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InSight Crime
INVESTIGATION AND ANALYSIS OF ORGANIZED CRIME
The year 2024 included some stark reminders that drug trafficking money can reach the highest levels of politics. From Honduras to Mexico to Colombia, allegations of narco-political contributions shook the foundations of power and disrupted international relations.
This article is part of our Criminal GameChangers series for 2024. Read the other articles in the series here.
InSight Crime co-directors Steven Dudley and Jeremy McDermott will join some of our most experienced field investigators for a discussion of the Criminal GameChangers annual series and challenges for the year ahead. To attend and participate live, you can make a donation as small as $10.
Perhaps the clearest evidence of this was Honduras, where the first family’s interactions with drug trafficking clans have put President Xiomara Castro on the defensive and all but ended US-Honduras counter-narcotics cooperation, including potential extraditions of suspected drug traffickers to the United States.
Much of the tension can be traced to September 3, when InSight Crime released a video that showed Carlos Zelaya, Castro’s brother-in-law and then a prominent congressperson, at a meeting with the country’s top drug traffickers during the late stages of Castro’s failed bid for the presidency in 2013. Zelaya did not deny that he was there, nor did he claim that the video was fake. Instead, two days before its release — and after InSight Crime sought comment on the case — he tried to downplay the importance of the gathering, saying he only knew one person in attendance.
“There was never any money delivered, at least not to me,” he added.
Although he said he was willing to speak with US authorities, Zelaya subsequently resigned his congressional post and fled to neighboring Nicaragua, which might have put him out of reach of US prosecutors.
Suspicions of the Zelaya family’s connections to drug traffickers go back decades. At the heart of them sit Carlos’ brother, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, the former president and now top aide to his wife, Xiomara Castro. In a 2008 diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks, then-US Ambassador to Honduras Charles Ford wrote that Mel Zelaya had a “close association with persons believed to be involved with international organized crime.”
And during the 2013 video released by InSight Crime, the drug traffickers — all of whom were later sentenced in the United States for their crimes — reminisced about the contributions they had made to Mel Zelaya during his 2005 campaign or while he was in power between 2006 and 2009, before right-wing political rivals, in concert with members of the military, engineered an administrative coup d’etat and removed him from office. In response to an InSight Crime request for comment, Mel Zelaya, like his brother Carlos, said he had “never received money from drug traffickers.”
SEE ALSO: Honduras Doubles Down on Flawed Mano Dura Strategy
Honduran authorities were also suspicious of the family’s interactions with traffickers for years. In 2010, Honduran prosecutors opened a money laundering investigation against several Zelaya family members, including Mel and Carlos Zelaya, a Contracorriente investigation from September revealed.
Based on internal documents from the Honduras Attorney General’s Office — which InSight Crime independently obtained — the Contracorriente investigation connected the Zelaya family to a series of land purchases by Grupo Fluir S.A., a real estate company that was at the heart of what authorities believed was a money laundering scheme.
One of Fluir’s co-founders was the wife of Sergio Neftaly Mejía, a drug trafficking partner to Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and the Sinaloa Cartel who was later convicted of drug trafficking and was sentenced to life in a US federal prison. Government investigators also documented that Fluir suspiciously issued debit cards to numerous members of the Zelaya family. And, with the assistance of Colombian authorities, the Honduran prosecutors probed whether Carlos and Mel’s other brother, Marco Zelaya, had halted a cocaine shipment coming from Colombia in the days following the coup against Mel.
Notwithstanding the subsequent prosecution of Mejía in the United States and the arrest of one of the Fluir founders, the Fluir case sputtered. The founder was released, and no Zelaya has faced charges in the case.
Still, the specter of a US prosecution looms. In the days prior to the publication of the video by InSight Crime, President Castro abruptly declared she would move to halt extraditions from Honduras. And after the video was released, Castro issued a blistering response to the revelations. In both instances, she blamed the US government.
The US government was at the heart of another major revelation in January, after InSight Crime published a chronicle of a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) investigation into potential drug trafficking contributions to the 2006 presidential campaign of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
AMLO, as he is popularly known, lost that election, but he won in 2018, and, after InSight Crime published its article, he spent the better part of a month during his daily presidential press briefings blasting the investigation. For AMLO, the chronicle, versions of which were published on the same day by ProPublica and Deutsche Welle, was part of a DEA conspiracy to upend his administration. His critics, meanwhile, pounced: the hashtag #narcopresidente spread like wildfire on the social media platform X.
