NEW YORK, Honduras.- A former drug trafficker from Honduras explained on Monday in a drug trafficking trial in New York that the defendant, Geovanny Fonts Ramirez, told him that the president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, Received shipments of cocaine from Colombia and “mocked the DEA.”
Former ex-Leonel Rivera, who led the dreaded Los Cachiros cartel and is now collaborating with the U.S. government, was on trial at the federal court in Manhattan who met the defendant in 2020 in prison metropolitan of New York (MCC).
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At this meeting, according to Rivera, the defendant told him that “he had evidence, photographs, videos to show how Juan Orlando, the president of Honduras, was receiving shipments of cocaine from Colombia at the airports of San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa.” .
Sources wanted to ask the DEA, the U.S. drug agency, to let him go out of jail for a month to retrieve that evidence, Rivera said.
According to the former head of Los Cachiros, Fuentes told him that the alleged drug trafficking took place “in front of the DEA, but that the DEA did not notice and that Joan Orlando Hernández was making fun of the DEA.”
Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, Who confesses to killing or ordering the deaths of 78 people and collaborating with the DEA two years before surrendering to U.S. authorities in 2015, hopes to reduce his life sentence to more than 30 years in prison in exchange for his testimony.
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He did not specify the exact date of the meeting at the MCC, but said Fuentes told him that “he was not going to go to trial” because he had all this information about the Honduran president.
New York Southern District Attorneys say the Honduran president and defendant were partners in trafficking tons of cocaine to the United States, but Hernandez has not been charged.
The Honduran president says he is innocent and that Rivera is lying to take revenge for his fight against drug trafficking and to reduce his sentence.
The president’s brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernandez, was found guilty of large-scale drug trafficking in October 2019 in New York. He has not yet been sentenced.
“Bribing a president isn’t cheap, is it?” Defense attorney Rivera asked Abraham Moskowitz.
“It’s not cheap, it’s expensive,” said Rivera, who claims to have bribed all Honduran presidents since 2006 in exchange for protection for drug trafficking and a promise not to extradite him to United States.
Rivera says he paid Hernandez a bribe of $ 250,000 to $ 300,000 in 2009, when he was congressional president and presidential candidate, and that after his election he paid him a second bribe.
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