Honduras Probes Allegation Ex-President Took Drug Cartel Bribes

Honduran authorities are set to investigate statements from a jailed former drug lord alleging that former ruling party President Porfirio Lobo and current Security Minister Julian Pacheco charged bribes in exchange for shielding cartels and their criminal operations.

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“The public prosecutor’s office opened an official investigation on the accusations made in the United States by Mr. Devis Leonel Rivera,” the office’s spokesperson, Juri Mora, told Reuters Wednesday.

Rivera, former leader of the Honduran cartel known as Los Cachiros now jailed in the United States, testified in court Monday saying that he paid large sums of money to the former president, beginning during his 2009 election campaign in the wake of Honduras’ U.S.-backed coup.

In a lengthy statement for as part of the drug trafficking hearing for Lobo’s son Fabio, Rivera claimed that his contact with police, military and government officials, including Lobo, aided his cartel in bringing tons of cocaine into Honduras, a hotspot on the drug trafficking route from South America to the United States.

Rivera testified that he first bribed Lobo with a sum of US$250,000 to US$300,000 in 2009, when he was running for president in an election that was widely boycotted as illegitimate for taking place under a coup regime after the military ousted President Manuel Zelaya earlier the same year.

He added that he paid at least two more bribes to Lobo to protect the gang’s operations and assure he would not be extradited to the United States. He also said he worked with Lobo’s son Fabio to secure government contracts to aid in laundering money.

Lobo denied the allegations Tuesday, telling reporters in Tegucigalpa, “I never received money from those criminals.”

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency arrested Fabio in Haiti in 2015 for suspected drug trafficking linked to Los Cachiros gang, months after Rivera had surrendered to the DEA. Fabio pled guilty to charges of conspiring to traffick drugs to the United States.

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Rivera testified that bribing Fabio and his private security personnel had helped bring in large cocaine shipments of 400 kg and 1 ton into the country in 2012 and 2013, respectively. His statements also implicated Julian Pacheco, currently minister of security under Lobo’s National Party successor, President Juan Orlando Hernandez. According to Rivera, Fabio responded to his offer for a US$50,000 bribe to guarantee a large cocaine shipment by asking for “a little bit more” for his “boss,” who was “General Pacheco.”

In an interview with Honduras’ La Prensa, President Hernandez downplayed the accusations against Pacheco, dismissing Rivera’s testimony as the words of a criminal and murderer. The president added that he will not consider requesting Pacheco’s investigation until the results of the investigation become clear. “We cannot act based on the words of a criminal,” he said.

Pacheco denied the claims Tuesday and said he is willing to face investigation.

The public prosecutor’s office told Reuters that Lobo and Pacheco will likely be called to testify as the investigation moves forward.

The U.S.-backed 2009 coup in Honduras helped pave the way for the expansion of drug trafficking thanks to a breakdown in the rule of law, a corrupt and complicit government and the widespread militarization of Indigenous and campesino areas.

The drug war since has been used as a pretext for U.S. support of a repressive government in Honduras, whose security forces have been implicated in human rights abuses, death squads and targeted assassinations of social movement leaders.