As then-Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández’s time period got here to an in depth in January, many Hondurans hoped he would quickly be extradited to the USA, following the trail of his brother, Tony Hernández, a former Honduran legislator who was sentenced to life in jail in the USA on medication and weapons fees final 12 months. However most individuals doubted it will truly occur: The now-former Honduran president, infamous for corruption, has remained an in depth U.S. ally all through all of it.
But Hernández, who reportedly bragged whereas president that he would shove medication “proper up the noses of the gringos by flooding the USA with cocaine,” had hardly begun his post-presidential life earlier than he was arrested and brought prisoner at a police particular forces base, the place he now awaits doubtless extradition to the USA.
Accusations of drug corruption have floated round Hernández for years, ever since his brother’s 2018 arrest and trial. U.S. prosecutors indicated the president was a co-conspirator in his brother’s “violent, state-sponsored drug trafficking conspiracy.” However his standing as president made issues tough: A White Home aide indicated that U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, after being briefed on Hernández final 12 months, wished to “go get him now” however was suggested in opposition to doing so as a result of he was a head of state.
As then-Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández’s time period got here to an in depth in January, many Hondurans hoped he would quickly be extradited to the USA, following the trail of his brother, Tony Hernández, a former Honduran legislator who was sentenced to life in jail in the USA on medication and weapons fees final 12 months. However most individuals doubted it will truly occur: The now-former Honduran president, infamous for corruption, has remained an in depth U.S. ally all through all of it.
But Hernández, who reportedly bragged whereas president that he would shove medication “proper up the noses of the gringos by flooding the USA with cocaine,” had hardly begun his post-presidential life earlier than he was arrested and brought prisoner at a police particular forces base, the place he now awaits doubtless extradition to the USA.
Accusations of drug corruption have floated round Hernández for years, ever since his brother’s 2018 arrest and trial. U.S. prosecutors indicated the president was a co-conspirator in his brother’s “violent, state-sponsored drug trafficking conspiracy.” However his standing as president made issues tough: A White Home aide indicated that U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, after being briefed on Hernández final 12 months, wished to “go get him now” however was suggested in opposition to doing so as a result of he was a head of state.
Certain sufficient, hardly two weeks handed after he left workplace earlier than the USA turned the screws on him: On Feb. 7, U.S. officers publicly revealed that final 12 months, Hernández had been quietly positioned on the Engel record of corrupt officers suspected of “undermining democracy in Central America,” sanctioning him and stopping him from getting a visa; every week later, the USA filed a proper request with the Honduran authorities for the previous president’s extradition, inflicting a whole lot of law enforcement officials to encompass his residence. He was arrested with out resistance the next day.
Hernández might appear to be an remoted unhealthy apple within the conflict on medication, the sequence of U.S.-sponsored army initiatives to cease drug trafficking in Latin America. However he’s not the one main political or army official within the area who has allegedly colluded with the very drug kingpins his nation has obtained U.S help to battle. Even after the revelations in his brother’s trial—the place prosecutors indicated Tony Hernández used Honduran state safety forces to facilitate the drug commerce and assist kill off rivals—the previous president’s forces continued to obtain coaching from U.S. troops and a whole lot of thousands and thousands of {dollars} in army assist.
Relatively than an aberration, Hernández is a window into the contradictions of the drug conflict itself, and his fall from grace speaks to deeper dysfunction inside U.S.-led efforts to fight drug cartels—not simply in Honduras however all through Latin America.
The conflict on medication started in June 1971 after then-U.S. President Richard Nixon recognized medication as “public enemy No. 1.” It expanded all through Latin America within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties after Washington started figuring out the drug commerce as a nationwide safety risk that wanted to be combated by way of army drive.
Pushed by U.S. demand for counternarcotics motion, safety forces in international locations corresponding to Colombia, Bolivia, and Mexico started aerial fumigation campaigns of clandestine coca or poppy fields and arrested members of the drug commerce.
One of many first large-scale counternarcotics operations, Operation Condor, started in 1977 after Mexican troopers and police, accompanied by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) brokers, descended on the mountains of northwest Mexico to wage a counterinsurgency marketing campaign in opposition to rural poppy farmers, leading to a whole lot of deaths as nicely widespread torture and displacement. (Tellingly, in a preview of future corruption traits, historians have since established that—whereas they uprooted some traffickers—the Mexican authorities established a “safety racket,” whereby high-level military and police officers took management of the drug commerce, permitting choose teams of traffickers to work and extorting them for a slice of the proceeds in addition to torturing or killing them in the event that they stepped out of line.)
