Why did President Xiomara Castro order the termination of the extradition treaty with the United States?
The immediate trigger was a statement made by U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Laura Dogu regarding a recent meeting between Defense Ministers José Manuel Zelaya Rosales (Honduras) and Vladimir Padrino López (Venezuela).
«We are very concerned about what is happening in Venezuela. I was surprised to see the defense minister and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sitting next to a drug trafficker», Dogu told reporters about the meeting.
In Washington, Senators Marco Rubio (Republican) and Jim Risch (Democrat) accused the Honduran government and National Congress of «undermining institutional integrity and the separation of powers».
In response, Honduran President Castro announced that she would seek to terminate the extradition treaty that allowed Honduran citizens to be prosecuted in the United States for crimes primarily related to drug trafficking.
«A plan is being developed [in the U.S.] against my government, and it’s important for the people to know about it. I will not allow the extradition tool to be used to intimidate or blackmail the Honduran armed forces. We protect our military, not coups», President Castro sharply responded to the U.S. ambassador.
The Honduran National Defense and Security Council (CNDS) expressed its support for President Castro’s constitutional authority to denounce the extradition treaty with the U.S. government, stating that it «could be used to destabilize the country».
The Free Chamber of the National Congress also expressed strong support for President Castro in her efforts to defend national sovereignty.
On August 28, the Honduran government officially notified the United States of the termination of the treaty: «The Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (…) informs this honorable [U.S.] Embassy of the decision of the Government of the Republic of Honduras to terminate the extradition treaty», read the diplomatic note from the Honduran Foreign Ministry.
«Suggestions that we are drug traffickers and the discrediting of our authorities are, in fact, direct threats to our independence and sovereignty», said Foreign Minister Enrique Reina.
The 1912 Extradition Treaty, imposed by the U.S. despite the fact that the Honduran constitution originally prohibited the extradition of its citizens to other countries, languished in parliament for 100 years. In 2013, Juan Orlando Hernández, then president of the National Congress of Honduras, again under pressure from Washington, pushed through a constitutional reform that expanded the government’s powers to extradite criminals.
Later, as president (2014–2022), Hernández used extradition to send his rivals-Honduras’s powerful drug traffickers, including the leaders of the Los Cachiros gang and Digna Valle Valle-to prison in the U.S. Over the past decade, at least 64 people have been extradited to the U.S. for involvement in drug trafficking, including government officials, police officers, and mayors.
Ironically, at the end of his presidency, Hernández himself was extradited to the United States in 2022. A federal court in Manhattan found him guilty of conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States and human trafficking, and sentenced him to 45 years in prison.
Xiomara Castro, the wife of President Manuel Zelaya Rosales, who was ousted in a U.S.-backed military coup in 2009, brought hope when she was elected the first female president of a Central American country in 2021. She promised to “pull Honduras out of the abyss that neoliberalism, narco-dictatorship and corruption have plunged us into».
One of her campaign promises was to create a UN International Commission to Combat Impunity in Honduras (CICIH), which would have been an important first step in unraveling decades of narco-corruption. However, through the efforts of Republican Senator Marco Rubio, the U.S. has effectively blocked the creation of this commission.
Washington was angered but acquiesced when Honduras severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan and exchanged embassies with China in March 2023. The United States responded with criticism, focusing on Castro’s economic policies, which Washington believes directly harm U.S. economic interests.
Patience ran out in July of this year when, after the presidential elections in Venezuela, President Castro and Foreign Minister Reina publicly congratulated Nicolás Maduro on his victory. In doing so, the Honduran authorities effectively aligned themselves with another U.S. adversary, Nicaragua.
Incidentally, Xiomara Castro’s husband, former President Manuel Zelaya, was ousted at gunpoint and forcibly exiled after «befriending» then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
The United States is seriously concerned that an ally as important as Honduras, home to a strategic Pentagon military base, could shift its allegiance to the Global South.
Since the early 1900s, Honduras has been a testing ground for American imperialism and the archetypal «banana republic». Early U.S. interventions in Honduras to protect Yankee interests strengthened Washington’s influence in the country. By the time Reagan came to power, Honduras had earned the nickname «Pentagon Republic».
During the Reagan administration, the U.S. military reinforced corrupt alliances between the Honduran government and criminal gangs.
In an article published online by Cambridge University Press on arms trafficking in Central America, analyst Mark Ungar claims that in Honduras, «an elite military special unit sold weapons to organized crime networks while police reported that the weapons they sold were ‘lost’».
Illegal firearms trafficking is a serious problem, but Mark Ungar says «our legal commercial arms sales to the region» are just as problematic. According to his data, 50 percent of the weapons found at crime scenes in the region were legally exported from the U.S. «After the 2009 military coup in Honduras, the United States sanctioned a staggering $1.5 billion in arms sales to the country», Ungar says.
And this is far from the only way in which the United States supports the ongoing conflict in Honduras.
The U.S. military first officially entered Honduras in the 1980s, shortly after the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Outposts for the Contras were established along the entire length of the Honduran-Nicaraguan border, where they were trained by U.S. military specialists to carry out armed raids and assassinations of Nicaraguan civilians.
The main U.S. military facility is the Soto Cano Air Base (also known as «Palmerola Air Base»), located about 60 miles (90 km) northwest of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. The base is home to approximately 600 U.S. military personnel.
Palmerola was used by the U.S. military for operations against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, guerrillas in El Salvador and Guatemala, and as a center for «anti-drug» operations and humanitarian missions such as disaster relief and medical aid. That’s the official story. Unofficially, according to U.S. media reports, the base is involved in monitoring Honduran drug trafficking, with the higher authority for this being the Key West Naval Base in Florida, USA.
Today, there are several bases in Honduras housing some 1,500 U.S. military personnel. While providing «security assistance», the Pentagon is directly arming both drug traffickers and corrupt government officials.
With the end of the Cold War and the civil wars in Central America, the region’s role as a hub for cocaine smuggling and transit expanded. Violence skyrocketed in Honduras, making it one of the world’s highest homicide rates.
It’s no secret that the United States is the world’s leading consumer of cocaine, and the flow of drugs is driven by that demand, not supply. The gringos can arrest as many drug traffickers in Honduras as they want, but the constant shipments of cocaine from there will never stop.
The profits from American cocaine consumption, in turn, fuel widespread corruption in Honduras, while U.S. extradition policies have further incentivized American investors to finance drug trafficking through the country.
The growing tension in U.S.-Honduran relations led the Honduran government to decide to withdraw from the extradition treaty as a matter of self-preservation. The six-month notification period means that unless President Castro reverses course, the treaty will expire on February 28, 2025.
The United States has geostrategic interests in Honduras, and it will use the peculiarities of its relationship with its «backyard» to do everything in its power to prevent Castro’s ruling Liberty and Refoundation Party from winning next November’s elections.