In late 2021, Xiomara Castro won the Honduran presidency by uniting the opposition and defeating National Party candidate Nasry Asfura in a decisive first-round victory. Much of the world cheered because Asfura was the handpicked successor of outgoing President Juan Orlando Hernandez, a corrupt and authoritarian leader who stole the previous presidential election in 2017 and was recently convicted in U.S. federal court of accepting bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel. It’s good when narco-linked authoritarians can be defeated at the ballot box and forced out of power—and a tragedy when those like Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro remain in office despite losing. In that sense, Castro’s victory was an enormous win for democracy in the hemisphere.
Yet, despite the celebrations at the time, there were concerns over Castro. Her husband and chief political adviser, former President Mel Zelaya, shared many of Hernandez’s traits when he was in office from 2006 to 2009, but with less success. Zelaya wanted to hold on to power beyond the single term in office allowed by the Honduran constitution, but was instead forced out in a military coup in 2009. He committed serious acts of corruption while in office, though at nowhere near the scale at which Hernandez operated after being elected in 2013. And, as we learned last week, Zelaya and his political machine may have been financed by some of the same drug-trafficking networks that quietly paid off Hernandez while he was in office.
InSight Crime and Univision published a bombshell investigative report, including video evidence, describing how drug traffickers from the Cachiros criminal organization met with Carlos Zelaya, the former president’s brother, in 2013. The group’s leaders, who at the time played a key role in moving cocaine from Venezuela to Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, offered Carlos Zelaya several hundred thousand dollars to finance Castro’s campaign in that year’s presidential election—in which she finished second to Hernandez—and pay off Mel Zelaya in the process. While discussing the money, one of the traffickers says, “Half must be for the comandante,” very clearly referring to former President Zelaya.