Mörderischer Partner
Honduran Admits to 78 Killings in Deal That Implicates Politicians and the Police
Ein Drogenboss aus Honduras machte einen Deal mit US-Behörden und gab zu, 78 Morde beauftragt zu haben.
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — The number of murders the Honduran drug lord admitted to orchestrating over 10 years was stunning. The list included killers, rapists and gang members. Then there were the innocents: a lawyer, two journalists, a Honduran refugee in Canada; there were even two children caught in a shootout.
In all, the drug lord, Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, said that, working in concert with drug traffickers and others, he had “caused” the deaths of 78 people — a number that posed a dilemma for United States officials when Mr. Rivera came to them offering to expose high-level corruption in this Central American nation of some nine million people.
Knowing that he was already a target of United States investigators, Mr. Rivera sought to help the Drug Enforcement Administration root out corrupt Honduran politicians and other elites who had made Honduras a gateway for massive amounts of cocaine headed for the United States through Mexico.
The offer came at a time when United States officials were deeply concerned by Honduras’s slide into anarchy. A stalwart ally and home to a United States military base, Honduras was plagued by drug traffickers and gangs and had one of the world’s highest homicide rates. It is the first landing point for about 80 percent of suspected drug flights departing from South America, the State Department has said.
But to sign Mr. Rivera to a formal cooperation agreement meant the government would most likely have to do something for him: seek leniency on his behalf, which could spare him a long prison sentence and leave the families of the Honduran victims believing that Mr. Rivera got away with murder.
Today, four years after Mr. Rivera’s clandestine cooperation began, federal prosecutors in Manhattan have with his help charged seven police officers from Honduras’s na-
tional force, along with the son of the former president and several members of a prominent banking family.
The evidence, a prosecutor said in September, showed nothing short of “state-sponsored drug trafficking.”
Investigators have also gathered evidence that Honduras’s former president, Porfirio Lobo, took bribes to protect traffickers, and that drug money may have helped finance the rise of the current president, Juan Orlando Hernández.
Neither politician has been charged. Both denied the allegations to The New York Times.
Prosecutors who approved the agreement with Mr. Rivera and a second deal with his brother, Javier, say the men offered a rare opportunity to expose the links between drug traffickers and Honduran politicians and businessmen.
Details of Devis Rivera’s cooperation, which included recording Honduran targets, emerged in March when he testified against Fabio Lobo, the former Honduran president’s son. Mr. Lobo was recently sentenced to 24 years in prison for cocaine conspiracy.
Murdering a General
The Rivera brothers, who led a trafficking organization called Los Cachiros, built a fortune as middlemen, moving cocaine from airstrips northward to the Mexican cartels.
The brothers used violence to muscle out rivals and others, from at least 2003 when Devis Rivera was involved in the murder of a hospital security guard and, the next year, the killing of the man he had been guarding, a cartel leader.
By late 2009, Mr. Rivera testified, he and other traffickers felt threatened by General Julián Arístides González Irías, the counternarcotics czar. “The decision was made to kill him,” Mr. Rivera testified. General Arístides González was assassinated in December 2009 by a gunman on a motorcycle. Mr. Rivera testified that the traffickers paid $200,000 to $ 300,000 for the killing, which was handled by the police.
That was around the same time, Mr. Rivera testified, that he and his brother bought a president. Concerned about the possibility of extradition to the United States, Mr. Rivera said they paid more than $400,000 in bribes to President Porfirio Lobo, before and after his November 2009 election. At President Lobo’s home in early 2010, Mr. Rivera received the assurance he wanted.
“The president said to me to tell my brother not to worry,” Mr. Rivera recalled, “because during his four-year term nobody would get extradited.”
President Lobo also designated his son Fabio, who was once a juvenile court judge, “as a middleman who would be able to protect us, help us — the Cachiros,” Mr. Rivera said.
“I gave him a bribe almost every time I met with him,” Mr. Rivera said. “I knew that having him with me, everything would go well.”
With President Lobo’s patronage, the brothers invested in construction companies that competed for government contracts. They opened a zoo, complete with tigers and jaguars. By December 2013, Mr. Rivera testified, he and his brother Javier had begun talking with the D. E. A. and prosecutors to strike a deal.
A Devil’s Bargain
Prosecutors wrestled with granting a deal to men who had killed so many people. One official said prosecutors were not aware of how many murders Mr. Rivera had been involved in until after discussions began.
Under the deal, the brothers would have to admit to — and plead guilty to — all murders and other crimes they had committed, even those the authorities were unaware of. That would sweep in killings that might go unaccounted for in Honduras.
Mr. Rivera’s agreement shows that if he fulfilled his end of the deal, prosecutors would seek leniency at his sentencing. He may also be placed in the witness protection program, the document says.
During President Hernández’s tenure, Honduras’s murder rate has fallen. About a third of the police force has been dismissed following revelations of some officers’ roles in drug-related assassinations.
Still, a State Department report observed that in Honduras, “new criminal bosses have emerged to assume leadership of dismantled networks to continue cocaine smuggling and other forms of crime.”
In Honduras, there is relief Mr. Rivera is facing justice in New York.
“They should be judged here, but by whom?” said Hilda Caldera, the widow of Alfredo Landaverde, a politician and counternarcotics official who was assassinated in December 2011 — one of the murders to which Mr. Rivera has pleaded guilty. “The justice here is contaminated.”
Ms. Caldera said her husband had been willing to declare what few others would: that traffickers had infiltrated the police and military. “He was alone, so alone,” she said.
One victim’s father, Heriberto Palacios, said he was uneasy that the Rivera brothers would get leniency, given “all of the evil they did in Honduras.”
His son Nahum had been a television and radio reporter, and he was killed in 2010 with his girlfriend, Yorleny Sánchez, a doctor, near his home.
Mr. Palacios, a retired farm laborer, said he had once inquired about his son’s murder investigation. Officials refused to provide any information, lest he “might misinterpret it.”