The Honduran president agreed to shield a drug trafficker from prosecution and offered to let him use the country’s armed forces for security in exchange for a $25,000 bribe, prosecutors in Manhattan federal court alleged Tuesday.
The president, Juan Orlando Hernández, met with the alleged drug kingpin, Geovanni Daniel Fuentes Ramirez, on several occasions starting in 2013, according to court documents.
Ramirez was arrested by Drug Enforcement Agency officials on Sunday in Florida and charged with a weapons violation and conspiring to import cocaine in New York on Tuesday, federal authorities said.
At their meetings, Hernández allegedly spoke to Ramirez about the cocaine “laboratory” he developed near a commercial shipping port in the country after he turned over the $25,000, prosecutors alleged.
The laboratory-produced hundreds of kilos of cocaine per month after its launch in 2009 and was protected by armed guards who carried AK-47 rifles and handguns, according to federal prosecutors.
Because of its location near the port, Hernández allegedly offered the country’s armed services to further protect the operation.
The president also steered Ramirez to report directly to his brother Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernandez Alvarado, who was convicted of drug trafficking in Manhattan federal court in 2019.
Hernández told Ramirez that his brother “was managing drug-trafficking activities in Honduras and that Fuentes Ramirez should report directly to Hernández Alvarado for purposes of drug trafficking.”
Manhattan US Attorney Geoffrey Berman thanked US law enforcement for Ramirez’s arrest in a statement on Tuesday.
“Ramirez was, up until his arrest by the DEA two days ago, a prolific, powerful, and murderous cocaine trafficker in Honduras,” Berman said in the statement.
“As further alleged, Fuentes Ramirez paved the way for unimpeded shipment of multi-ton loads of cocaine by bribing police and a high-ranking Honduran politician,” he added. (https://nypost.com/2020/03/03/president-of-honduras-took-bribes-to-protect-cocaine-kingpin-feds-say/)
Original Source: AP
