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Summary
On February 16, ex-President Juan Orlando Hernandez was arrested by Honduran police. Since then, his extradition process to the United States to stand trial on drug trafficking and weapons charges, has been unfolding in Honduras. His arrest has sparked debates about whether his rights are being violated; the future of Honduran institutions involved in the narco-state; and how his supporters, including the US and Canadian governments, should be held accountable for supporting a violent, narco-regime.
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To read Karen Spring’s article about the U.S. indictment against ex-Director of the Honduran National Police Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla, go to: https://www.aquiabajo.com/blog/2020/4/30/us-indictment-of-el-tigre-bonilla-just-the-tip-of-the-impunity-iceberg
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Transcript
Karen Spring:
Less than three weeks after leaving the presidential palace, ex-President Juan Orlando Hernández was arrested on drug trafficking and weapons charges. The night before his arrest, Honduran police surrounded his home. They waited to move in and take him into custody until a Honduran judge signed the official arrest warrant. The following day when JOH’s last moments of freedom ran out, he took his last private moment to hug his wife, ex-First Lady Ana García, goodbye. Seconds later, he opened the main door of his mansion in Tegucigalpa, leading to the street and he was arrested by Honduran police, led by the new minister of security, Ramón Sabillón. Handcuffed and chained by his hands and feet, the Honduran media ate it up. From President of Honduras to being paraded in front of the cameras in chains. This was a historical moment for Honduras and Latin America.
Welcome to the Honduras Now podcast. This podcast shares human rights stories from Honduras and connects them with global issues and North American policy. I’m your host, Karen Spring, a longtime human rights activist that has lived in Honduras for over a decade. Thanks so much for listening.
From the front of his mansion, Juan Orlando Hernández was then taken by a large group of Honduran police to the Special Forces police base in Tegucigalpa. That evening JOH spent the night detained inside the Special Forces base. The following day, he was escorted to the Supreme Court.
JOH was informed of the charges against him. The request for his extradition from the New York Southern District Court was signed on January 27, 2022, the day Juan Orlando Hernández left office.
The request outlines that JOH is being accused of three charges, which I’m paraphrasing because they’re quite long. The first charge is conspiracy to import, produce, and/or distribute a controlled substance into the United States. This charge has a minimum of 10 years in prison if found guilty.
The second is using and carrying machine guns and destructive devices during, and possessing machine guns and destructive devices in furtherance of, the cocaine importation conspiracy, or the drug importation conspiracy. The minimum is 30 years to maximum life in prison.
The third charge, conspiring to use and carry machine guns and destructive devices during, and to possess machine guns and destructive devices in furtherance of, the narcotics importation conspiracy. There is no minimum for that crime, but the maximum is life in prison.
So if found guilty of all three charges, JOH faces an absolute minimum of 40 years in prison, which means he would likely spend the rest of his life behind bars, and that’s just the best case scenario. He’s charged with the same charges that his brother was, Tony Hernández, minus the charge of lying to federal agents. Tony is currently imprisoned in the high security federal prison in Victorville, California, and he was convicted in 2019.
JOH’s second extradition hearing in Honduras took place in the Supreme Court in Tegucigalpa, and it was scheduled for almost a month after his arrest on March 16. And since then, JOH’s extradition has been approved by Judge Ortez. Then his defense team appealed that decision. It was denied. Then JOH’s lawyers presented an injunction to the Supreme Court, arguing that his constitutional rights will be violated if he is extradited to the US. The Supreme Court refused to accept the injunction since the extradition procedures do not allow such a motion in the first place.
Now, the legal stuff is kind of confusing regarding extradition. It’s even confusing for Honduran experts because there really isn’t an extradition law in Honduras. It’s more of a procedure. And in fact, the delay of getting this episode out about JOH’s arrest and extradition is because I was waiting for him to be extradited. A very bad idea when you’re waiting for Honduran legal procedures to take place. But twice his extradition has been approved. But his legal team in Honduras keeps grasping at any possible legal motion to slow down the legal process and to avoid it from happening. It’s now been two months since Juan Orlando Hernández was arrested. He’s still here in Honduras. And like clockwork, the justice system has slowed down to benefit him. Despite the fact that his extradition is largely inevitable, the Supreme Court magistrates seem to have been buying Juan Orlando Hernández some time.
