On Friday, March 8, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted on three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy in a Manhattan federal court docket. Extradited to the USA shortly after finishing his second presidential time period in 2022, the 55-year-old Hernández is up towards a compulsory minimal sentence of 40 years in jail.
Following the conviction, US Legal professional Basic Merrick Garland accused Hernández of getting run Honduras as a “narco-state the place violent drug traffickers had been allowed to function with digital impunity”. The US Division of Justice, Garland righteously bleated, has now proven its dedication to “disrupting the whole ecosystem of drug trafficking networks that hurt the American individuals, irrespective of how far or how excessive we should go”.
And but given the USA’ elementary function in nurturing and sustaining this very ecosystem within the first place, the responsible verdict can safely be filed underneath the “Can’t Make This Up” class of imperial hypocrisy.
For starters, recall that Hernández was till very not too long ago a superb chum of successive US administrations, which appointed him an important ally within the so-called “struggle on medication” and flung cash at Honduras accordingly. The messianically right-wing chief got here to energy 5 years after the 2009 US-facilitated coup d’état towards Manuel Zelaya, who had dared to steer the nation barely off the straight and slender path of neoliberal dystopia.
The fabricated pretext for the coup, which happened on US President Barack Obama’s watch, was that Zelaya was scheming to stay president of Honduras in violation of the constitutional one-term restrict. Later this restrict was rapidly allotted with to be able to allow the continued reign of Hernández, whose re-election in 2017 was recognised by the US Donald Trump administration regardless of sweeping allegations of fraud.
Publish-election protests triggered a characteristically deadly response from Honduran safety forces, which didn’t cease the US from persevering with to fund these exact same forces. Anyway, it was enterprise as common in a Central American nation that the US has traditionally seen as its personal private army base.
In the course of the Chilly Battle, for instance, the US utilised Honduras as a launchpad for terrorising neighbouring Nicaragua, which had did not correctly undergo the charitable chokehold of US-imposed capitalism.
And what have you learnt: contributing to the struggle effort in Nicaragua was none apart from distinguished Honduran drug lord Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, whose airline SETCO – which helped provide US-trained Contra mercenaries – was often called the “CIA airline”. In the meantime, the drug commerce the Contras had been reaping earnings from helped kick off a crack cocaine epidemic in South Central Los Angeles.
How’s that for “ecosystems that hurt the American individuals”?
To make sure, long-standing US involvement in drug trafficking is hardly a secret; as a New York Occasions headline from 1993 specified: “The CIA Drug Connection Is as Outdated because the Company”. The CIA’s narco-operations have spanned the globe from Pakistan to Laos to Venezuela, whereas many a global narco-politician has – like Hernández – discovered at the very least fleeting favour with the US authorities.
Take the case of Hernández’s fellow Central American chief Manuel Noriega, the late drug-running dictator of Panama, whose service as a CIA asset and US pal persevered for many years till one wonderful day in 1990, when he was hauled off to Miami to face drug trafficking and different expenses. In 1992, he was sentenced to 40 years in jail – the identical sentence now looming over Hernández.
In the course of the prelude to Noriega’s extradition, the US army bombed the residing daylights out of the impoverished neighbourhood of El Chorrillo within the Panamanian capital of Panama Metropolis, killing as much as a number of thousand civilians. The neighbourhood was quickly nicknamed “Little Hiroshima”; the US dubbed the slaughter “Operation Simply Trigger”.
Objectively talking, in fact, the US was in no place to impose “justice” in Panama – and the present Hernández drug trial shouldn’t be actually a “simply trigger,” both. On the finish of the day, the USA’ erstwhile Honduran narco-buddy is merely a symptom of a US-fuelled ecosystem, not its trigger.
Furthermore, the justice system of a world superpower that’s primarily chargeable for institutionalising impunity within the Honduran postcoup period can’t be credited with bringing any kind of justice to Honduras.
As scholar Dana Frank paperwork in her ebook The Lengthy Honduran Night time: Resistance, Terror, and the USA within the Aftermath of the Coup, US “drug struggle” funds went to help the homicidal actions of safety guards working for biofuels magnate Miguel Facusse within the Aguan Valley in northeastern Honduras, the place small farmers in search of to say their land rights had been being “hunted down… like animals”.
In response to WikiLeaks cables, the US had recognized since at the very least 2004 that Facusse was trafficking in cocaine. Frank summarises the vile verdict: “Exactly as US funding for the Honduran army and police escalated underneath the pretext of preventing the drug struggle, then, US-supported troops had been conducting joint operations with the safety guards of somebody the USA knew was a drug trafficker, to be able to violently repress a campesino motion on behalf of his unlawful claims to huge swaths of the Aguan Valley.”
Returning to US Legal professional Basic Garland’s allegations relating to the “narco-state the place violent drug traffickers had been allowed to function with digital impunity”, it’s fairly painfully apparent that mentioned state of affairs is one hundred pc made within the USA – the nation whose demand for and criminalisation of medication can be what drives the entire narco-enterprise.
In the long run, if the US actually desires to go about “disrupting the whole ecosystem of drug trafficking networks”, it must disrupt itself first.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
