After a crisis with the United States embassy and amid accusations of links to drug trafficking, the president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, denounced this Wednesday (4) that there is a plan to destroy her government and also interfere in the next electoral process, scheduled for 2025.
“After the threats from the United States (US) ambassador, accusing the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces and the former Minister of Defense of being drug traffickers, I confirm that the peace and internal security of the Republic are at risk,” said Xiomara.
She added – in a statement released on social media – that a “plan to destroy my democratic socialist government and the upcoming electoral process is underway. The same dark forces, internal and external, of 2009, with the complicity of the national and international corporate media, are reorganizing in our country to create a new coup d’état that the people must repel.”
Last week, U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Laura F. Dogucriticized a meeting between Honduran and Venezuelan authorities, leading the Honduran government to suspend an extradition treaty it had with the North American country.
The director of the National Anti-Corruption Council of Honduras, Gabriela Castellanos, published a “public letter” on Wednesday calling for Xiomara’s resignation, linking the president’s “family circle” to drug trafficking. However, the document does not present any evidence of such links.
Repudiation
Former President Manuel Zelaya – who was deposed in 2009 and is the current president’s husband – has denied any accusations against him. “I have no crimes or money from drug trafficking in my 72 years of life. Anyone who claims otherwise is doing so out of petty interests and is lying,” Zelaya said on social media.
The charges also targeted Carlos Zelaya, a member of parliament and brother-in-law of President Xiomara, and José Manuel Zelaya, a former Defense Minister and son of Carlos Zelaya. Carlos admitted to the Public Prosecutor’s Office that he met with drug traffickers in 2013 who wanted to finance political campaigns, but denied knowing whether they were drug traffickers.
This week, a video of Carlos Zelaya in a meeting in 2013 with alleged drug traffickers from Honduras was released by a specialized US website InSight Crimefueling the crisis in the Central American country.
The extradition treaty broken by the Honduran government last week was what allowed the extradition of the country’s former president, Juan Orlando Hernández, accused of drug trafficking. In June of this year, he was sentenced to 45 years in prison by a court in New York.
Honduras
President Xiomara Castro links these accusations to 2009, when President Manuel Zelaya was deposed by the military. At the time, the president went into exile in the Brazilian embassy. Zelaya’s political group accuses the United States of being behind the deposition.
Zelaya maintained close relations with governments considered hostile by Washington – such as Venezuela and Cuba – and even joined the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) bloc.
When announcing the call for a new Constituent Assembly in 2009 to rewrite the country’s Constitution, the Armed Forces refused to organize the election and Zelaya was deposed. In 2021, Xiomara Castro – the wife of the deposed president – was elected president of Honduras.
