By Héctor Silva Ávalos, Resumen Latinoamericano on January 27, 2022.
photo: efe
Today Xiomara Castro assumes, with Latin American presidents of all ideological signs looking on including the Vice President of the United States as witnesses, the position she won at the polls last November; President of the Republic of Honduras. Her detractors would have preferred that she never set foot in the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa.
To reach the house of government, Xiomara Castro has had to face all the mafia monsters that have grown in Honduras in the 12 years that the National Party, led first by Porfirio Lobo and during the last decade by Juan Orlando Hernandez, both accused of complicity with organized crime. They are fearsome monsters, drug trafficking, state violence and impunity among the most imposing, whose ghosts will continue to roam the corridors and offices from which today it is Castro’s turn to lead the country and which the president must exorcise from the beginning, without hesitation, to have a clean table.
The monsters showed their fangs even before the president-elect was sworn in before the Constitution.
Ten days before the inauguration, a group of dissident deputies from Libertad y Refundación (Libre), Castro’s party, joined with colleagues from JOH’s National Party, as Hernández, the departing president, is popularly known, and others from the Liberal Party to try to wrest governance in Congress from the president.
Hernández’s nationalists and the liberals, led by businessman Yani Rosenthal, have a lot to lose if President Castro’s administration, supported by a sympathetic Congress, results in the persecution of the political mafias that has strangled and brought Honduras to its knees.
JOH faces the increasingly real possibility that the United States will ask for his extradition to answer before a New York court for drug trafficking crimes as was his brother, and Rosenthal is a member of Honduras’ most predatory elite, one that allied itself with drug trafficking to launder money and do business; he himself, Yani, was convicted in the United States for laundering assets for Los Cachiros, the most violent drug trafficking gang in the country’s history, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Hondurans.
Without political concessions or too many rhetorical turns, the elites commanded by Juan Orlando Hernandez for a decade did everything necessary to armor themselves. JOH and his followers took over the Supreme Court of Justice, the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the National Police to avoid scares; they also kicked out the Support Mission Against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (MACCIH), the supranational criminal investigation organization that worked together with a handful of local prosecutors on cases that even touched some of the mid-level monsters.
No one could stop JOH, not even Washington, whose prosecutors fingered him as an accomplice in an international drug trafficking network that fed off the Honduran state. Even when the Department of Justice secured a conviction for cocaine trafficking of Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, the president’s brother, JOH hid behind the institutions he controlled at will to avoid any scares.
The victory of Xiomara Castro, who campaigned promising to bring something like the MACCIH back to Honduras and has offered a tough hand against drug traffickers, has changed the equation for JOH, the Yanis and others.
The first move of the mafias has been to try to take over Congress to make a scenario in which the extradition of Juan Orlando Hernandez, the arrival of an international anti-corruption commission or the election of an independent prosecutor and other progressive actions more difficult.
Jorge Cálix, a congressman who came to Congress under the banner of Libre, Xiomara’s party, is the visible face of the maneuver. Cálix turned around to form a block with the deputies of the National Party and Liberal Party in order to stop the impetus of the new president. Cálix was already clear, for example, on the issue of extradition; he will promote, he said, a law that makes impossible the expatriation of Hondurans to be tried in other countries.
It is not an easy road map for the president to navigate, but she is accompanied, for now, by the legitimacy that Juan Orlando Hernández has lacked since, in 2017, he was reelected in open defiance of the Constitution and after a string of elections plagued with irregularities. Xiomara Castro is validated by an electoral triumph without fissures.
The new president will also have to face her own ghosts: her husband, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, and several Libre deputies are still under serious accusations of corruption, cronyism and even drug trafficking. But Xiomara is not Mel and, at least for now, she is accompanied by a vote of confidence that reaches several sectors of Honduran civil society -from the left to the center- and the most influential international actors in the region.
The inauguration today of Castro at the National Stadium in Tegucigalpa was attended by Kamala Harris, Washington’s number two, old representatives of the Latin American left such as the Vice President of Cuba, Salvador Valdés Mesa, Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernandez and the former Bolivian President Evo Morales, and new ones such as the Chilean Gabriel Boric, whose election in Chile has awakened so much enthusiasm among the most progressive political sectors. Also in attendance was a delegation of the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro signaling the distinct possibility that Honduras will soon be re establishing diplomatic with Bolivarian Venezuela. It has been a long time since a Central American president generated so much expectation.
For a decade, Honduras saw its territory turned into a fiefdom of organized crime, whose headquarters, according to dozens of U.S. judicial documents and testimonies collected in several regions of the country, was in the presidential palace itself.
As has also happened in neighboring El Salvador and Guatemala, in Honduras the political mafias took over everything to secure their criminal enterprises and loot public money. Like others before her, Xiomara Castro, the first woman president of the country, has reached the pinnacle of political power in Tegucigalpa with the promise of cleaning up the sewer. Now, it is up to her to face the monsters and the ghosts and do just that.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano