Honduras extradites admitted drug trafficker to U.S.

Honduras has extradited a man to the United States nearly three years after officials allege he fled to the Central American country to avoid punishment when he admitted to trafficking large quantities of drugs into San Francisco.

“Let this case be instructive to people considering whether to distribute drugs in the Tenderloin District,” U.S. Attorney Ismail Ramsey wrote in a statement. “The reach of the government is long and we are determined to assign the resources necessary to eradicate drug dealing from our neighborhoods.”

Victor Viera-Chirinos is suspected of collecting “rent” from street-level dealers and keeping them supplied with drugs, including heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. He pled guilty in January 2021 to possessing and conspiring to distribute large amounts of the drugs.

He was scheduled to be sentenced in June 2021, but he fled to Honduras the week before, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. At the time, federal prosecutors were asking for a 63-month sentence “based on the egregiousness of the conduct,” while his defense attorneys argued for 24 months in prison.

Viera-Chirinos, 42, extradited Wednesday, is the fourth man sent to the United States from Honduras in connection with drug trafficking charges this year. His younger brother, Jorge Viera-Chirinos, 34, was extradited from Honduras in February along with two other people. The younger Viera-Chirinos and another extradited defendant had previously been arrested in the Bay Area but fled the country before their trials while out on bond.

An 18-month Chronicle investigation published last year found that while most Hondurans reaching the cities in the Bay Area or elsewhere in the U.S. find legal work, hundreds of San Francisco’s low-level dealers are migrants from the country’s Siria Valley, from which they fled violence and extreme poverty.

Extraditions are rare in Bay Area drug cases, and the four this year represent a stepped-up effort by local and federal law enforcement to combat the drug addiction epidemic in San Francisco, which saw a record number of overdose deaths last year.