Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez said Wednesday (March 24) that he had records showing that traffickers who accuse him in US courts of being linked to drug trafficking are lying.
Read also: Honduras: the president accused of helping drug traffickers
In a press statement at the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa, Juan Orlando Hernandez reiterated that he was not involved in drug trafficking and said his innocence was proven by recordings made secretly in 2013 by the DEA , the US drug control agency.
"
It is not possible to deny that the traffickers give false testimony, because the truth is documented, in the form of secret tapes
," he said.
According to him, while he was a candidate for the Honduran presidency in 2013, the DEA had an agent infiltrated into meetings of drug trafficking officials in Honduras.
In discussions secretly recorded by this agent, the traffickers say that if Juan Orlando Hernandez wins the election, they will not be able to make deals with him, he said.
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What the narcos are saying in these tapes is that Hernandez is not going to deal with them, that he is not going to compromise with them,
" "
that I am intractable,
" said the president.
"
What they were actually saying in 2013 is the opposite of their false testimonies now,
" insisted Juan Orlando Hernandez.
In testimony in Manhattan federal court, the leader of the Honduran Los Cachiros cartel, Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, claimed that his organization paid $ 250,000 in cash in 2012 to Hilda Hernandez, sister of the current president, while he was a parliamentarian and presidential candidate Rivera, and that trafficker Geovanny Fuentes had told him that he had physical evidence showing that Hernandez had received shipments of cocaine from Colombia at the Honduran airports of San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa.
US prosecutors see Hernandez as a co-conspirator involved with Fuentes in sending tons of cocaine to the United States.
The latter has been found guilty and is awaiting his sentence, which can range from ten years in prison to life imprisonment.
Elected president in 2013 and re-elected in 2018, Hernandez considers that he and his brother are victims of revenge from the traffickers he helped extradite to the United States.