The Honduran people mobilized this Friday night to demand the resignation of President Juan Orlando Hernández for his links with drug trafficking, after his brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández was convicted of drug trafficking in a trial in United States (USA).

The demonstrations have taken place in San Pedro Sula, La Ceiba, La Lima, El Progreso, Tocoa (north), Choluteca, Valle (south), El Paraíso, Olancho, east, and other areas of the country, which were repressed by the police forces with tear gas, says the AFP agency.

The former Honduran president Manuel Zelaya summoned peaceful demonstrations indefinitely until the end of the Hernández government, because the sentence against his brother “constitutes a condemnation for Juan Orlando Hernández himself.”

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“We call all our militancy at the national level to total, organized and permanent mobilization with actions of peaceful, but firm and forceful protests. We instruct our grassroots organizations, social movements and other political organizations in order to move towards a national plan of indefinite protest until this dictatorship falls,” said Zelaya.

Similarly, he urged the US to suspend its political support to the government of Honduras, as well as to suspend all the cooperation that are carried out in the military level.

Judgment

This Friday, a New York jury convicted Juan Antonio Hernández, brother of the Honduran president, for the crimes of conspiring to traffick cocaine, possession of weapons and destructive devices and false testimony, AVN says.

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During the trial, the prosecution maintained that the Hernández government had turned their country into a “narco-state” and presented as witnesses two former drug lords who agreed to collaborate to reduce their sentences.

Witnesses said the president received money from drug trafficking leaders, including Mexican Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán.

Given this, President Hernández said that “the jury sadly decided to believe in the word of people who have declared themselves confessed murderers, drug traffickers.”

Source URL: Alba Ciudad

Translated by JRE/EF