This is a classic example of how efficient the justice system can be when it’s in favor of powerful interests. A lot of these magistrates in the Supreme Court, the 15 of them, are Juan Orlando Hernández’s buddies, and actually JOH put them in their position during their election in 2016. And despite the fact that no Honduran judge wants to stand up to the power of the US government, I think it’s pretty clear that the magistrates are helping Juan Orlando Hernández out, but more just to slow the process and to slow his extradition.
A few days ago, two magistrates that had still not signed off on the last ruling finally signed it. And finally, on April 13, after all the signatures were collected from the magistrates, the case was passed from the Supreme Court to the executive branch of the government. From here, the executive branch gives the okay to the US government. And now, as of April 13, JOH is just waiting for the DEA and the US government to take him into custody. This is supposed to happen after this week, sometime next week between April 20 and 22nd. The longer JOH stays in Honduras, the longer he avoids a harsh US prison, the longer he can stay with his family, in probably the best possible detention conditions he will ever get from now on. But the extradition to the United States is now basically a done deal.
The day after JOH’s arrest, former First Lady Ana García de Hernández spoke publicly to denounce that Juan Orlando Hernández’s rights were being violated at the time of his arrest and in his detention inside the special police base, and that Honduran drug traffickers are seeking revenge against him. This is Ana García speaking to the Honduran media.
Ana García de Hernández (interpreted):
I want you to remember, and don’t forget, because the truth will come out. Juan Orlando is the victim of a revenge by the same drug traffickers that were extradited. This is why today, our fear, our pain, is because we are victims of the situation. They cornered us. Today I presented a complaint to the Human Rights Commissioner for the manner in which my husband is being treated, how he is detained, and how his rights are being violated in a humiliating and degrading form, which goes against all the human rights treaties that our country has signed.
Karen Spring:
Ana García called on supporters to join her in vigils outside the police base where Juan Orlando Hernández was being held, and outside the court. Maybe a hundred or so people showed up at first, and then the numbers dwindled when she made similar calls later on. She asked Hondurans to pray for her husband, and she demanded that human rights organizations investigate the violations against Juan Orlando.
In response, CONAPREV, the government institution responsible for overseeing the conditions of all jails and detention centers around the country, paid Juan Orlando a visit. Their leaked report outlines the conditions inside the special police base where JOH is being held. JOH has a private bathroom with a shower. His family is able to bring him three meals a day. He has a mini fridge to keep his food. His room has a small window with metal bars over it, and with an air purifier. He’s able to take his hypertension medication, and within a day of being in prison had two visits, one from his wife, and another from a private doctor.
The CONAPREV report of the visit notes, “It’s important to mention that Juan Orlando Hernández’s treatment must be the treatment provided to 21,000 prisoners in the 25 jails, which, as CONAPREV has noted in visits around the country, are held in a collapsed prison system, where the fundamental rights of prisoners are routinely denied.” Juan Orlando Hernández has managed to escape being imprisoned in the maximum security prisons that he himself built while in office. He’s escaped the conditions that my partner, Edwin Espinal, a former political prisoner, once faced, and that thousands of others continue to experience inside Honduran prisons.
Juan Orlando Hernández gets one hour of sunlight per day. Edwin, my partner, and others, not just Edwin, get one hour every two weeks.
Juan Orlando Hernández’s family could bring him food every meal. We were able to take Edwin a meal every two weeks and he, like most other prisoners, basically starved on small portions of terrible food given to all prisoners inside the maximum security prisons.
Juan Orlando Hernández has his own room and wasn’t mixed in with any dangerous gang leaders. However, most prisoners in maximum security prisons, if they aren’t in gangs, are in the crossfire of gang dynamics and recruitment.
Ana García denounced and cried that Juan Orlando Hernández’s rights were being violated because he had been paraded like a trophy in front of the press after his arrest. The same thing happened to Edwin. He was walked around a parking lot of the police headquarters in chains and media were called to take pictures and videos that were later played all over the evening news.
Even though I hate jails and the entire way that society has developed such a punitive response to crime, it’s been pretty outraging to hear Juan Orlando Hernández’s family cry about human rights, especially when he and his government shot people dead in the streets for protesting, stole thousands of dollars of money destined for public social programs, and did nothing when so many human rights defenders were shot, threatened, and forced into exile during his eight years in power. The hypocrisy isn’t lost on many.
