WASHINGTON, USA.- The United States paid a “high cost” to support the re-election of President of Honduras ignoring the contrary recommendations of the Organization of American States (OAS), a senior U.S. senator said Wednesday.
The chairman of the affairs subcommittee of the Western Hemisphere in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee American Tim Kaine deplored the support of former President Donald Trump’s government for the re-election of Joan Orlando Hernandez in 2017.
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“The United States paid a high cost for not going against an authoritarian and now we are dealing with a border crisis driven by intense violence and corruption in that country,” Kaine said during a hearing in Congress.
“So if we don’t act to support organizations like the OAS, we will end up seeing things we’re not happy about,” added the Democratic senator, a former U.S. vice presidential candidate alongside Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Hernandez, a right-wing lawyer in power since 2014, was re-elected in November 2017 amid allegations of fraud and following a questionable court ruling that allowed him to run despite a constitutional ban.
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After a problem in the transmission of data during the counting of votes, Hernandez turned around a five-point advantage brought to him by his rival, Salvador Nasralla, and beat him by less than two points. The protests left about twenty dead.
Kaine said the OAS denounced the “huge irregularities” and recommended repeating the election, but the United States “undermined” the regional body and recognized Hernandez’s term until 2022 “because he had made a variety of things that (the Trump administration) liked. “
after, Tony Hernandez, A former Honduran congressman and brother of the president, was found guilty of drug trafficking in October 2019 “with a lot of evidence involving the president,” the senator noted.
And now, he added, he has just concluded a second trial for drug trafficking in New York against a Honduran accused of being a partner of President Hernandez, who according to a witness said: “We are going to put the drug in the gringos in their own noses and they won’t even notice ”.
“This was some of the evidence about this president that the United States chose to recognize above the OAS objections,” he said.
During the hearing on Wednesday, convened to discuss the state of democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Secretary General of the OAS, Luis Almagro, recalled that the call for new elections in Honduras did not resonate in the international community.
“Practically, we were left talking alone about this issue all over the world,” he said.
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Almagro said that “the Honduran people paid the highest price,” but “definitely” so did the OAS.
In January 2020, the government of Hernandez did not renew the Mission to Support Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (MACCIH), created in 2016 in agreement with the OAS.
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