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 courtroom. 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 Common Merrick Garland accused Hernández of getting run Honduras as a “narco-state where violent drug traffickers were allowed to operate with virtual impunity”. The US Division of Justice, Garland righteously bleated, has now proven its dedication to “disrupting the entire ecosystem of drug trafficking networks that harm the American people, no matter how far or how high we must go”.
And but given the USA’ basic position in nurturing and sustaining this very ecosystem within the first place, the responsible verdict can safely be filed below the “Can’t Make This Up” class of imperial hypocrisy.
For starters, recall that Hernández was till very not too long ago an excellent chum of successive US administrations, which appointed him a significant ally within the so-called “war on drugs” 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 slim path of neoliberal dystopia.
The fabricated pretext for the coup, which passed off 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 shortly disbursed with with the intention 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.
Submit-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 navy base.
Through the Chilly Conflict, for instance, the US utilised Honduras as a launchpad for terrorising neighbouring Nicaragua, which had didn’t correctly undergo the charitable chokehold of US-imposed capitalism.
And what are you aware: contributing to the conflict 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 known as the “CIA airline”. In the meantime, the drug commerce the Contras had been reaping income from helped kick off a crack cocaine epidemic in South Central Los Angeles.
How’s that for “ecosystems that harm the American people”?
To make sure, long-standing US involvement in drug trafficking is hardly a secret; as a New York Instances headline from 1993 specified: “The CIA Drug Connection Is as Old as the Agency”. 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 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 endured for many years till one fantastic 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.
Through the prelude to Noriega’s extradition, the US navy 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 briefly nicknamed “Little Hiroshima”; the US dubbed the slaughter “Operation Just Cause”.
Objectively talking, after all, the US was in no place to impose “justice” in Panama – and the present Hernández drug trial just isn’t actually a “just cause,” 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 worldwide superpower that’s primarily answerable for institutionalising impunity within the Honduran postcoup period can’t be credited with bringing any form of justice to Honduras.
As scholar Dana Frank paperwork in her e-book The Lengthy Honduran Evening: Resistance, Terror, and the USA within the Aftermath of the Coup, US “drug war” 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 claim their land rights had been being “hunted down… like animals”.
In keeping with WikiLeaks cables, the US had recognized since at the least 2004 that Facusse was trafficking in cocaine. Frank summarises the vile verdict: “Precisely as US funding for the Honduran military and police escalated under the pretext of fighting the drug war, then, US-supported troops were conducting joint operations with the security guards of someone the United States knew was a drug trafficker, in order to violently repress a campesino movement on behalf of his illegal claims to vast swaths of the Aguan Valley.”
Returning to US Legal professional Common Garland’s allegations concerning the “narco-state where violent drug traffickers were allowed to operate with virtual impunity”, it’s slightly 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.
Ultimately, if the US actually desires to go about “disrupting the entire 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 mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.