While JOH awaits extradition, Ana García, who counts on Juan Orlando Hernández’s power of attorney, has been busy with their financial matters. García transferred assets worth over $2.4 million to Ficohsa Bank, alleging to pay down debt. The transfer created controversy. Why was a Honduran bank allowing bank transactions subject to seizure and connected to drug money while its owner was in a process of extradition to the United States?
Shortly after this, and likely under a lot of pressure, earlier this month, in April, the Honduran prosecutor’s office moved on JOH and the Hernández Alvarado family’s assets. Authorities seized 30 properties, eight companies, 16 vehicles, and 80 financial products. But honestly, I don’t doubt that he has many more properties. Amongst the entire western region of Honduras, where JOH focused a lot of his narco empire, they don’t actually have digitalized property records. So this means that someone has to go into each municipality, and look through all of the paperwork and records of land titles in order to make a list of who owns what in western Honduras. It’s a huge job. That makes me and others doubt that all of his assets have been seized, not to mention the fact that he and his family probably knew this was going to happen, and figured out how to hide what they feared would be seized by Honduran authorities.
Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!): [See the full piece here]
We begin today’s show in Honduras where authorities have arrested former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who faces extradition to the United States on drug trafficking charges. Hernández was a longtime US ally, who had led Honduras from 2014 until this past January 27, when he was succeeded by Xiomara Castro, Honduras’s first female president.
Karen Spring:
Now many people ask me, how did Juan Orlando Hernández go from being a US ally to being extradited to the United States to face drug trafficking charges?
Juan Orlando Hernández and his family say that this is because he was so effective at cracking down on drug traffickers. That now all the drug traffickers that he helped extradite to the US are seeking revenge and spewing lies to US authorities about his involvement in drug trafficking. US prosecutors, on the other hand, counter this, at least in Tony Hernández’s trial in 2019, by putting drug traffickers that were never extradited by JOH’s government on the stand to testify and spill the beans about their drug operations and Juan Orlando Hernández and the Honduran government’s involvement.
Now I personally think that the US government tolerated JOH because he gave them what they wanted, economically and politically, for so long. I think some US institutions like the DEA broke with JOH when they started to grasp how uncontrollable JOH’s involvement in drug trafficking really was.
There was one point in 2016 when WhatsApp messages between a high-level Honduran military officer and the DEA were leaked to the press. It was right around the time when public allegations against JOH’s brother, Tony Hernandez, hit the press. The messages sounded like the DEA was still trying to figure out who was who inside the Honduran government, who was with the drug traffickers inside the military, police, and the government, and who wasn’t.
But I would say, the US government must have known how deeply involved the post-coup regime was in drug trafficking and organized crime. But, instead, they chose to look the other way for so long, despite the horrific conditions in the country, because of what US interests gained from having a president that gave them whatever they wanted. They turned on him because the stakes of supporting him got too high and it was too hard to defend him.
So while Hondurans sit and wait for the next step of JOH’s extradition process, another really important and interesting arrest was made. On March 19, Juan Carlos Bonilla, also known as “El Tigre,” or “The Tiger,” a mean-looking largely built guy, was driving in a pickup truck through a toll road booth about 30 minutes outside of Tegucigalpa. Bonilla is a former head of the Honduran National Police. And he didn’t likely know a police operation was trailing him, waiting for him to get to the toll booth. The police seized the moment when he pulled up to the toll booth to surround his vehicle and arrest him.
Now Bonilla probably didn’t calculate that the recent changes in the government would mean circulating freely inside Honduras, with an extradition request and an arrest warrant, was no longer a safe and smart option.
The arrest was carried out on request by the Southern District Court of New York, who sent an extradition request to the Honduran government. And despite being indicted on April 30 2020, “El Tigre” Bonilla had never been arrested by Honduran authorities, likely because he’s considered a co-conspirator with Juan Orlando Hernández, or the Hernández Alvarado cartel, as it’s called. JOH probably learned to protect the traffickers in Honduras that faced extradition that would have a lot of dirt on him.
Now the indictment from the New York Southern District Court against Bonilla reads: “Bonilla Valladares was a member of the Honduran National Police between approximately 1985 and approximately 2016. During his tenure, he held high-ranking positions, including Regional Police Chief, with authority over locations in western Honduras that were strategically important to drug traffickers, and Chief of the Honduran National Police for all of Honduras between approximately 2012 and approximately 2013. Bonilla Valladares corruptly exploited these official positions to facilitate cocaine trafficking, and used violence, including murder, to protect the particular cell of politically-connected drug traffickers he aligned with, including Hernández Alvarado. Bonilla Valladares, in coordination with Hernández Alvarado and others, also provided members of their conspiracy with sensitive law enforcement information to facilitate cocaine shipments, including information regarding aerial and maritime interdiction operations.”
