Honduras was shaken by the drug trafficking allegations against President Juan Orlando Hernández in a Manhattan court, but the tentacles of drug trafficking extend to the country from the late 1970s, from Pablo Escobar to Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán.
The New York court began the trial on Wednesday against Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, the Honduran president’s brother, on charges of “large-scale drug trafficking.”
Prosecutor Jason Richman asserted in court that the Honduran president received millions of dollars in bribes from drug traffickers, including Mexican kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
“That allegation itself is 100 percent false, absurd, and ridiculous… this is less serious than Alice in Wonderland,” Hernández wrote on Twitter.
“That allegation is 100 percent false, absurd, and ridiculous… this is less serious than Alice in Wonderland,” Hernández wrote on Twitter. From the late 1970s, the tentacles of the Medellín Cartel, from Colombia, began to infiltrate the country’s military and governmental structures.
The spearhead was Ramón Matta Ballesteros, a Honduran resident of Colombia, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States in the 1990s. The first Hondurans killed in the disputes over drug trafficking routes were Mario and Mary Ferrari. Initially reported missing, their bodies were found on July 15, 1978, buried in a well on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa.
Before their bodies were discovered, Luis Ferrari, Mario’s father, sent a letter to a newspaper with a chilling statement for the time.
“Some high-ranking military officers are involved with my son in cocaine smuggling, a business that provides substantial profits, which he shared with those who are now responsible for the disappearance of my son and his wife,” the letter stated. On March 9th of that year, the coup leader, General Policarpo Paz García, declared at a press conference: “This is not a small matter, but rather a mafia that handles two or three billion dollars and, therefore, is willing to go to any extreme to protect this gigantic illicit business.”
Matta, based in Colombia and founder of the Medellín Cartel, took advantage of the vulnerability of the institutions and the country’s privileged geographic location to transform Honduras into a transit point for cocaine manufactured in the South American coca-producing mountains and destined for the vast U.S. market.
Pablo Escobar Gaviria, through Matta, and Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, of the Guadalajara Cartel, among others, constituted the first major generation of drug lords who used Honduras as a drug trafficking hub, taking advantage of clandestine docks and airstrips in sparsely populated areas.