By the twenty first century, a succession of U.S.-led safety initiatives escalated the drug conflict on its numerous Latin American fronts. The primary, Plan Colombia, which launched in 2000, set the usual for later initiatives, making a mannequin during which Washington funneled weapons and coaching to its Latin American allies to beef up their safety forces whereas additionally pushing for judicial reform. (Some have famous that neoliberal financial restructuring in addition to the enlargement of mining and agribusiness have tended to come back shut on the heels of those safety initiatives.) Plan Colombia was adopted by the Mérida Initiative in Mexico and the Central America Regional Safety Initiative (CARSI) in fiscal 12 months 2008.
These initiatives have been laden with controversy. Safety forces benefitting from a surge in U.S. assist have been documented as being answerable for massacres, extrajudicial killings, and enforced disappearances. Critics, in the meantime, identified that past short-term dips, general drug flows remained constant and, in some instances, even rose.
When Hernández was elected president in 2013, he portrayed himself as an iron-fisted conservative hard-liner who would cease at nothing to finish drug violence. Bloodshed had been skyrocketing within the nation since a 2009 army coup, which drove migration to the USA and thus led the Obama administration to extend expenditures on CARSI. As the top of the Honduran army, Hernández was a key associate of this system, which helped funnel greater than a billion {dollars} to Central American safety forces “to confront narcotics and arms trafficking, gangs, organized crime, and border safety deficiencies” by 2015, based on the Middle for Financial and Coverage Analysis.
Throughout his tenure, Hernández was continuously seen at Honduras’s Soto Cano Air Base for photo-ops with U.S. army officers to reaffirm shared safety targets. In the meantime, he benefited from relationships with Washington past safety assist: Conferences with figures, corresponding to Sen. Marco Rubio, former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, and former U.S. President Donald Trump, helped him keep a world picture of legitimacy whilst his reputation at house soured resulting from rampant corruption and persevering with violence.
However after his brother’s 2018 arrest in Miami and subsequent trial in New York, it grew to become clear to the general public that whereas Hernández was arresting some drug traffickers, he was actively defending others and reaping the advantages. U.S. prosecutors even alleged that he took a $1 million bribe from Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán by means of his brother in alternate for shielding El Chapo’s shipments, which Hernández later pumped into his profitable 2013 presidential marketing campaign. In 2021, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration revealed that since 2013, for all the interval he benefited from U.S. help, Hernández had been below investigation for drug trafficking. Out of workplace and now not helpful to U.S. geopolitical pursuits, Hernández—a broadly loathed, corrupt former proxy—grew to become a simple scapegoat for an administration struggling to “battle root causes” of surging migration.
For some observers, Washington’s about-face on a corrupt former ally is unsurprising: “The U.S. has selectively weaponized anti-drug coverage in opposition to Latin American authorities officers solely after they’ve been used to facilitate U.S. pursuits within the area,” stated Oswaldo Zavala, a Mexican journalist and the creator of Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in U.S. and Mexican Tradition. As a precedent, Zavala referenced Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who had helped funnel drug cash to the Nicaraguan Contras as a former CIA asset earlier than finally working afoul of his benefactors in the USA, who ousted him in an enormous invasion within the winter of 1989 and 1990.
Certainly, Hernández is way from the one main U.S. ally in Latin America to have been implicated with the identical narcotics he was tasked with combating. Take, for example, Genaro García Luna, Mexico’s public safety secretary through the first section of the Mexican drug conflict from 2006 to 2012, and Salvador Cienfuegos, Mexico’s basic and protection minister from 2012 to 2018, who was awarded the Legion of Benefit by the U.S. Protection Division. Each males presided over army forces that have been essential to Washington’s Mérida Initiative, touted as an “anti-drug and rule of legislation help to Mexico.”
But the U.S. Justice Division accused García Luna of taking funds from the Sinaloa Cartel and was arrested by DEA brokers in Dallas in 2019, and Cienfuegos allegedly used his place to defend the Sinaloa Cartel and was arrested by U.S. authorities in 2020. (Following diplomatic uproar, the U.S. Justice Division abruptly launched Cienfuegos from jail a month later.)