No wonder JOH’s government never wanted to arrest him. Bonilla is a co-conspirator. And if he talks, he could incriminate Juan Orlando Hernández and his cartel. Let’s just say Bonilla’s arrest means JOH is in even more deep doo-doo.
“El Tigre” Bonilla’s arrest and extradition won’t take place immediately either. There is a Honduran extradition process, just like the one Juan Orlando Hernández is going through. But it looks like Juan Carlos Bonilla won’t put up much of a fight. My sources inside the country in Honduras tell me they expect Bonilla will collaborate with US prosecutors once he’s sent there, and could potentially end up being a key collaborator. What “El Tigre” Bonilla’s arrest shows is a significant high-level involvement of key figures in the Honduran police in drug trafficking and drug cartels. For those interested I wrote a piece on my blog, AquiAbajo.com, about Bonilla’s involvement in crimes in Honduras, including torture, kidnapping, murder, that in addition to drug trafficking, and this has a chilling and lasting effect on his victims here in Honduras. I’ll link to the piece in the show notes for those that are interested.
But I want to say that it’s pretty messed up that Juan Carlos Bonilla and Juan Orlando Hernández, amongst others, are not being tried here in Honduras. This is a debate and a discussion that happens every time in Honduras when another huge narco is extradited. The debate is twofold, but both main points are linked. The first one has to do with how the Supreme Court magistrates, all 15 of them, were handpicked by Juan Orlando Hernández and the structure of the dictatorship, back in 2016. These same magistrates, and the same attorney general, that haven’t done anything to charge Honduran drug traffickers, remain in their positions. Despite a new government, the Attorney General’s Office and the Supreme Court are controlled by the interests of the dictatorship.
This is a human rights expert and lawyer, Joaquín Mejía, in an interview with TN5 [interview starts at approximately 53:00 min] talking about this.
Joaquín Mejía Rivera (interpreted):
Finally, I also think that we must think about two things. One, that this extradition without a doubt reflects the failure and collapse of the justice and security system in Honduras. And for this reason, I think we must also think about the date after Juan Orlando Hernández’s extradition. What are we going to do about the Honduran police? What are we going to do about the Attorney General’s office? What are we going to do about the justice system? And most importantly, what are we going to do about the armed forces that have been clearly and conclusively mentioned by US judge Kevin Castel in the trials taking place in New York?
We should be asking two things. We have to ask ourselves, where did the drugs they got to the US pass through? Through the sea, land, and air borders. And who has always been constitutionally responsible for guarding Honduras’s borders? The military. So are they complicit or incompetent? And in that sense, an investigation has to take place.
Secondly, US judge Kevin Castel, in the trial and the arguments he used to sentence Tony Hernandez to life in prison, said two things very clearly about the armed forces. That, one, they took care of the drugs while they were being trafficked, and that, two, the armed forces safeguarded drug traffickers.
Karen Spring:
The debate highlighted by Joaquín continues. Some lawyers and activists are calling for the impeachment of the Attorney General and the president of the Supreme Court. For sure, sparks are flying inside several Honduran institutions that have been involved, or have looked the other way, as the drug cartels took over the government under JOH. I think JOH’s extradition will mean a lot of internal turmoil inside several Honduran institutions. Public officials turned whistleblowers will likely come forward with corruption cases and reveal the depth of the Honduran narco state. The structure of the narco dictatorship will slowly fall, and it will undoubtedly be painful and violent.
Another major debate sparked by the recent extradition requests is the role of the United States, not just in the economic and political support they gave to JOH over the years, but also the fairness that the US gets to try Honduran drug traffickers for charges in a court far from the realities of the consequences of the drug war that has been backed and fueled and funded by US policy. What will happen to the money that was made by selling and running drugs across Honduras? Will Honduran drug traffickers including JOH be paying the US government? I think this money, if so, that might be confiscated by the US government, should be returned to the Honduran people and used to repair harms and undo the damaging effects of the 12-year US-backed dictatorship. As one social movement leader told me, the gringos just pulled the knife that they stabbed us with, and now they leave us with gaping wounds that won’t stop bleeding. We face a terrible economic and institutional crisis that forces us to be more dependent on the US, the very same thing that got us into this mess in the first place, he told me.
