NEW YORK, USA.- The former head of the Honduran cartel Los Cachiros, Leonel Rivera, said this Thursday in a trial for drug trafficking in New York that he bribed the current president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, To its 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 explained that the Cachiros delivered to Hilda Hernández, President’s sister, $ 250,000 in cash in 2012, when he was a congressman and presidential candidate, in exchange for “protection that we would not be captured in Honduras, both the military police and the preventive police, that we would not be extradited me and my brother (Javier) to the United States and that Joan Orlando Hernández would continue to give us contracts to launder money from drug trafficking. “
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New York’s Southern District Attorney considers Honduran president a “co-conspirator” of alleged drug trafficker Geovanny Fonts in trafficking tons of cocaine to the United States, and they say they were both partners and “planned to send as much cocaine to the United States as they could.”
Hernandez flatly denies the allegations and has not been indicted by U.S. justice.
“How to believe false witnesses that I was dealing with narcos, when it is proven that the Cachiros they sought a deal with USA for the impossibility of criminals to make a deal with me. They are going to die in a foreign prison, if the “Magic Key” of a reduced sentence does not work for them, the president tweeted on Wednesday.
Cash bribes
Rivera also said that in 2014, when Hernandez was already president, he handed over $ 50,000 in cash at a Tegucigalpa restaurant to his brother Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernandez because this one “promised contracts for Inrimar,” a cover company in Els Cachiros to launder money. Tony Hernandez was found guilty of drug trafficking in New York in 2019 and his sentence is scheduled for March 23.
This is not the first time the Honduran president has been involved in drug trafficking: during the trial of his brother Tony, the former Honduran mayor Alexander Ardón he explained that in 2013 he attended a meeting where the former head of the Sinaloa cartel Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán delivered one million dollars in cash for Joan Orlando Hernández’s election campaign.
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The former boss, a witness cooperating in the trial of Fonts that began on Monday in New York, also reported 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 for “giving us protection so that my brother Javier and I would not be captured in Honduras.”
Alvarez “promised to repeal Honduras’ extradition law to the United States” and new government contracts for Los Cachiros front companies, said Rivera, a legendary drug chief who confesses to 78 murders and worked for at the US anti-drug agency DEA in Honduras 2:00 years, until it was handed over to US authorities in 2015.
The Cachiros also bribed half a million dollars in drug trafficking in the former President Manuel Zelaya (2006-2009) in 2006, in exchange for “putting a cousin of mine as Minister of Security,” Rivera told a jury. But in the end this did not happen, said the former narco capo, dressed in a yellow prisoner suit and with chained ankles.
Zelaya denied the allegations on Twitter. “Irrefutable proof that I never received a bribe is that I never appointed a minister, neither from organized crime, nor from pressure from the American embassy,” he wrote Thursday.
The leader of Els Cachiros also revealed that the government of Porfirio “Pepe” Llop (2010-2014) helped The Cachiros launder money. “He gave us several road contracts. The Pepe Lobo government paid us with checks from the Honduran government and so the money from the drug trafficking was laundered,” he said.
“Pepe” Wolf’s son, Fabio, was sentenced to 24 years in prison for drug trafficking in 2017 in New York.
Rivera explained that he and his brother turned themselves in to U.S. authorities when Washington began investigating — and when they felt his life was in danger in Honduras.
“I felt cornered because the office of the DEA of New York and Southern District Attorneys in New York mentioned me and Javier Rivera through the OFAC (Office of the Control of Foreign Assets, Dependent on the U.S. Treasury). And they didn’t mention the corrupt political drug traffickers we had bribed, ”he complained.
Nor to other narcos who worked with them, nor to “the military police who had worked with us,” nor to “the Honduran preventive police,” to whom he also bribed the Los Cachiros cartel.
Rivera faces a life sentence plus 30 years in prison, but hopes to get a reduction in his sentence in exchange for his testimony in this trial and other pasts, such as those of Tony Hernández and Fabio Llop.
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