March 30, 2021
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“A Damning Portrait of Presidential Corruption, but Hondurans Sound Resigned”
(NYT article)
The title is misleading. Hondurans are not “resigned” to life under the boot of this US and Canadian-backed regime. They are violently, corruptly forced to suffer in conditions of fear, corruption and economic desperation, forcing many to try and flee to exile in Mexico or the US.
What is missing in this NYT piece is a “damning portrait” of 12 years of US military, economic and political support, propping up the military-backed, drug-trafficking, pro-US regime in power in Honduras. Missing also is a “damning portrait” of support for the Honduran regime from Canada, other governments and actors in the “international community”.
Eric Olson of the Seattle Foundation, interviewed in the article, states that “there’s a meta-story, which is the failure of government. We need to give the people of Central America a sense of hope. And that starts with fighting corruption and ending this ridiculous theft of Hondurans’ future.”
The real “failure of government” that US society, NGOs, ‘think tanks’, politicians and media should focus on is generations of illegal US interventions and propping up of brutal regimes across Latin America, particularly in Central America, particularly in the beaten down country of Honduras.
The "theft of Hondurans' future" Eric Olson speaks of, begins and ends in the US.
Until US civil society, NGOs, media, politicians and prosecutors work to hold the US to account for generations of imperialism - illegally using its political, military and economic power to undermine democracy and prop up repressive, pro-US regimes in other countries (such as Honduras) - people in place like Honduras will be forced to suffer the violent, corrupt and exploitative consequences.
Grahame Russell, Rights Action
grahame@rightsaction.org
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A Damning Portrait of Presidential Corruption, but Hondurans Sound Resigned
By Emily Palmer and Kirk Semple, March 23, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/world/americas/honduras-juan-orlando-hernandez-drug-trial.html
He received briefcases stuffed with cash. He held clandestine meetings with drug traffickers in a rice factory. He sought to invest in a cocaine lab. He vowed to flood the United States with drugs. And he did all of this while pursuing the highest office in Honduras.
These were some of the accusations made about President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras in a federal courtroom in New York this month.
Mr. Hernández, who has repeatedly denied any association with drug traffickers, was not standing trial in the case and has not been charged with any crimes. Rather, Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez, a Honduran citizen, was the defendant; he was convicted on Monday on all counts, including conspiracy to traffic cocaine and arms possession.
But evidence presented in court over two weeks provided a searing assessment of the president, whose government’s failure to build a lawful state and a robust economy has helped drive hundreds of thousands of despairing citizens to emigrate in recent years, with most trying to reach the United States.
Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez. Credit: U.S. District Court
The trial added to the growing mound of evidence gathered by federal prosecutors in recent years that casts Mr. Hernández as a key player in Honduras’ drug-trafficking industry. The proceedings led analysts to believe that formal charges against Mr. Hernández himself may not be far away.
“It’s yet another nail in his coffin,” said Eric L. Olson, director of policy at the Seattle International Foundation and an expert on Latin America. “But more than what this means for Juan Orlando, this sends another message to the people of Honduras that there’s no future for them, and what’s the point of hanging around?”
The swirl of corruption allegations around Mr. Hernández has been building for years. In 2017, international observers documented many irregularities in his election to a second term, prompting weeks of violent protests around the country. The opposition said he should not have been on the ballot in the first place, arguing that Mr. Hernández had unfairly stacked the Supreme Court with his supporters, who then lifted the nation’s constitutional ban on re-election.
More recently, federal prosecutors in the United States have sought to show that the president built a symbiotic relationship with drug traffickers who provided financial support for his political ascent in return for protection from prosecution.
In 2019, Mr. Hernández featured as an unnamed but plainly identifiable “co-conspirator” in the prosecution of his brother, Tony Hernández, who was convicted in federal court in New York on drug trafficking charges and is scheduled to be sentenced next week.
The accusations made by American government lawyers over the years have made for a jarring contrast with the United States’ continued political support for Mr. Hernández, who has cast himself as a willing partner in the effort to stem the flow of migrants to the U.S.-Mexico border.
In testimony during the trial this month, Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, who once ran a violent drug gang called Los Cachiros, testified that in 2012 he gave $250,000 in cash to Mr. Hernández — transferring it by way of the president’s sister, Hilda Hernández — in exchange for the promise that he would not be arrested and extradited to the United States. Mr. Hernández, at the time, was running for his party’s presidential nomination.
Another witness, a Honduran accountant who testified under the pseudonym José Sánchez, said he witnessed Mr. Hernández accepting bribes from Mr. Fuentes and negotiating access to the drug trafficker’s cocaine lab during meetings at the offices of Graneros Nacionales, the biggest rice producer in Honduras.
