Having friends in high places is a necessity in the smuggling trade. It doesn’t get any better than having both the police chief of an entire country and it’s president on the payroll, too.
Cocaine smuggling hobby
Juan Carlos Bonilla goes by the nickname “El Tigre” in his native Honduras. They also used to call him police chief but that doesn’t mean he was only a village beat cop. He was getting paid to be the top law enforcement official in the whole country.
Smuggling cocaine was only a hobby. Uncle Sam wanted Bonilla on drug trafficking charges and now we’ll get to press them.
Once they had all the extradition paperwork filled out, signed and stamped, U.S. prosecutors pulled the cover off the drug and weapons charges.
The Hondurans were nice enough to parade the disgraced smuggling lord in front of the media in Tegucigalpa when they captured him. He’d been on the run for several months.
American prosecutors say Bonilla “conspired with now-detained former President Juan Orlando Hernandez to ship cocaine to the United States.” A lot of it.
He was in charge of the entire Central American country’s police forces in 2012 and 2013. He was smuggling coke while supposedly working with right-wing President Porfirio Lobo to stamp out the trade.
Extradited already
Bonilla has already been dragged up to the United States for prosecution, he landed here on Tuesday, May 10 without a lot of fuss.
He’s being transferred to Manhattan, New York, where they’ll stand him up in front of a federal court judge. His smuggling buddy Hernandez, “who left office in January after eight years in power,” was extradited also.
El Presidente denies everything. He pleaded Not Guilty on Tuesday. He swears up and down that he didn’t take “millions of dollars” to help the cocaine smuggling trade in exchange for “protection from arrest.” Prosecutors are smirking about it.
Dragging El Tigre in for justice “demonstrates that no one is exempt by virtue of their title or position of authority, even foreign presidents and police chiefs,” Damian Williams declares.
Not only did the police chief help in smuggling cocaine, he helped control the competition by only busting rivals. Bonilla allegedly “directed police to let cocaine shipments pass through checkpoints without being inspected or seized, in exchange for bribes.”
He’s keeping his mouth shut and waiting for help. All Bonilla has to say to the press is he has a “clear conscience.“
