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Juan Ramon Matta Waldurraga, a high-profile Honduran drug runner and money launderer, has announced that he turned himself into the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, DEA, on charges of smuggling cocaine into the United States. Since August, Matta has been living in the New York City judicial district he turned himself in to.
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Matta’s lawyers and the DEA expect to reach a plea bargain in which Matta pleads guilty to smuggling drugs into the United States between 2005 and 2010 in exchange for information on his organized crime empire that stretches from Honduras to Colombia and Panama.
In addition to drug smuggling charges by U.S. authorities, Matta has also been wanted since June in his native Honduras for the illicit purchase of 43 properties and 22 businesses and contracts dating back to 2001. Among these businesses deals is the construction of a hydroelectric dam in Honduras.
Matta Waldurranga’s father, Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, a leading Honduran drug trafficker in the 1980s. He has served time in a maximum security prison in Illinois since 1988. During that decade, the senior Matta played a major role in shipping U.S.-supplied guns and weaponry to the right-wing Contras in neighboring Nicaragua to fight the Sandinistas. The U.S. played a major role in attacking the socialist movement.
According to La Prensa, 14 other major Honduran drug traffickers have been extradited to the United States since 2010.
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