With the pardon granted by convicted US President Donald Trump to drug trafficker and former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, other dirty tricks filed in the record of the head of the State Department, Marco Rubio, resurface.
Democratic congressmen and experts on US politics assert that the release of the Honduran drug trafficker was proposed to Trump by the corrupt head of the State Department, Marco Rubio. After granting the pardon and following international condemnation of Hernández’s acquittal, Trump himself claimed that he didn’t know or have much knowledge of who the man really was. Of course, Rubio knew him well.
Let us remember that Hernández was imprisoned in the United States with a firm sentence of 45 years in prison imposed by judges of the southern district of New York, for the crime of exporting and introducing 400 tons of cocaine into US territory.
In such a contradiction and display of scant political morality, Trump accuses Venezuelan constitutional president Nicolás Maduro, without evidence, of leading a drug cartel and has launched a war against that nation with the already declared interest of seizing all of that country’s oil and mineral wealth.
But let’s return to Marco Rubio, whose relationship with the former Honduran president and the powerful lobbying firm BGR Group has been documented for years.
An investigative report by VICE magazine revealed that Juan Orlando Hernández signed a contract in early 2020 with the lobbying firm BGR Group, founded by Republican billionaire Haley Barbour, for a total of $660,000. The contract aimed to bolster his image in Washington as a reliable ally and a fighter against organized crime. VICE is a magazine founded in 1994 in Montreal, Canada, and currently based in New York.
At that time, the president’s legal environment was beginning to crumble as his brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, was sentenced to life imprisonment for trafficking tons of cocaine to the United States for more than a decade.
Although Juan Orlando denied the accusations that arose in that and other trials, the testimonies collected by US prosecutors indicated that the then president not only knew about, but also participated in and received bribes to finance his campaigns.
In that environment, the BGR Group launched a whole publicity machine in favor of the Honduran president, for which it contacted congressional staff, distributed press releases, organized approaches and reinforced the perception of Hernández as a reliable partner of Washington.
And here the name of Marco Rubio appears again, who, according to the VICE report, is historically one of the main beneficiaries of BGR Group’s political contributions.
The firm organized fundraising events for Rubio during his 2010 and 2016 Senate campaigns, as well as his brief presidential campaign. After signing the contract with Honduras, BGR contacted 11 congressional staffers; three had worked directly with Rubio.
In other words, the Hernández government paid a firm closely linked to a politician who today, from the State Department, participates in defining foreign policy towards Latin America, in which he tries to implement the nefarious Monroe Doctrine.
Back in April 2018, Rubio, then a senator from Florida, tweeted, “Thanks to Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández for leading the drug traffickers,” where below appeared a photo of the two men together.
The current US Secretary of State was a frequent visitor to the drug trafficker during his second term, obtained fraudulently but with the backing of the Organization of American States (OAS), then headed by the far-right Luis Almagro. During one of his visits, Rubio praised the “war on drugs” being waged by Hernández’s government, while his brother, Juan Antonio, was flooding the United States with tons of drugs.
Rubio’s congratulations to Juan Orlando for his fight against drugs cannot be attributed to mere naiveté, because the life of the far-right politician is intimately linked to drug trafficking.
When Rubio was 16, his brother-in-law Orlando Cicilia was arrested in 1987 for trafficking a massive drug shipment valued at $15 million. Cicilia lived with Rubio’s sister, Barbara, very close to the house where Marco lived with his parents. At the trial in 1989, Rubio, then 18, refused to testify about whether he or his family had received money from Cicilia.
The drug trafficker, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison, was released after 12 years following a plea deal. Immediately afterward, his brother-in-law, who was already a member of the Florida House of Representatives, used his position to secure a real estate license for Cicilia. These tangled connections led to him being known in Miami as Narco Rubio (Blonde Drug Lord).
That is why his business dealings and friendship with drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández are considered just another operation in his long history of lies, corruption, and relationships with drug lords.