The revelations in a drug trafficking trial in New York come from former Leonel Rivera, who led the dreaded Los Cachiros cartel and is now working with the US government.
A former head of the Honduran drug trade told a drug trafficking trial in New York on Monday that the defendant, Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez, had told him that Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández received shipments of cocaine from Colombia and “mocked the DEA.”
The former Leonel Rivera, who led the dreaded Los Cachiros cartel and now works with the US government, told the trial in Manhattan federal court that he met the defendant at the New York Metropolitan Jail (MCC) in 2020.
SEE: Honduras president helped New York prosecutor trade tons of cocaine to US, says
At that meeting, the defendant told him, according to Rivera, that “he had evidence, photos and videos to show how Juan Orlando, the president of Honduras, received shipments of cocaine from Colombia at the airports of San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa.”
Fuentes wanted to ask the DEA, the US drug agency, to release him from prison for a month to retrieve that evidence, Rivera said.
According to the former Los Cachiros head, Fuentes told him that the alleged drug trade took place “for the DEA, but that the DEA was not aware of it and that Juan Orlando Hernández was ridiculing the DEA.”
Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, who confesses to killing or ordering death of 78 people and working with the DEA two years before surrendering to US authorities in 2015, hopes to reduce his life sentence to more than 30 years in return for his testimony. .
He did not specify the exact date of the meeting at the MCC, but said Fuentes told him that “he would not go to court” because he had all this information about the Honduran president.
Prosecutors from the Southern District of New York say the president of Honduras and the defendant were partners in the trade of tons of cocaine to the United States, but Hernández has not been charged.
The Honduran president assures him that he is innocent and that Rivera is lying to get revenge for his fight against drug trafficking and to reduce his sentence.
The president’s brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, was found guilty of large-scale drug trafficking in New York in October 2019. He has not yet been convicted.
ALSO: President of Honduras in US crosshairs for linking him to drug trafficking
‘Bribing a president isn’t cheap, is it?’ Asked lawyer Abraham Moskowitz to Rivera.
“It’s not cheap, it’s expensive,” said Rivera, who claims to have bribed all of Honduras’ presidents since 2006 in exchange for protection from drug trafficking and a pledge not to extradite him to the United States.
Rivera says he paid Hernández a $ 250,000 to $ 300,000 bribe in 2009 when he was president of Congress and running for president, and paid him a second bribe after his election.