The American Pedigree of Honduran Drug Planes

It started off simply enough.

A private jet made an unplanned stop at Goloson Airport in La Ceiba, Honduras on Sunday evening.  But it was suspicious.  The jet had not filed a flight plan with Goloson as its destination.  In fact, it had not filed a flight plan at all.  Yet its two Mexican pilots claimed Goloson was its destination, and that it was there to pick up cargo, but could not identify what cargo, or say who would provide it.  They identified the plane as belonging to a Mexican firm, but could not name it, and told Honduran authorities the plane was arriving from Toluca, Mexico. 

These authorities quickly became suspicious.  They noticed dirt on the tires of the plane, suggesting it had previously landed on a dirt airstrip, like the clandestine strips used for drug flights.  Mexican pilots have a history of showing up in Honduras on board an empty plane, leaving it parked at an airport, and flying out on a commercial flight the next day, so Mexican pilots, especially pilots who don't know what cargo they expect or who they expect it from, are suspicious.

The Honduran authorities detained the pilots and examined the jet.  All of the seats had been removed, and drug sniffing dogs reacted, suggesting that the plane had recently had a cargo of cocaine on board.

Residue from the plane later tested positive for cocaine.

But by then, the local prosecutor had released the Mexican pilots, who had flown home to Mexico the next day on a commercial flight.  She reportedly told her boss she saw no reason to hold them.

This sounds like a Mexican drug plane, right?

It did to the Honduran press, who identified the plane as Mexican, largely on the basis of who was flying it and what the pilots told them. 

But the identification number of the plane shown in pictures and reported in the news stories is N125DH.  Mexican registrations begin with the letters XA, XB, or XC. "N" begins an American registration number. Looking it up in the FAA N-number registry online shows this is officially an American-owned plane.

N125DH is registered to Aero Investments LLC, and the address on the registration is of an LLC clearinghouse in Cheyenne, Wyoming. According to the Wyoming Secretary of State's website, this LLC was founded in 2010 with the filing done by Wyoming Corporate Services, Inc..  The FAA registration indicates this plane was purchased in 2011. 

The filing address for the registration, 2710 Thomes Ave, Cheyenne, WY, was featured in this Reuters report about Wyoming Corporate Services. Reuters described the office on Thomes Street as "a little Cayman Island on the Great Plains", and described Wyoming Corporate Services as

a business-incorporation specialist that establishes firms which can be used as "shell" companies, paper entities able to hide assets.

At the time of the Reuters investigation in 2011, more than 2000 companies used 2710 Thomes Ave. as their official address.

This is not the only plane owned by Aero Investments LLC.  They also own a GulfStream 21 seat corporate jet, registration N366JA. In 2008, prior to when Aero Investments bought N366JA, it had been used by then-Senator Obama and Secret Service agents to fly from Chicago to Afghanistan. Until July, they also owned an AeroCommander 685 9 seat prop plane, N74CP, which they sold after it crashed and suffered significant damage in Texas in June.  The investigation noted that the flight was operating as a business charter at the time. 

Because the FAA database is only up to date as of August 6, we cannot know if Aero Investments LLC still owns the aircraft that landed in La Ceiba, or recently sold it to someone in Mexico.  Aero Investments could have sold the plane since then to someone in Mexico, with the paperwork waiting to get updated in the FAA backlog. The plane can be seen listed as for sale with an aircraft broker supporting the idea that it might recently have been sold to new owners.

The last entry for this aircraft in Flight Aware, which tracks flight plans, shows the plane flying from Ontario, California to Tijuana, Mexico on August 8.  After that, nothing.  This might also point to the plane having been recently sold. 

Under FAA regulations, "the seller is responsible for removing the N numbers from his/her exported aircraft when the aircraft is deregistered."  That apparently didn't happen here.

Murky ownership of drug planes is common. Several other narco-aircraft captured in Honduras have had alleged temporary or even expired Mexican registration, while their pictures showed clear N-numbers indicating American ownership.

Like the guns used in the drug trade, the aircraft used often have an American pedigree.  Aircraft confiscated in Honduras for allegedly having carried cocaine are overwhelmingly small corporate jets and twin prop planes that can carry 10 to 20 passengers and are nearing the end of their commercial lives. These planes are worth less than the drugs they can carry, and so frequently are treated as expendable.

N125DH is no exception. It was manufactured in 1971. So one last sale to a Mexican owner with a lucrative business that didn't require the plane to continue in service for very long would be profitable.

