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US and Canada Delegation to Honduras Launches Campaign to Indict the United States and Canada as Co-Conspirators in the Narco-Trafficking Trial of Juan Orlando Hernández
MEDIA ADVISORY, January 10, 2024, Tegucigalpa, Honduras
Contact
- Karen Spring, Honduras Solidarity Network (Honduras): 504-8785-5757
- Victoria Cervantes, Honduras Solidarity Network (US): 312-259-5042
- Judy Ancel, Cross Border Network: 816-835-4745
Members of a ten-day US/Canada delegation hosted by the Cross Border Network of Kansas City and the Honduras Solidarity Network of North America have investigated how their two nations prioritize protecting the political, economic, and military interests of their governments and corporations over the rights and interests of the Honduran people.
The delegation visited communities affected by mining and land grabbing, met with labor movement activists, and spoke with US, Canadian and Honduran officials and found that the continuing poverty, inequality, and dispossession of the Honduran people result from the crimes of the narco-dictatorship that ruled Honduras since the U.S. and Canadian-supported coup in June 2009.
Since then both the U.S. and Canada have covered up and lied about their “democratic” ally Juan Orlando Hernandez who they knew was trafficking drugs for years.
Since the restoration of democracy with the election of Xiomara Castro as Honduras’s first woman president, both countries continue to interfere in the attempts of the Castro government to undo the damage done by the narco-dictatorship or to pass reforms that help to ameliorate the spirit-killing poverty of the majority of the population. Instead, they exacerbate problems.
The delegation found that extractive industries (like mining in the Guapinol region), the loss of sovereignty (as in the CAFTA-imposed ISDS tribunal on the $10.7 billion ZEDE Próspera suit against Honduras), the dispossession of campesinos in the Aguan Valley and Garifuna communities along the north coast, and Canada’s praise for textile company Gildan which has closed a factory, violating injured workers’ rights all benefit multinational corporations while failing to solve the deep issues of inequality in Honduras.
These companies benefitted economically from the coup and continued doing business to their own profit and benefit under the narco-state.
The U.S. is now seizing the opportunity of the drug trafficking trial of former President Juan Orlando Hernández (long-time “democratic allie” of the U.S. and Canada) and his cronies, including the former head of the national police and a family member of Hernandez, to whitewash their own complicity in the narco-dictatorship from 2009 to 2022.
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