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Honduran president denies drug trafficking accusations
TEGUCIGALPA, March 11, 2021 (BSS/AFP) – Honduran President Juan Orlando
Hernandez on Wednesday denied allegations made by a US prosecutor that he
helped smuggle tons of cocaine into the United States.
New York prosecutor Jacob Gutwillig said in federal court Tuesday that
Hernandez was paid a $25,000 bribe by Geovanny Fuentes, who is on trial.
“How can anyone believe false testimonies that I was dealing with drug
traffickers,” Hernandez wrote on Twitter.
Gutwillig claimed that accountant Jose Sanchez was present at meetings in
2013 and 2014 where Honduran Fuentes paid the money to Hernandez.
Sanchez was due to tell the New York jury about “the shock, the fear he
felt when he saw the defendant sitting with the president,” said Gutwillig.
The witness worked at a rice-growing company through which Fuentes
laundered money, the prosecutor alleged.
Sanchez will testify that Hernandez told Fuentes “they’d transport so much
cocaine into the US they’d shove the drugs up the noses of the gringos,” said
Gutwillig.
Hernandez, a lawyer who came to power in January 2014 and is in his second
term, has styled himself as a champion in the fight against drugs.
US prosecutors consider him a co-conspirator alongside Fuentes but have
not charged him.
The president’s brother, Tony Hernandez, was convicted of large-scale drug
trafficking at a New York trial in 2019.
The sentencing in that case has been delayed several times and is now
scheduled for March 23. Tony Hernandez could be sentenced to life in prison.
Prosecutors say he was the middle man between accused trafficker Fuentes
and the president.
President Hernandez was linked to drug trafficking at his brother’s trial
by Leonel Rivera, the leader of a Honduran drug trafficking gang called “Los
Cachiros.”
“It’s a proven fact that Los Cachiros tried to make a deal with the US,”
Hernandez tweeted. “The false testimonies of drug traffickers are obvious
lies. The drug traffickers gave their ‘sworn statement’ that for $25,000 the
drug traffickers bought total impunity.”
“But 10 days before my election (in 2013) Los Cachiros decided to abandon
their billion dollar empire to negotiate their surrender to the US.”
Rivera began testifying Wednesday, telling the New York jury that he had
worked with Fuentes from 2011 to 2013, until they got into a fight and the
alleged trafficker tried to kill him.
“The defendant wanted to work with me guarding loads of cocaine,
transporting it… and giving him custody, giving him security,” said Rivera,
who faces a life sentence plus 30 years in prison but hopes it will be
reduced in exchange for his testimony.
Rivera collaborated for two years with the US Drug Enforcement
Administration until turning himself in to American authorities in 2015.
He has been a cooperating witness for the US government in other major
drug trafficking trials in New York, including that of president Hernandez’s
brother.
In the trial of Tony Hernandez, Rivera said the president received
millions of dollars in bribes from drug traffickers to protect the cocaine
shipments to the United States.
BSS/AFP/FI/0822 hrs