Drug Trafficking and Corruption are Deeply Rooted, Part of State Relations with Former President’s Accomplices, say Analysts.
HAVANA TIMES – The corrupt structure established by former president Juan Orlando Hernandez “is still in place” in Honduras, warned political analysts from the country. The former president (2014-2022) was sentenced to 45 years in prison by a New York court for various drug trafficking and weapons-related offenses; however, the international scandal has had no effect in Honduras.
Experts noted that the Honduran Public Prosecutor’s Office has not opened any investigation against the former president and his collaborators in the country, despite sending prosecutors to the former president’s trial in New York.
Honduran political parties, the business elite, and the authorities of Xiomara Castro’s government “say nothing,” emphasized lawyer and political analyst Lester Ramirez. “They act as if it did not happen to them or the Honduran system.”
This silence in the Honduran political class “is not surprising,” Ramirez stressed, noting that a “patrimonial view of the State” prevails in Honduras, where the State is seen as a booty, and because corruption has been “like fuel for political parties in Honduras.”
A Public Prosecutor’s Office That Does Not Investigate
In an interview with the program Esta Semana, sociologist and associate researcher at the Honduran Documentation Center, Leticia Salomon, highlighted that Honduran society remains “astonished to see how the Public Prosecutor’s Office did nothing” during Juan Orlando Hernandez’s government, and “has still done absolutely nothing to investigate and prosecute all the suspicions and accusations of drug trafficking and corruption regarding the former presid