In late 2021, Xiomara Castro gained the Honduran presidency by uniting the opposition and defeating Nationwide Occasion candidate Nasry Asfura in a decisive first-round victory. A lot of the world cheered as a result of Asfura was the handpicked successor of outgoing President Juan Orlando Hernandez, a corrupt and authoritarian chief who stole the earlier presidential election in 2017 and was just lately convicted in U.S. federal courtroom of accepting bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel. It’s good when narco-linked authoritarians will be defeated on the poll field and compelled out of energy—and a tragedy when these like Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro stay in workplace regardless of shedding. In that sense, Castro’s victory was an unlimited win for democracy within the hemisphere.
But, regardless of the celebrations on the time, there have been issues over Castro. Her husband and chief political adviser, former President Mel Zelaya, shared a lot of Hernandez’s traits when he was in workplace from 2006 to 2009, however with much less success. Zelaya needed to carry on to energy past the only time period in workplace allowed by the Honduran structure, however was as a substitute pressured out in a navy coup in 2009. He dedicated severe acts of corruption whereas in workplace, although at nowhere close to the size at which Hernandez operated after being elected in 2013. And, as we realized final week, Zelaya and his political machine might have been financed by a number of the similar drug-trafficking networks that quietly paid off Hernandez whereas he was in workplace.
InSight Crime and Univision printed a bombshell investigative report, together with video proof, describing how drug traffickers from the Cachiros legal group met with Carlos Zelaya, the previous president’s brother, in 2013. The group’s leaders, who on the time performed a key function in transferring cocaine from Venezuela to Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, supplied Carlos Zelaya a number of hundred thousand {dollars} to finance Castro’s marketing campaign in that yr’s presidential election—during which she completed second to Hernandez—and repay Mel Zelaya within the course of. Whereas discussing the cash, one of many traffickers says, “Half have to be for the comandante,” very clearly referring to former President Zelaya.
