US motions expand drug claims against Honduras president

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. federal prosecutors have filed motions saying that Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández took bribes from drug traffickers and had the nation’s armed forces shield a cocaine laboratory and shipments to the US.

The paperwork quote Hernández as saying he needed to “’shove the medication proper up the noses of the gringos’ by flooding the US with cocaine.”

The motions filed Friday with the U.S. Southern District of New York don’t particularly title the president, referring to him as “CC-4,” or co-conspirator No. 4, however clearly determine him by naming his brother and his personal submit as president.

The president, who has not been charged, has repeatedly denied any connection to traffickers regardless of the 2019 conviction of one in every of his brothers, Juan Antonio Hernandez. Throughout that trial, the president was accused of accepting greater than $1 million from Mexican drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán — an accusation repeated within the new motions.

He has mentioned that traffickers are falsely accusing him to hunt vengeance for clamping down on them. The federal government didn’t instantly reply to a request for touch upon the brand new filings.

The motions search pretrial approval to confess proof within the case of Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez, who was arrested in Miami in March. And so they increase upon allegations filed shorty after the arrest accusing Hernandez of taking bribes in trade for defense from regulation enforcement.

Fuentes Ramirez is accused of conspiring to smuggle cocaine into the US and the motions filed Friday accuse him of manufacturing “a whole bunch of kilograms a month” of cocaine and of getting a number of folks killed to guard his illicit enterprise.

“By late 2013, the defendant partnered straight with CC-4 and high-ranking officers within the Honduran navy. Presently, CC-4 was pursuing election because the President of Honduras as a member of the Partido Nacional de Honduras (the “Nationwide Celebration”),” the movement mentioned.

It added {that a} witness “would testify that that they and different drug-traffickers have been paying huge bribes to CC-4 in trade for defense from regulation enforcement and extradition to the US;” and that the president-to-be “accepted roughly $1 million in drug trafficking proceeds that was supplied to his brother by the previous chief of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquín Guzmán Loera.”

Prosecutors say he had agreed to work by means of the president’s now-convicted brother.

The motions additionally implicate senior navy, police, political and enterprise figures in laundering cash and bribery.

Hernandez, who had been president of congress earlier than being elected president in 2013, was reelected in 2017 to a time period that ends in January 2022. He has cooperated with the Trump administration and its efforts to stem migration from his nation and others in Central America.

Throughout a January 2020 go to to Honduras, appearing U.S. Division of Homeland Safety Secretary Chad Wolf mentioned, “Honduras is a valued and confirmed accomplice to the US in managing migration and selling safety and prosperity in Central America.”

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