The Cocaine Cowgirl on the Ex-Honduran President’s Road to Hell
You may not have heard of drug-trafficker Digna Valle, but Juan Orlando Hernández certainly has. And he knows her brothers too, because they nearly killed him.
My [narco nerd] world was shocked but not surprised to see the former president of Honduras arrested in shackles this week. It had been coming for years, but at the same time I never completely believed it ever WOULD happen. Then it did. Because life is like that.
And as the world watched, I thought of the tiny town of El Espiritu, which few would have heard of, but where a decent percentage of the cocaine arriving in the U.S passes by. And where I went last year, to “meet” Digna Valle, the drug-trafficking matriarch who I have written about here and reported on here and here. The Valles practically built that town, and were the unelected leaders, both loved and feared, for years. The unpaved roads are flanked by mansions they built and abandoned when Digna and her brothers were arrested.
Still, Digna couldn’t be less famous, although I guess she is now a little infamous. But nowhere near as infamous as Juan Orlando Hernández (known by his initials JOH in Honduran circles), who until a few weeks ago was the president of Honduras.
Despite such inequality in the fame stakes, Digna and her tiny town were protagonists in JOH’s fall from grace.
For years, it was alleged - mostly by convicted drug-traffickers in the U.S. - that JOH ran a “narco state” during his time in power. Turns out the United States finally agreed with the narcos pointing the finger at JOH: Many claimed to have bribed him and relied on him for protection over the years in which he wielded formidable power in Honduras, as the new charges reflect.
U.S. prosecutors have accused JOH of saying he wanted to “shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.” I could go on, but you get the idea……you can read all the backstory via links here.
JOH’s beleaguered Central American country lies smack bang in the middle of the cocaine highway between South America and the United States: The “highway” passes right through Digna’s home town. Her family were historically contraband and cattle smugglers until cocaine started gushing up from South America. The her family became the Valle Cartel.
Some of JOH’s biggest mistakes allegedly took place near El Espiritu, where Digna and her clan lived and controlled like their own fiefdom.
It was just a little further along that international line where JOH’s brother and envoy “Tony” Hernández met with Joaquín “el Chapo'' Guzmán, amongst others, in 2013, to do a million dollar deal. Both of those characters are now serving life in U.S prisons. Digna and her brothers Luis and Miguel might not have been sitting at the table physically that day, but their business interests were.
The money in the meeting was wrapped in plastic bags in a pile on the table they sat around, some there have since testified. It was a “donation” towards JOH’s presidential campaign which was taking place that year. In return for the mountain of cash, Chapo wanted help and protection for his drug-trafficking activities and his valued associates, one of which was Digna’s family organization. The Valles transported “massive quantities of cocaine with armed security across Honduras” for Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel, according to a translated copy of the U.S charges that I got hold of this week.
Protection meant keeping the gringos off their backs. No arrests and definitely no extraditions.
Then Digna got arrested in Miami in 2014, around a year after the deal was made. Suddenly, that million dollars didn’t seem very well spent. At least, not to her brothers Luis and Miguel. From El Espiritu, they hatched a plan to kill JOH, backed by El Chapo, who was also understandably pissed. They wanted to kill him because he let Digna go down. She might not have been the first Honduran narco to get arrested since the agreement, but I am sure that her detention annoyed the violent Valle boys way more than the arrest of any other traffickers.
This week’s charges against JOH confirmed what I heard a while back: the former president allowed both Luis and Miguel to get arrested and extradited by the Americans because he knew they wanted to kill him. DEA agents quickly got wind of the Valle brothers’ murderous plan and arrested them before they could execute it.
So the U.S. government saved JOH’s life so that it could have the pleasure of eventually taking him down.
But revenge was not completely elusive for JOH’s former cocaine colleagues. Once incarcerated, the Valle brothers, Digna and all the other regional traffickers who felt JOH betrayed them got their own backs. They all provided evidence to U.S prosecutors on the former president’s drug interests, the sum of which emerged this week and put him in shackles.
And I have absolutely no doubt that this week, JOH was the talk of the town in El Espiritu.