And if such a plane lands in Honduras, it might not actually be expendable. The director of the OABI, the government agency that controls confiscated planes in Honduras, recently told the press that the Public Prosecutor's office frequently returns the planes to whoever comes to reclaim them, even if there is proof the planes were used to haul drugs.

While small corporate jets predominate in Latin America, the drug trade frugally takes advantage of other aged planes. A 2008 article in the New York Daily News outlined the purchase and use of older large jets, such as DC-8s and 727s, to haul drugs between South America, especially Colombia, and Africa and Europe. Older passenger jets like this can be purchased for as little as $250,000, less than similar vintage corporate jets.

Like the US side of narco-weapons, the US side of drug planes remains largely uninvestigated by law enforcement, and largely unreported on by the US press.

One question that springs to mind that an investigative reporter might want to ask: why does the FAA have such a loose approach to transferring title on planes, and (apparently) no effective follow through when planes that were sold by US brokers to drug traffickers still carry their US registration numbers?

Strange Coincidences

On Saturday, the Special Anti-Kidnapping Unit (GEAS in Spanish, Grupo Especial AntiSecuestro) of the National Police announced they had rescued a kidnapped cousin of Porfirio Lobo Sosa.

Mario Filberto Moya Lobo was kidnapped October 16, 2010 near Catacamas, Olancho. According to El Heraldo, Moya Lobo was being held on a hacienda in the mountains of La Zarzaloza, Ocotillal, in the Municipio of Patuca, Olancho. After being freed, he was returned by the police to Catacamas.

Also involved in the operation were elements of the Colombian Special Anti-Kidnapping unit of the Army, the Gaula, who are in Honduras to train its National Police. The Gaula groups specialize in breaking up criminal groups. El Heraldo reported that they have helped free 11 Hondurans kidnapped so far. The National Police spokesperson went to great lengths to explain that their role was only advisory, that this was a domestic operation.

According to La Tribuna, no one was captured during the rescue, but the Anti-Kidnapping Police were left there to "comb the countryside" to find those responsible.

Thursday morning, six bodies (seven in some reports) turned up in one small aldea in Olancho.

All six bodies were found in Ocotillal, Municipio of Patuca, Olancho, where the operation that freed Moya Lobo was carried out.

Every press account agrees they were some of those involved in the kidnapping of Moya Lobo. CODEH, the non-governmental human rights organization headed by Andres Pavon, has indicated the National Police are responsible for the deaths of these individuals. The National Police deny responsibility, explicitly stating they detained no one, and report they've opened a special investigation.

Its not the first time the Special Anti-Kidnapping Unit of the National Police has been embroiled in controversy. On November 1 a member of the unit, stationed in La Ceiba, was captured while kidnapping a San Pedro Sula businessman in San Pedro Sula.

The same officer's police-issued gun had been found in a car belonging to kidnappers "a few years ago", but "nothing came of it."

To hear the National Police tell it, it was just a coincidence that the Anti-Kidnapping Unit was combing the area where the six or seven bodies turned up, all on a single hacienda in the aldea of Ocotillal, Patuca, Olancho.

A coincidence that strains credulity, don't you think?

Oscar Estrada: "La vida no vale nada" (Life is worth nothing)

Honduran film-maker Oscar Estrada weighs in on Vos el Soberano about the rush to attribute the multiple homicide in a factory in San Pedro Sula to "gang rivalry" that has received such unquestioning coverage in the English-language media. It would be wonderful if some of the reporters who find the story-line they are reporting so compelling would present even a bit of the context he provides:

At whom does the horror point?

When in 2007 I began work on the documentary "El Porvenir", seeking to understand and portray the most complex massacre that up until that moment had occurred in the country, in which 69 people lost their life in the penal center of La Ceiba at the hands of the prison guards in alliance with the common prisoners, one thing motivated me: I knew very well and wanted to present it that way in the film, that if as a population we allowed this frightening crime (and another four massacres that occurred in the same period) to be lost in oblivion, the horror would end by catching up with us.

In those dark years of the mano dura, public opinion that the media of communication manipulated at will succeeded in demonizing gang-member youth in such a way that, without subterfuge, many people publicly said that the massacre was good, since according to them it annihilated delinquents that otherwise would cause more damage to society.

The war against the gains was won physically eliminating almost all the gang members of the time, hence the fame of personages like Oscar Alvarez, to the point that today the gangs barely appear in the media spectrum that seeks constantly to create internal enemies to justify state repression.

