Hern ndez in the years during which he was accused of organizing a high-level drug ring From his influential position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Rubio advocated for weapons shipments to Hern ndez Related Rubio Says Maduro is Terrorist-in-Chief of Venezuela s C rtel de los Soles Is It Even a Real Group Corruption undoubtedly is rampant in Venezuela where the military has selectively colluded with drug traffickers since the s and where safety forces under Maduro whose last electoral process was denounced as fraudulent have been implicated in widespread crimes against humanity Though it s a myth that fentanyl comes from Venezuela cocaine is flown from the Caribbean nation to clandestine landing strips in Honduras where they have been received by drug clans operating under protection from Hern ndez The message designating C rtel de los Soles as an FTO coincidentally accused it of being tied to the Sinaloa Cartel another designated FTO accused of funneling money to Hern ndez s presidential campaign The indictment of the Honduran drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes asserts he had received help from the highest levels of the Honduran military an institution long trained by the Pentagon whose executives provided the drug lord with weapons uniforms intelligence and protection Testimonies in the trial against Hern ndez made frequent mention of military forces deployed to grease the skids of cocaine smuggling operations providing measure for drug shipments and murdering traffickers who had fallen afoul of the president Police corruption was no less damning The testimony of Ludwig Criss Zelaya Romero a former member of the Honduran National Police who turned himself in to the U S Drug Enforcement Administration indicated systematic pacts between police leaders and drug traffickers including the claim that a U S trained police special forces unit worked with the Grillos one of the a multitude of paramilitary gangs roving Honduras A top cop and U S ally Juan Carlos Bonilla who was denounced for orchestrating a system of social cleansing death squads in the s and s was indicted by U S prosecutors in Manhattan in for conspiracy to import cocaine while also being named in the Hern ndez trial Critics have argued that the idea of cartels offers an insufficient framework for understanding complex criminal networks and the Cartel of the Suns is little different an agglomeration of interconnected drug networks systematic though disperse working outside and through state institutions This is a affair about power corruption and massive cocaine trafficking the prosecutors disclosed in their opening arguments against Hern ndez and one man who stood at the center of it all Yet the person at the center doesn t invariably get the worst cure The lowest members of the arrangement or unaffiliated fishermen whom the U S deems criminal are obliterated burned alive or left to drown Maduro could face assassination or exile while the people of Venezuela are left to fear a U S invasion Hern ndez is awaiting a ticket to freedom The post Hondurans Called Right-Wing Ex-President a Narco-Dictator Trump Plans to Pardon Him but Threatens War on Venezuela appeared first on The Intercept