Former Honduran National Police Chief Juan Carlos Bonilla Valladares faces charges of leading a massive effort to smuggle cocaine into the United States and provide machine guns to police that facilitated the shipments, the US Justice Department said in a press release on Thursday
WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 30th April, 2020) Former Honduran National Police Chief Juan Carlos Bonilla Valladares faces charges of leading a massive effort to smuggle cocaine into the United States and provide machine guns to police that facilitated the shipments, the US Justice Department said in a press release on Thursday.
"Juan Carlos Bonilla Valladares, the former chief of the Honduran National Police, allegedly abused his positions in Honduran law enforcement to flout the law and play a key role in a violent international drug trafficking conspiracy," US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman said in the release.
Bonilla Valladares oversaw the transshipment of multi-ton loads of cocaine bound for the United States, used machineguns and other weaponry to accomplish that and participated in extreme violence, including the murder of a rival trafficker, to further the conspiracy, Berman explained.
"Now Bonilla Valladares has been marked as an outlaw and charged with crimes that could send him to a US prison for life," Berman said.
In exchange for bribes paid in drug proceeds, Bonilla Valladares directed members of the Honduran National Police, who were armed with machine guns, to let cocaine shipments pass through police checkpoints without being inspected or seized, the release added.
From 2003 to 2020, multiple drug trafficking organizations in Honduras and elsewhere worked together, and with support from prominent public officials, including Honduran politicians and law enforcement officials, to receive multi-ton loads of cocaine sent to Honduras from Colombia and Venezuela via air and maritime routes, and to transport the drugs westward in Honduras toward the border with Guatemala and eventually to the United States, according to the release.
