Honduras President’s Sibling Nabbed: Trafficked Tons of Drugs with Police & Politicos

While on Thursday morning, the now Democratic Party-run House of Representatives began their first session by allowing the government shutdown to continue and by discussing the prospect of impeaching President Donald Trump, there was absolutely no mention of the immigrant caravan that originated in Honduras and has made its way up to the U.S.-Mexican border.

Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez speaks during a welcome ceremony at the National Palace in Mexico City. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido

In the midst of the immigrants traveling north, the brother of the Honduran president — who once served as a lawmaker in that Central American nation — was arrested and indicted in the U.S. on drug and weapons charges.

Juan Antonio Hernandez is the younger brother of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who has blamed leftist interests for manipulating immigrants to destabilize his country. The younger Hernandez was at one time a member of the National Congress of Honduras and according to U.S. federal drug enforcement agents, the President’s brother is a known drug trafficker who has trafficked tons of cocaine throughout the region during the past 10-years with the Honduran politicians and law enforcement officials either assisting the Hernandez traffickers or just “looking the other way” and ignoring the criminal actions of the President’s brother and his minions.

The drug-trafficking Hernandez was nabbed last week in Miami, Florida and this week he was arraigned and charged in federal court with conspiring to import cocaine into the United States, weapons offenses involving the use and possession of machine guns and destructive devices and making false statements to federal agents.

While his capture occurred in Miami, the case is being prosecuted in a Manhattan  federal courtroom and was assigned to U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel, a George W. Bush appointee, according to a Justice Department statement.

The Manhattan-based U.S. Attorney’s Office alleges that “Hernandez was trafficking multi-tons of U.S.-bound cocaine through Honduras.”

The president’s younger sibling also arranged security for the cocaine shipments, bribed law enforcement officials for sensitive information to protect drug shipments and solicited large bribes from major drug traffickers. His security detail members were armed with fully-automatic machine guns.

“The former Honduran legislator and his criminal associates teamed up with some of the world’s deadliest transitional criminal networks in Mexico and Colombia, according to federal authorities, to flood American streets with illicit drugs,” according to a Justice Department statement.

“From at least in or about 2004, up to and including in or about 2016, multiple drug-trafficking organizations in Honduras and elsewhere worked together, and with support from certain prominent public and private individuals, including Honduran politicians and law enforcement officials, to receive multi-ton loads of cocaine sent to Honduras from, among other places, Colombia via air and maritime routes, and to transport the drugs westward in Honduras toward the border with Guatemala and eventually to the United States,” according to the federal indictment.

Juan Antonio Hernandez is the younger brother of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who has blamed leftist interests for manipulating immigrants to destabilize his country.

“For protection from official interference, and in order to facilitate the safe passage through Honduras of multi-hundred-kilogram loads of cocaine, drug traffickers paid bribes to public officials, including certain members of the National Congress of Honduras,” states the indictment’s text.

Not only did Hernandez work with large-scale drug traffickers in Colombia, Honduras and Mexico to import cocaine into the U.S., he was also involved in processing, receiving, transporting, and distributing multi-ton loads of cocaine that arrived in Honduras via planes, go-fast vessels and a submarine. He also had access to cocaine laboratories in Honduras and Colombia, where some of the drug was stamped with his initials.

“Hernandez also coordinated and, at times, participated in providing heavily armed security for cocaine shipments transported within Honduras, including by members of the Honduran National Police and drug traffickers armed with, among other weapons, machine guns,” the indictment states.

The feds include a specific incident in which Hernandez and his drug trafficking cohorts collaborated with Honduran law enforcement and government entities.

This case helps illustrates the security issues created by growing numbers of gang members as well as rampant drug trafficking in Central America at a time when thousands of immigrants from that region are demanding asylum in the U.S.

Judicial Watch Investigators toured the Guatemalan-Honduran border to cover the caravan first-hand when it first left the Honduran northern city of San Pedro Sula. Besides gang members and mobs of young angry men, the caravan consists of Africans, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans and Indians.

Guatemalan officials confirmed that the “elaborately planned” movement is benefiting human smugglers and bringing disturbing numbers of violent gang members and other criminal elements through the country, into Mexico and possibly the U.S.

One high-level Guatemalan government operative told Judicial Watch: “MS-13 gang members have been detained and coyotes (human smugglers) are joining the march with clients who pay to get smuggled into the United States.”

With evidence from federal authorities that Honduran government and law enforcement officials are complicit in a major drug trafficking operation run by the president’s own brother, there’s no telling the level of criminals making their way north as part of the caravan.

 

Honduras is a tropical country punished by poverty, corruption and violence. As if that weren’t enough, on November 26th, 2017 Honduras had some very peculiar elections: even though millions of people were called on to vote that day, only one vote counted in the end: that of President Juan Orlando Hernández, who decided to stay for another four years, no matter what the polls said. Since then, protests have been unleashed all over the country. What is happening in Honduras? Who is Juan Orlando Hernández? What is the Trump administration’s role in all of this? Find out in this video.

Jim-Kouri

Jim Kouri, CPP, is founder and CEO of Kouri Associates, a homeland security, public safety and political consulting firm. He's formerly Fifth Vice-President, now a Board Member of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, a columnist, and a contributor to the nationally syndicated talk-radio program, the Chuck Wilder Show.. He's former chief of police at a New York City housing project in Washington Heights nicknamed "Crack City" by reporters covering the drug war in the 1980s. In addition, he served as director of public safety at St. Peter's University and director of security for several major organizations. He's also served on the National Drug Task Force and trained police and security officers throughout the country.

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