“I couldn’t believe what I was watching,” Mr. Sánchez said of an encounter in 2013, when Mr. Hernández was running for president on his party’s ticket. “I was looking at the presidential candidate meeting with a drug trafficker.”
Mr. Sánchez said that in those meetings, Mr. Hernández was twice given bribes of cash stuffed into briefcases, one with $15,000 and the other with $10,000. The accountant said he was personally responsible for counting the cash: $20 bills wrapped in rubber bands.
Mr. Sánchez, who fled the country and is seeking asylum in the United States, also said he heard Mr. Hernández assure Mr. Fuentes that he planned to cancel the extradition treaty with the U.S., making his associates “untouchable.” “He then took a sip of his drink,” Mr. Sánchez said of Mr. Hernández. “And he said, ‘We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses, and they’re never even going to know it.’”
A prosecutor said during closing statements that the relationship between Mr. Fuentes and Mr. Hernández was so important to both men that Mr. Fuentes continued bribing the president in exchange for protection as late as 2019.
The evidence presented at trial, and the “readiness” of prosecutors “to explicitly allude to his culpability, suggests that Hernández is very much in the government’s sights,” said Daniel Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School.
Mr. Hernández has denied the allegations of corruption and has argued that the testimony in the Fuentes case, as in the trial of his brother, came from unreliable witnesses who were trying to punish him for his efforts to clean Honduras of drug trafficking. Moments after the jury returned its verdict on Monday, he took to Twitter to defend himself, citing what he called an “unprecedented 95 percent reduction” in drug trafficking across Honduras.
The trial played out in Honduras against the backdrop of presidential and congressional campaigns that have further underscored the degree to which corruption riddles the political system.
Several candidates who competed in primaries on March 14 were under investigation for or suspected of corruption. And though the votes are still being tallied, the front-runner to be the nominee for the Liberal Party, one of Honduras’ two main political parties, was released from a U.S. prison last August after serving three years for a money laundering conviction.
Mr. Fuentes’s brother, Cristhian Josué Fuentes Ramírez, whom prosecutors have also accused of drug trafficking, is running for Congress.
But corruption is so embedded in society, and Mr. Hernández so widely despised by Hondurans, that the latest allegations against him will most likely have little impact, analysts said.
“One would think he’d be crippled by these allegations, but there have been so many shadows over the legitimacy of his presidency and he’s still been able to hold the office,” said Charles Call, an associate professor of peace and conflict resolution at American University in Washington.
Following the verdict this week, Hondurans expressed a sense of fatigue, and widespread cynicism that anything would change. “We do not live in a state of law,” said Edwin Kelly, 35, a data analyst from La Ceiba who lamented “the power of the narco-president.”
The latest revelations might, though, drive even more migrants to head north. There are many reasons more Honduras have been leaving in recent years, among them insecurity and poverty, said Mr. Olson, of the Seattle International Foundation.
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Riddle
If a corrupt, repressive, US and Canadian-backed government traffics cocaine in the middle of the forest, for over a decade, will any US or Canadian politicians or prosecutors investigate the legal liability of US and Canadian officials and politicians for their policies and actions? Will any US or Canadian media outlets investigate and call for political and legal consequences?
Juan Orlando Hernandez –“JOH”- with a few of the US and Canadian leaders whose governments have supported and worked closely with JOH and the Honduran regime since the June 28, 2009 military coup ousted Honduras’ last democratically elected government.
Background articles
Drug money, coup d’etats & global corporations in Honduras
NACLA Report on the Americas, by Karen Spring, https://mailchi.mp/rightsaction/drug-money-coup-detats-global-corporations-in-honduras
“Shithole countries”
The US government promises pathway to citizenship for 11 million people, but will the US, Canada and “international community” continue to treat Honduras and Guatemala like “shithole countries”, creating ever more forced migrants and refugees?
By Grahame Russell, https://mailchi.mp/rightsaction/us-government-promises-pathway-to-citizenship-for-11-million-people
More information
To receive updates about political and human rights issues in Honduras: https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/honduras_daily
Act / Stir up the pot / Chip away
Keep sending copies of Rights Action information (and that of other solidarity groups/ NGOs) to family, friends, your networks, politicians and media, asking ‘Why do our governments, companies and investment firms benefit from and turn a blind eye to poverty, repression and violence, environmental and health harms that caused the forced migrancy / refugee crisis in Guatemala and Honduras?’
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Tax-Deductible Donations (Canada & U.S.)
To support land, human rights and environmental defender groups, and justice struggles in Honduras and Guatemala, make check to "Rights Action" and mail to:
- U.S.: Box 50887, Washington DC, 20091-0887
- Canada: (Box 552) 351 Queen St. E, Toronto ON, M5A-1T8
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