Now I asked Grahame Russell from Rights Action, a US and Canadian based organization, what he thinks of the role of the US and Canada, and how should both governments be held accountable for backing up such a government for so many years.
Grahame Russell:
People who follow Latin American issues from, let us say, a more progressive issue, many have heard of the famous quote by a US president in the 1930s or 40s, or even 50s, about the dictatorship in Nicaragua, and they would say, well, Anastasio Somoza is a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch. And it’s a very telling type of denigrating phrase from the rich, powerful country of the United States that props up these dictatorships. The government that Juan Orlando Hernández, the dictator of Honduras, is a repressive, open-for-business, narco-trafficking son of a bitch, but he is our repressive, narco-trafficking, open-for-global-business son of a bitch.
All that happened in Honduras over the past 12 years, with the murder rates skyrocketing to the highest in the world, the repression rates skyrocketed to the highest repression rates that Honduras had seen since the the early 1980s when it was dominated by US-backed military regimes, the highest femicide rates in Latin America, the highest numbers of Hondurans forced to flee into exile as refugees, the highest numbers of forced refugees since the 1980s. There was a complete sort of destruction and division and impoverishment of the Honduran society because of the coup. And there’s no way it would have happened without the 12 years and seven months of full US, Canadian military, economic, and political support.
And then that leads to your final question, and it’s the timeworn question, how should Canada and the US be held responsible for propping up and funding and politically supporting a drug trafficking president and his entire regime, including the military. That’s the timeworn question of imperialism. This is what struggles going on across Canada and the US are all about, and we just need to do more of these. How do we hold our governments, our global corporations and banks and investors, and our military, fully responsible, criminally and politically responsible, but then also legally responsible, criminally and civilly and legally responsible, for when our policies and actions contribute to atrocities, crimes, human rights violations, environmental destruction in other countries around the world? And many groups across Canada, the US are working on these issues, but there’s a long way to go.
And I think in the short term, though I suspect this won’t happen, what I would love to see is full inquiries, political inquiries in the Canadian Parliament, in the US Senate, and the US Congress, with subpoena powers, to do a full investigation into the policies of the US government since the 2009 coup and the ensuing 12 years to fully investigate the policies and actions of the Canadian and US governments propping up this illegal undemocratic regime. Who were the decision makers? Subpoena them, and ask them to explain their policies in terms of respecting even minimally agreed upon human rights standards set out in the United Nations Charter and in all of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. And I think that the US and Canadian policy violated just about every international law one could shake a stick at, related to promoting democracy and defending human rights around the world. That would be a bare minimum.
And then, ideally, there would be criminal proceedings against some of our policymakers, the intellectual authors, as they say, of the Canadian and US policies. I strongly suspect this [inaudible] there’s far too much impunity and corruption in the functioning of our foreign policy establishments that have, it seems to me one main goal, which is to prioritize the expansion of Canadian and US political and economic interests around the world, and engage in a race to the bottom. And the 12 years and seven months of the finally ousted regime of Juan Orlando Hernández is almost a textbook perfect example of an extraordinary race to the bottom. We could not have been propping up and supporting a more violent, a more corrupt, a more exploitative regime, if we had invented it.
So I sign off that this is an extraordinarily positive time in Honduras, they have a daunting task to start to repair so much harm and destruction that this US and Canadian backed regime did to all of their institutions of society, including social relationships at the community, regional, and national levels. I’m heartened by the strength and the courage and the vision of the Honduran people themselves all across the country. So many grassroots organizations, organizations across the country, that fought against the US and Canadian backed regime, that resisted it and suffered it, and now have the space with this new government to start to implement changes from the most local level in neighborhoods and barrios across the country and rural communities right through to the highest levels of the government and state. It’s a very positive time in Honduras, even with these daunting tasks.
Karen Spring:
As this situation develops, and as more extradition requests of high-level Hondurans come down, I’ll keep you all posted.
That’s the show for today. Thanks so much for listening. Definitely check out the show notes at HondurasNow.org. For those listening in Honduras, enjoy your Semana Santa. It’s the hottest week here, where most people hit the beach or any body of water they can find. Thanks for listening. Until next time, this is Karen Spring, your host, hasta pronto.