Ex- Honduras drug lord says he bribed current and past presidents
The former head of the Honduran cartel Los Cachiros, Leonel Rivera , said Thursday in a drug trafficking trial in New York that he bribed the current president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández , his vice president Ricardo Álvarez and two former presidents , Manuel Zelaya and Porfirio Lobo , in exchange for protection and government contracts to launder drug money.
In a shocking testimony, Rivera said that Los Cachiros gave Hilda Hernández , the president’s sister, $250,000 in cash in 2012, when he was a congressman and a candidate for the Presidency, in exchange for “protection that they would not capture us in Honduras, both the military police and the preventive police, that I and my brother (Javier) were not going to be extradited to the United States and that Juan Orlando Hernández would continue to give us contracts to launder drug money ”.
Prosecutors from the southern district of New York consider the president of Honduras a “co-conspirator” of the alleged drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes in the trafficking of tons of cocaine to the United States. Hernández denies all the allegations.
Rivera also said that in 2014, when Hernández was already president, he gave $50,000 in cash at a restaurant in Tegucigalpa to his brother Juan Antonio Tony Hernández because he “promised contracts for Inrimar,” a front company of Los Cachiros to launder money. Tony Hernández was found guilty of drug trafficking in New York in 2019 and his sentence is scheduled for March 23.
Rivera, a cooperating witness in Fuentes’ trial that began in New York on Monday, also related that he paid half a million dollars to the vice president and former mayor of Tegucigalpa Ricardo Álvarez in 2012, when he was a candidate for the presidency of Honduras, in exchange of “giving us protection so that my brother Javier and I were not going to be captured in Honduras.”
Álvarez “promised to annul the Honduran extradition law to the United States” and new government contracts for Los Cachiros’ front companies, said Rivera, a legendary drug boss who has confessed to 78 murders and worked for the US anti-drug agency DEA in Honduras. two years, until he was handed over to US authorities in 2015.
The Cachiros also bribed former President Manuel Zelaya (2006-2009) with half a million dollars from drug trafficking in 2006, in exchange for “putting a cousin of mine as Minister of Security,” Rivera told the jury. But in the end that did not happen, said the ex-priest, dressed in a yellow prison suit and with chained ankles.
