From Tegucigalpa.
Fireworks and shouts of joy sounded in several regions of Honduras on Wednesday night, when the spokesman for The Supreme Court of Justice confirmed that the designated judge accepted the extradition request that the United States had done a month ago that led to the arrest of the former president John Orlando Hernandezaccused of conspiracy and drug trafficking on a large scale by the South Court of New Yorkthe same one that condemned his brother exactly a year ago Tony Hernandez to life imprisonment plus thirty years, for the same crimes that the former president is now accused of.
change of side
Minutes after the ruling was known, the lawyers who defend the man who governed the country until the end of January of this year clarified that they will appeal the decision, which will fall to the full Supreme Court. The same one that was formed when Hernández was president and that validated his illegal re-election in 2017, but that less than a month ago and unanimously – like rats jumping from a sinking ship – did not accept the request for him to serve house arrest while Wednesday’s ruling was expected.
On Thursday morning a video was released Hernández had recorded minutes before knowing the approval of his extradition, where he maintained that his current situation was “the product of revenge by those who had the country on its knees,” confessed murderers who were harmed by the fight against drug trafficking that took place since his administration, when several criminals were deported who, apparently, turned out to be competition for their clan.
narcs
Who is also likely to travel north soon – and without a visa – is Juan Carlos “Tiger” Bonilla, former Director of the National Police between 2012 and 2013, who had been a fugitive for two years and was arrested last week about thirty kilometers from Tegucigalpa. According to US prosecutors, Bonilla took advantage of his charges to “facilitate cocaine trafficking using violence, including the murder” of a drug trafficker from Copán who did not want the Hernández to use his department bordering Guatemala for the passage of the drug. . Today he is waiting for the result of his extradition hearing to be known in April.
Just over a month ago he was sentenced in the United States Geovanny Fuentes -also to life imprisonment plus thirty years-, who was involved in the shipment of more than 21 thousand kilos of drugs. According to a witness who testified at the trial, Fuentes had teamed up with Hernández to “smuggle drugs up the noses of the gringos.” The former president is accused of having conspired to import more than 500,000 kilos of drugs.
hit and after
It is becoming more and more evident how, after the coup d’état suffered by the then president Manuel Zelaya Rosales In 2009, what was installed in Honduras was a narco-government that co-opted all spheres of public administration to carry out its illicit activities without inconvenience while militarizing society with the excuse of fighting drug trafficking, increasing defense budgets and security to the detriment of other portfolios such as health and education.
What would cause thousands of Hondurans to begin fleeing the country in the migrant caravans that began to leave San Pedro Sula in October 2018. Honduras would no longer be a food-exporting banana country, but would become a country exporting cocaine and precarious laborwith remittances -the dollars sent by migrants to their families- reaching the equivalent of twenty percent of the Gross Domestic Product.
returns
Paradoxically, the same day that the extradition of former President Juan Orlando Hérnandez was confirmed, the student leader returned to the country Edward Urbinawho was in exile in Costa Rica after being arrested in a supposedly Sandinista and leftist Nicaragua, for a request that the then Honduran narco government had made to Interpol, where he was accused of having set fire to a military truck during the protests for the electoral fraud of 2017.
After the elections in November of last year in which Xiomara Castro would become the first woman to head the executive in Honduras, she had also returned to the country andl General Ramon Sabillonwho had had to escape in 2014 after arresting Valle Valle drug traffickers without notifying then-President Hernández, who removed him from his position as Director of the National Police.
They had not run with the same luck Julian Aristides Gonzalez and Alfredo Landaverde, both coordinators of the Directorate for the Fight against Drug Trafficking and assassinated for discovering the links that existed between the criminals and those who governed the country after the coup d’état. “We all know which personalities from political parties meet with crime bosses,” Landaverde had said on national television a few days before his execution.