The DEA investigation had its faults. It began with testimony from a lawyer who worked with the Beltrán Leyva Organization (BLO). The lawyer would later become known for his shaky and false testimony against other officials. Still, for the DEA, the lawyer had proven reliable in several important cases, and the agents who led the case plowed ahead, securing corroborating testimony from at least three other participants in the scheme.
One of these participants was an AMLO campaign aide who the DEA ensnared in a sting along the US-Mexico border before flipping him and securing his cooperation. The aide told investigators how he passed money from BLO operatives to the AMLO campaign in early 2006. And he later wore a wire to meetings with the AMLO campaign official who the aide said had received the money.
By then, AMLO was revving up for another run at the presidency for the 2012 elections. But little was gained with the wire, and more problems ensued. With the statute of limitations on the case expired, US investigators devised an elaborate plan to compromise the AMLO campaign official. A special US Justice Department committee, however, stepped in and halted the investigation, arguing that it could appear as if they were trying to upend AMLO’s 2012 campaign.
The mere existence of the committee is telling. For the US government and its counterdrug agents and legal teams, prosecuting high-level officials of other countries is a difficult needle to thread. And, more often than not, the US government opts to avoid pursuing these types of investigations, as they can upend diplomatic relations for years or even decades. For agents and prosecutors, the stakes are also high on a personal level. These cases can make or break their careers.
One recent notable exception to the more cautious approach culminated in June 2024, when a federal judge sentenced former Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernández to 45 years in prison. Hernández, the court found in a dramatic trial in February, had been part of a drug trafficking conspiracy for years, even while the United States hailed him as a crime-fighting ally during his time as president from 2013 to 2021. However, Hernández was only prosecuted after he finished his term. Ironically, it was President Castro who green-lit his capture and extradition.
SEE ALSO: Special Series: The Rise and Fall of Honduras Ex-President Juan Orlando Hernández
As it relates to Mexico, US officials remain far more calculating and politically cautious. In October, the United States sentenced Genaro García Luna, a former top security official convicted in 2023 for taking cartel bribes, to 38 years in prison. García Luna led the police for then-President Felipe Calderón, an avowed AMLO rival. In contrast, in 2020, the United States released former Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos, after he had been arrested in the Los Angeles international airport and charged with taking bribes from another cartel.
The DEA was livid with the Cienfuegos decision. AMLO, meanwhile, gloated, then released confidential communications to further embarrass the US counterdrug agency and undermine its case against the general. The case stung even more considering the agency’s previous investigation into AMLO. After the special committee shut it down in early 2012, an exasperated DEA agent who worked on the case asked his bosses: “What happens if AMLO wins, and we know this about him?”
Allegations of narco donations have tainted other presidencies as well. In August 2023, Nicolás Petro, the son of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, told prosecutors he had accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from a convicted drug trafficker, as well as at least two other highly questionable businessmen, for his father’s 2022 presidential campaign.
The trafficker was Samuel Santander Lopesierra. Lopesierra was known in the underworld as the “Hombre Marlboro” (Marlboro Man). As his name suggests, he specialized in selling contraband cigarettes, among other goods. He was convicted of drug trafficking in the United States, where he served 18 years of a 25-year prison sentence and was released in 2021.
In his declaration to authorities, Nicolás added that his father knew of the donations, and that most of the money went to personal, rather than campaign, expenses.
“I did not raise him,” President Petro said in response to the scandal, referring to the fact that Nicolás grew up in another household, apart from his father.
The investigation, however, took many turns in 2024. In March, Nicolás testified to a congressional commission that he was pressured by the prosecutor; that the money was lent to him, not donated to the campaign; and that his father was not aware of these debts. He later switched legal teams, as his defense scrambled to strike a plea deal on money laundering charges. As of this writing, the case is still pending.
Meanwhile, opposition forces have leveraged the scandal — dubbed on X as #PetroEscándalo, among other monikers — to attack the president’s domestic and international agenda, and may have weakened his ability to wage what Petro has termed “Total Peace,” the sweeping efforts to corral the various criminal groups operating in Colombia.
In April, the US State Department also mentioned the scandal in its annual global report on human rights, straining bilateral relations between the countries. For the US, it must have felt like déjà vu. In 1995, the US revoked then-Colombian president Ernesto Samper’s visa after his 1994 campaign accepted over $6 million from the Cali Cartel. Samper remained in office, but like Petro, he was at least partially hamstrung by the accusations.
Steven Dudley is the co-founder and co-director of InSight Crime and a senior research fellow at American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies in Washington, DC. In 2020, Dudley… More by Steven Dudley
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