Juan Carlos Hernandez has been a busy man reaching out to the White House several times since 2014. He is after money and he is likely getting it.
Hernandez has a big problem that the White House and the State Department are overlooking….it is called corruption and Hondurans know it well. Earlier this month, the protests began against the president and the with some amazement the United Nations anti-corruption body actually uncovered corruption in Guatemala but not so much in Honduras. Hondurans are calling for the resignation of Hernandez and the country has one of the highest murder rates globally for 2014.
Honduras is a key country in the matter of the DACA insurgency of people coming across our southern border in 2014. The matter was so bad that both Obama and Biden spoke to President Hernandez on the phone in 2014 on humanitarian issues and that those fleeing the country are not eligible for the DACA program.
Still desperate, President Hernandez was in the United States and had important time allotted to him at the State Department that was part of a 2 day program titled ‘Americas Society and Council of the Americas’ where the charter is to cover items including LGBT rights, economic development and the rule of law.
At the core of the corruption charges against President Hernandez is social security embezzlement. In 2014, yet another Honduran official was arrested for stealing more than $330 million in public money from a health pension fund.
Under Hillary Clinton at the State Department and with collaboration with the World Bank loans for more than a billion dollars have been pledged and then the United States augmented those dollars with 200 and 300 million going separately to countries in the region. With all this monetary infusion, why no clean up in corruption or a global cocaine network or an exodus of Hondurans?
Well at 3:00 PM, on June 17, 2015, President Hernandez just left the White House again.
In part from AFP news: Hernandez has come to Washington to meet with the new secretary general of the Organization of American States, Luis Almagro, and with US Vice President Joe Biden to discuss the development plan.
President Barack Obama has asked Congress for one billion dollars for the initiative but Republicans in Congress have expressed reservations.
– Taking responsibility –
To overcome those misgivings Honduras will disclose details of the plan to leaders of the two chambers, Hernandez said.
A Central American region that is prosperous and peaceful “is a tremendous investment for the American people”, the president said.
“I would hope that the leaders in Washington would understand that,” he added.
Still, the American aid is only symbolic.
Passing the package, he said, would mean Washington acknowledges that a huge part of the problem is Americans’ appetite for drugs like cocaine that are produced in South America and smuggled through destitute nations like Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala to reach the streets of the United States.
“In the end, it is not so much the money. It is the message that the United States takes responsibility for generating violence and migration as a result of drug trafficking in the region,” he said.
