Caribbean & Central America - December 2018

Evidence is mounting that drug gangs are seeking to produce cocaine directly in Honduras, thereby cutting shipment costs from the Andean. The implications for the country of becoming a drug producer on any large scale would be very negative, transforming the country’s position in the international drug business, altering criminal dynamics, and almost inevitably risking a sharp rise in insecurity and violent crime.

On 27 November, officials from the Honduran anti-narcotics agency, Dirección de Lucha Contra el Narcotráfico (DLCN), reported the decommissioning of 5,000 coca plants destined for cocaine processing, following the six-day ‘Operation Labrador’ in the mountainous northern department of Yoro to locate and destroy the crop. The plants – which the police said were of 20-30cms in height – were found on a hill in the village of Calderas, in the municipality of Olanchito.

This is the fourth or fifth time since April 2017 that authorities have discovered sizeable acreage of coca plants in Honduras. Drug processing labs and batches of chemical precursors have also been found and decommissioned, adding to the mounting evidence that criminals are looking to try out drug production in a country to-date used solely as the main transhipment point for cocaine moving between the Andean and North America.

In early April this year, Honduran authorities announced the discovery of some 14 hectares of coca plants in the small community of Los Tamales, located within a forest reserve between the departments of Olancho and Colón. They also dismantled a clandestine laboratory use to manufacture coca paste, the precursor to cocaine. Military police sources told Honduran media that there were signs of previous cultivation in the area.

The official suspicion was that Colombian groups were testing local growing conditions in the remote area, but Guatemalans were also suspected by the DLCN of involvement in the plantations. The direct owners of these plantations are unclear, as often they are found on communal land, and may be grown without the consent of local peasant farmers.

Just weeks later in mid-April, a 28.5-hectare (ha) plantation was discovered in Gualaco, a mountainous region also located in Olancho. Carlos Morazán, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office, told local media that the plantation “was in full production and there were signs of previous harvests”. He too speculated that traffickers were experimenting with local crops so as to save on the costs of shipping cocaine from Venezuela and Colombia.

In late April 2017, another relatively large coca plantation covering eight hectares was again discovered in Olancho. And the following month (May 2017), a further 84,000m² planted with 5,000-7,000 coca plants was found in the remote mountain community of Esquilipas Norte. After a tip-off, DLCN agents spent several hours trekking through the area before coming across the plantation, as well as evidence of a processing laboratory (with barrels of gasoline and cement found nearby).

Prior to that, smaller-scale cultivations had been discovered in the departments of Copán, Colón, Comayagua, and Yoro, which the authorities again had considered ‘experiments’ to gauge local growing conditions. In Copán, coca plants were discovered inside properties belonging to the Valle Valle criminal organisation, according to the daily La Tribuna. DLCN officials said that criminal groups were experimenting and “trying to analyse the optimal percentage of alkaloid necessary to produce cocaine”. There are 250 types of coca leaf, and so production of the best leaf for processing into the narcotic cocaine is not straightforward.

The latest crop found in Olanchito is one of the largest to date in the country and suggests that these efforts to cultivate viable harvests and produce coca paste locally are becoming more sophisticated – and successful.

Olancho has long been a strategic point for trafficking routes towards Mexico, and so it is no coincidence that the remote department is also the principal site for the cultivation efforts.

In its 2018 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR), the US State Department reported that Honduras remained “a primary destination country in Central America for cocaine-laden aircraft departing from South America” and also noted that the region’s remote Caribbean coast is particularly vulnerable, due to the lack of state presence.

At one point (in 2012), the INCSR estimated that almost 80% of all drug smuggling flights from South America passed through Honduras. In 2014, Honduras re-authorised ‘shoot-downs’ of suspected narco flights, pushing trafficking out to sea. By 2016, the INCSR was estimating that the vast majority of cocaine smuggled into Honduras was arriving via Caribbean coastal maritime routes.

Whether by air or by sea, Honduras is still a critical corridor for cocaine trafficking to the US, with senior political figures all the way to the top of the government continuing to be implicated.

On 26 November, Juan Antonio (‘Tony’) Hernández, the brother of President Juan Orlando Hernández, became the latest to be charged with conspiring to bring tonnes of cocaine to the US, as well as “related weapons offenses involving the use and possession of machineguns and destructive devices, and making false statements to federal agents”.

Tony Hernández was convicted based on the plea-bargain testimony of a former leader of the Honduran drug trafficking organisation Los Cachiros, Devis Leonel ‘Don Leo’ Rivera Maradiaga. Rivera, along with his brother Javier, their parents, and other siblings, headed up the violent Los Cachiros in Tocoa, on the Honduran Atlantic coast, for a decade (2003-2013).

During his 2017 trial in New York, Rivera admitted to participation in the deaths of 78 people, including the Honduran anti-drug czar Julián Arístides Gonzáles, the country’s former national security advisor, Alfredo Landaverde, and a journalist, Aníbal Barrow. He implicated a swathe of the Honduran political and economic elite in drug trafficking and bribery activities, including members of the powerful Rosenthal and Facussé families.

In May, New York federal court prosecutors had charged the Honduran congressman Midence Oquelí Martínez Turcios of conspiring to import cocaine into the US, also as a member of Los Cachiros. Prosecutors alleged that over the course of a decade, from 2004 to 2014, Martínez Turcios and Urbina Soto lent support to multiple drug trafficking organisations in Honduras for the transit of 100kg loads of cocaine through the country from Venezuela, Colombia, and elsewhere. Prosecutors simultaneously announced related charges against three other people, including Arnaldo Urbina Soto, a former mayor of the city of Yoro.

US investigators alleged that Martínez Turcios had received over U$1m in bribes from Los Cachiros. He was also accused of personally escorting cocaine shipments and participating in weapons training for paid assassins that Los Cachiros had recruited from the Central American street gang MS-13. Urbina Soto and two others allegedly also helped oversee trafficking. Authorities said they would seek the extradition of all the accused to the US. In December 2017, US prosecutors also charged another Honduran congressman, Fredy Renán Nájera Montoya, with conspiring to import cocaine.

Another presidential relative – Fabio Lobo, the son of former president Porfirio Lobo (2010-2014) – was arrested in a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) sting in 2015. He pleaded guilty to conspiring to import cocaine into the US and was sentenced to 24 years in prison in September 2017. Again, Devis Leonel Maradiaga implicated Fabio Lobo – and controversially also claimed he had bribed his father and president to the tune of at least US$300,000, purportedly to protect Los Cachiros’ operations and to secure government contracts for money laundering purposes. (Porfirio Lobo’s wife, Rosa Elena Bonilla, was arrested in February last for embezzling US$680,000 of public funds meant for social programmes).

Elsewhere, Yankel Rosenthal, former minister of investment under President Hernández, was sentenced to two years and five months in prison in January 2018, having pleaded guilty to attempting to launder drug proceeds on behalf of a Honduran lawyer. Rosenthal’s cousin, Yani Rosenthal, was previously sentenced to three years, and his father Jaime Rosenthal, the country’s former vice president, was also charged. He too remains at large.