Who is honduras leader

El Salvador, in , is the most recent country in the region to ditch Taipei in favour of Beijing. Subscribe for our daily curated newsletter to receive the latest exclusive Reuters coverage delivered to your inbox. More from Reuters. Sign up for our newsletter Subscribe for our daily curated newsletter to receive the latest exclusive Reuters coverage delivered to your inbox.

In Farallones, there are a few visible reminders of that era, including the track bed of a railway operated by a United Fruit subsidiary called the Truxillo Railroad Company.

The railroad tracks in Farallones have long since been pulled up, and the banana farms in the area have mostly been replaced by African palm. There have been other changes, too. For the past two decades, the airstrips of the local plantations have become a preferred venue for drug traffickers seeking to discreetly land shipments of cocaine on the way to the United States.

In , one such plane, likely bearing a ton of cocaine, was destroyed on the airstrip in Farallones. Only then was the plane burned and buried with a bulldozer, as if to hide the evidence. In Tocoa, I was given a tour of the palm-oil installations and introduced to employees, who spoke of their gratitude to Dinant for providing jobs. One woman wept as she recalled being menaced by land invaders. But, at a meeting with community leaders in a settlement just outside one of the plantations, people were more concerned with poverty.

Eight of his relatives had already immigrated to the United States. It was difficult for small farmers to support themselves. He explained that they were the offspring of a stud horse that Fidel Castro had given his father, when the two of them began working together to bring palm plantations to Cuba.

The program reportedly ended after U. It was largely overgrown, and had heavy metal cables stretched across, to thwart drug traffickers. Despite the obstacles, a narco plane had landed there a couple of years earlier. How does a nation-state fail? The C. Secret camps were set up along the border, and the Contras launched forays into Nicaragua, while their leaders took meetings with C.

When Congress uncovered the program and ordered it shut down, the White House circumvented the ban with a gimcrack scheme: American operatives sold arms to Iran and funnelled the proceeds to the Contra fighters in the Central American jungle. Within Honduras, the U. When a handful of Marxists sneaked across the Nicaraguan border, they were swiftly hunted down and killed. In the cities, government assassins targeted campus radicals and trade-union supporters. Congress about the killings, and soon afterward was found tortured to death.

By viciously repressing the left, Honduras escaped the civil wars that devastated its neighbors, but it also never experienced the reconciliation that followed. Throughout the eighties, drugs and international politics were inseparably entwined in Latin America.

Manuel Noriega, the dictator of Panama, was a C. When I interviewed him in prison, in , he told me that the Americans had asked him to let Colombian drug runners launder cash in Panamanian banks.

According to a Senate investigation, led by John Kerry in the late eighties, the U. Matta-Ballesteros, an early partner of Pablo Escobar, has become a legend in the narco underworld. In Honduras, Matta-Ballesteros corrupted politicians, military officers, and police.

He is also suspected of taking part in the torture and murder of an American D. After three years, the Honduran government finally sold him out; he was forced onto a plane and transported to the U. In Honduras, his arrest set off widespread rioting, as some fifteen hundred protesters marched on the U. Embassy, broke into its annex, and set it on fire.

Five died in the unrest. These days, Matta-Ballesteros is at a federal prison in the U. But the network that he built in Honduras has grown, subsuming the government and civil society. Nobody fears consequences for anything, because of the level of impunity. A decisive moment came in June, , when President Manuel Mel Zelaya was pushed out of office in a coup.

Zelaya was abducted early one Sunday morning and was hustled, still in his pajamas, onto a plane out of the country. New elections were held a few months later, and the winner was Porfirio Lobo Sosa, from the conservative National Party. As the U. But the country deteriorated rapidly, with unrestrained gang violence and frequent assassinations of journalists, politicians, and land-rights activists.

Much of the mayhem was evidently drug-related, though it was unclear who was behind it all. The Rivera Maradiagas had started out as cattle rustlers before forming a drug-running organization known as Los Cachiros.

Their business had brought them enormous wealth, including a property portfolio worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but they felt increasingly threatened. Fearing for their lives, they struck a deal with the U.

Their testimony revealed the extraordinary extent to which drug trafficking had penetrated Honduran life. Rosenthal pleaded guilty to money laundering; in , he was sentenced to three years in an American prison. Former President Lobo received me one afternoon in his apartment in Tegucigalpa. In the foyer, security men doused the soles of my shoes with antiseptic before buzzing me through. The slums were far enough in the distance not to spoil the view.

As a servant led me to a sofa, a middle-aged woman greeted me and then vanished. She served two and a half years and was released in , after the Honduran Supreme Court threw out her conviction and ordered a new trial. Lobo came into the living room, wearing a checkered shirt and jeans and giving off the relaxed air of a man in comfortable early retirement.

He has been out of office for seven years, but he began our talk with a long recitation of his Presidential achievements.

Lobo nodded. His own son Fabio had been caught collaborating with Los Cachiros—ensnared by a sting operation in which D. Fabio pleaded guilty in a Southern District of New York court in and was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison. Lobo gave me a beseeching look. President Lobo had himself been accused of profiting from the drug business. One of the Rivera Maradiaga brothers claimed that they had bribed him, during and after his election. In return, Lobo had allegedly offered political protection, and designated Fabio as a security liaison.

Lobo denied this, insisting that his family was being persecuted by political enemies. But that was all a misapprehension, Lobo said. Nevertheless, Lobo said that he had maintained good relations with the American Ambassador and had been lauded for his leadership by the U. The year-old served as a member of Congress for the National Party from to He was arrested in November in Miami on charges that he had used his connections with the government to smuggle cocaine through Honduras to the US.

Prosecutors said his career in drug trafficking began as early as , when he started providing Honduran traffickers with information about the movements of the police and the military. He "can't point to poverty, lack of opportunities or a need to support his family," Mr Laroche said.

It is very damaging indeed. He has repeatedly said that drug seizures have gone up since he took office and that his family is being targeted by disgruntled drug gangs. I don't wish it on anyone. I find it outrageous," he said.