Because the Mexican Army and Federal Police below Cienfuegos and García Luna have been deployed to Ciudad Juárez, arresting sure traffickers, military-linked loss of life squads started finishing up widespread extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances in opposition to the city poor. Medication nonetheless flowed north. Leaked State Division cables from 2008 indicated that U.S. officers have been conscious that there was a excessive likelihood García Luna, for one, was complicit in high-level drug corruption contained in the Mexican state safety equipment, whereas Edgar Valdez Villarreal, a outstanding drug lord often called “La Barbie,” alleged in a public letter after his 2010 seize that he had been making common funds to García Luna.
It mustn’t come as a shock that some U.S. authorities companies collaborate with the very people different U.S. companies denounce, stated Alexander Aviña, a Mexican American professor of Latin American historical past at Arizona State College who researches drug wars.
“There are competing pursuits throughout the U.S. state,” Aviña stated. “The Justice Division is working in opposition to the CIA, which is working in opposition to the DEA. There are various instances the place the DEA is conscious that one in all [the United States’] allies is concerned in medication, after which the CIA steps in and stops them from investigating.”
One former DEA agent who labored in Mexico below the Mérida Initiative, who requested to stay nameless for skilled causes, was blunt in recognizing that when confronted with a subject of corrupt authorities officers, Washington usually collaborates with the lesser of two evils: “You’ve bought to make a cope with the satan sooner or later,” the previous DEA agent stated. “We needed to alter to [the reality of corruption] and work with folks typically.”
The DEA didn’t reply to Overseas Coverage’s request for remark.
Robert Arce, a former agent who labored for the U.S. Bureau of Worldwide Narcotics and Legislation Enforcement Affairs (INL) in Mexico between 2014 and 2017, stated he and most of his colleagues on the INL have been conscious of corrupt officers, corresponding to Cienfuegos or García Luna, in associate governments. However the heads of the bureau in Mexico Metropolis, he stated, expressed little curiosity in investigating them as a result of doing so would muddy the black-and-white picture of linear progress within the drug conflict. “The heads don’t wish to hear something damaging,” he stated. “They don’t need us reporting unhealthy stuff about these figures we’re working with being corrupt as a result of they wish to ship rosy reviews of progress to [Washington] to allow them to proceed to get extra funding.”
In response to a request for an official remark, a U.S. State Division official, who would solely touch upon situation of anonymity, said in an e-mail, “The Bureau of Worldwide Narcotics and Legislation Enforcement Affairs works with governmental and non-governmental companions to stop and reply to corruption and associated crimes, and to strengthen anticorruption structure across the globe,” including that “Underneath our framework for safety cooperation between the USA and Mexico, each international locations pledged the utmost respect for human rights and an intolerance for corruption. INL’s work in Mexico has prioritized and continues to prioritize diplomacy and overseas help to advance efforts to stop, determine, and prosecute corruption.”
Hernández’s potential extradition might assist clear up that picture, not less than marginally, in the USA. However it “received’t essentially alter the course of the drug conflict or essentially enhance issues for the higher,” stated Daybreak Paley, a journalist who’s reported from Central America and Mexico and is the creator of Drug Battle Capitalism. “Doing so would require the regulation of narcotics and the demilitarization of prohibition.”
Paley is of a neighborhood of critics who sees medication and drug abuse as a public well being difficulty—the place medication ought to be legalized to allow them to be regulated, lowering overdose deaths and lacing with lethal chemical substances like fentanyl—slightly than a nationwide safety risk needing to be combated by army drive. Many see the prohibition of narcotics, then again, as making a black market alternative for armed felony teams and corrupt authorities factions to make darkish cash in an underground financial system whose solely type of regulation is excessive violence.
However as Hernández faces the prospect of going north, weapons within the drug conflict proceed going south: On Feb. 7, Rubio and U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez launched the Western Hemisphere Safety Technique Act, a invoice that will considerably increase the funding and coaching of Latin America’s militaries to battle transnational felony organizations. Hernández could also be one rotten determine rooted out of the drug conflict, however the system itself continues to churn alongside.
