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| President Hernández and U.S. diplomat socialize. Photo: Casa Presidencial |
On March 3 the U.S. government
formally
charged Honduran citizen Geovanny Daniel Fuentes Ramírez “with conspiring
to import cocaine into the United States and related weapons offenses involving
the use and possession of machineguns and destructive devices.” Federal agents
had arrested Fuentes Ramírez two days earlier at Miami International Airport;
the charges were filed in the Southern District of New York.
While the case didn’t get much media attention in the United
States, it provides a fascinating insight into the connections between our
government’s foreign policy, its approach to asylum, and its “
war
on drugs.”
The case links the
current
president of Honduras, the National Party’s Juan Orlando Hernández, to a
major drug trafficking operation. According to U.S. prosecutors, in or about
2013 Fuentes Ramírez paid Hernández some $25,000 “in exchange for protection
from further interventions by law enforcement” against his drug trafficking
business. Hernández, who began his first term in 2014, also “agreed to facilitate the use of Honduran
armed forces personnel as security” for Fuentes Ramírez’s operations, according
to the charges, and he instructed the alleged drug smuggler
“to
report directly” to his brother, Tony Hernández, “for subsequent drug
trafficking activities.”
The “End of Asylum”
President Hernández denies any connection to drug
trafficking, but the evidence against him keeps piling up.
Last fall a New York jury convicted Hernández’s brother Tony
on four counts related to cocaine smuggling.
Prosecutors
charged that Tony, a former Congress member for the National Party,
“participated in the importation of almost 200,000 kilograms of cocaine, used
heavily armed security including members of the Honduran National Police, and
coordinated two drug-related murders.” In addition, the president’s brother
“funneled millions of dollars of drug proceeds to National Party campaigns to
impact Honduran presidential elections in 2009, 2013, and 2017.”
One of the bribes Tony Hernández forwarded was some $1 million
that notorious Sinaloa Cartel boss
Joaquín
Guzmán Loera (“El Chapo”) allegedly earmarked for the current president
during the 2013 elections.
The U.S. Department of Justice clearly agrees with the
assessment of many Hondurans that their country has become a “
narco-state.”
So we might expect a strong condemnation of President Hernández from the U.S.
government, which has spent billions of dollars over the past fifty years
fighting drug trafficking in Latin America. And surely the U.S. asylum system
would give special attention to the thousands of Hondurans who in recent years
have fled from drug gangs that the U.S. government says operate under protection
from Honduran armed forces personnel.
The Trump administration’s reaction has been exactly the
opposite.
The present U.S. government seems to have no problems with
the Honduran president and his apparent drug connections. In fact, just one day
after Hernández’s brother was convicted in New York, U.S. interim
ambassador to Honduras Colleen Hoey was
photographed
laughing with President Hernández himself.
As for Hondurans seeking asylum, the Trump White House has
slammed the door in their faces: current immigration policies add up to what
several analysts have
declared “
the
end of asylum.” An important element in this is a
safe
third country agreement Honduras made with the United States last September. Far from accepting refugees from Honduras’s drug gangs, the
United States is now sending the refugees to
nearby
Guatemala—and plans to ship asylum seekers from other countries into danger
in Honduras.
Bipartisanship in Action
The Trump administration gets a lot of criticism from many
quarters, but we haven’t heard a lot about these particular outrages. There’s a
reason: U.S. support for rightwing Central American governments is a
longstanding bipartisan policy, one which doesn’t get much pushback from the
corporate media.
In the case of Honduras, the Obama administration gave
de
facto support to a June 2009 coup against elected president Manuel Zelaya
and then allowed the new coup-installed government to hold a highly suspect
presidential election that November—the first of the three elections Tony
Hernández was accused of funding with drug money. Following Obama’s example, in
December 2017 the Trump administration certified the
even
more questionable election of President Hernández to an unconstitutional
second term. Establishment media like the
New York Times and the
Washington
Post largely ignored or downplayed these developments.
This should be a reminder that simply removing Donald
Trump from office won’t end human rights violations in the U.S. immigration
system. Trump’s immigration policies are definitely worse than earlier
policies, but that doesn’t mean the earlier policies weren’t bad. Truly
effective immigration reform is going to be impossible without fundamental
changes in this country’s foreign policies.
Correction, 3/9/20: The item originally indicated that the safe third country agreements with El Salvador and Guatemala were already being implemented.
A slightly different version of this post appears on the NYU Press blog.
