WASHINGTON, UNITED STATES. – The United States paid “heavy fees” to support the re-election of the President of Honduras, echoing the opposing recommendations of the Organization of American States (OAS), a senior US senator said Wednesday.
The chairman of the subcommittee on Western Hemisphere on Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tim Kaine lamented the support of former President Donald Trump’s administration for the 2017 reelection of Juan Orlando Hernández.
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“The United States has paid high costs not to go against an authoritarian and now we are facing a crisis at the border fueled by intense violence and corruption in that country,” Kaine said at a congressional hearing.
“So if we don’t act to support organizations like the OAS, we’ll see things that we’re not happy about,” added the Democratic Senator, a former US vice presidential candidate at Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Hernández, a right-wing attorney in power since 2014, was re-elected in November 2017 amid allegations of fraud and a disputed court decision that allowed him to flee despite a constitutional ban.
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After a data transmission problem while counting the votes, Hernández turned a five-point lead over his rival, Salvador Nasralla, and beat him by less than two points. About 20 people were killed in the protests.
Kaine said the OAS denounced the ‘massive irregularities’ and recommended that the election be repeated, but the United States’ undermined’ the regional body and recognized Hernández’s mandate until 2022 ‘because it had done a variety of things that the government (Trump). “.
Later, Tony Hernandez, a former member of the Honduran Congress and brother of the president, was found guilty of drug trafficking in October 2019 “with much evidence involving the president,” the senator said.
And now, he added, a second drug trafficking trial in New York has just been completed against a Honduran accused of being a partner of President Hernández, who, according to one witness, said: own noses and they won’t even notice. “
“That was part of the evidence about this president that the United States elected to acknowledge over the OAS’s objections,” he said.
During Wednesday’s hearing, which was called to debate the state of democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro recalled that the call for new elections in Honduras found in the international community.
“Practically speaking, we talk to ourselves about this issue all over the world,” he said.
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Almagro said that “the Honduran people paid the highest price,” but “certainly” the OAS.
In January 2020, Hernández’s government adopted the Support the mission against corruption and impunity in Honduras (MACCIH), established in 2016 in accordance with the OAS.
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