But the robberies, extortion, rapes, assassinations, dismemberment of corpses, massacres and the rest of the crimes committed-- supposedly-- by the gangs continue happening. Every day in Honduras there are reported between 10 and 14 violent deaths, many of them by firearms and the numbers continue rising placing Honduras in the list of the most violent countries of the continent, only behind Mexico and Colombia.

Then came the Coup d'Etat and those persons who devised (or allowed to pass) the massacres, returned to appear stronger and unpunished. The government of the mano dura returned, now with the face of Christian humanism, to impose by force the reconciliation and unity of the gravedigger.

Who at that time was Minister of Security today continues being it and his practice, now less in the media because anti-insurgency can be carried off only in a secret fashion, continues as well to be repressive.

Who at that time was the president of Congress, today is that of the republic and, like Ricardo Maduro on the 4th of April 2003 left the country on the day of the massacre, so as not to be witness to the pain and indignation that left the dead wholesale.

In this country life is worth nothing. Literally speaking. With fifty dollars you can pay an assassin so that he will eliminate a person, with fifty dollars more you can eliminate the assassin and the traces of the crime. At 100 dollars per death, 1900 lempiras at the present exchange rate, the impunity of barbarism has been embedded in the depths of this Honduras that today falls on us.

Yesterday, while some of us marched following the call of the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular for a national civic strike, demanding among other things a raise in the minimum wage, respect for the labor laws, a halt to repression and violations of human rights, in San Pedro Sula, in a barrio that carries as its name Cabañas (ex-president of the 19th century, bulwark of Morazanism and of the ethics of power), in a small shoe factory, Marxist symbol of the worker, 19 young workers were assassinated, some of them apparently members of the resistance.

Beyond the symbolism of the massacre, it has to be clear that an act of terrorism of this nature is not done improvisationally. Calculated were the place where the crime was to be carried out, their routes of arrival and escape; calculated also the hour and the day. The assassins know very well how to create terror, for this they have been shaped in in this they are professionals.

While the bodies of the youths were carried away by the forensic doctor, Wong Arévalo, unconditional spokesman of the Coup and apologist for the violations of human rights squawked about the inactivity of the police and the intelligence corps. Not so much for the massacre (which he also did to a lesser extent), so much as for the windows of his building that the demonstration broke in its wake. "This group is only comparable with organized crime", shouted Wong Arévalo and his claim echoes the declarations of the prosecution that announced it would prosecute the members of the Frente de Resistencia for "illicit association".

There is a clear effort in the media of communication to link both events: the attack with stones on the golpista channels and the massacre in Cabañas. In this effort they mix maliciously to make believe that the resistance, while it is not directly responsible for this massacre, are equally detestable and dangerous and, the same as the gangs 10 years ago, any action of the system against us is justified.

It is interesting, in contrast to the other massacres, that in this terrorist act golpismo claims the inaction and "inefficiency" of its super Minister of Security Oscar Alvarez and demand immediate actions in respect to it.

It is very improbable that justice will be done. The most likely is that they will arrest some scapegoat to calm the demands of public opinion and will try to justify the massacre with the already trite "settling of accounts".

I was right. We as a society allowed impunity to embed itself like a malign cancer and today the horror points at us.

8 of September, 2010

Mano dura is literally "strong hand", the signature policy of Oscar Alvarez in his first incarnation as Security Minister of Honduras during the term of President Ricardo Maduro. Similar policies were widely implemented throughout Central America. In Honduras, they involved criminalizing gang membership, encouraging collaboration in policing by the armed forces, and formation of extrajudicial death squads targeting youths without apparent concern about whether those killed were guilty of any crime, or even actually were gang members. The majority of these killings went unsolved, and indeed, uninvestigated. Involvement of the security forces was widely suspected.

Anti-gang legislation was based on establishing "illicit association" as a crime. So the citation of "illicit association" as a supposed crime by the members of the resistance who marched in conjunction with the general strike is laden with disturbing overtones.

Mayanization in action: erasing Pech history

A story that caught my eye today, from the Bulgarian site FOCUS Information Agency (billing itself as "the first Bulgarian private information agency" and "the most preferred Bulgarian electronic media both in Bulgaria and abroad"), simultaneously illustrates the complexity of Honduran cultural history, and the narrowing effects of what historian Dario Euraque has dubbed mayanization: the collapse of all the diversity of Honduras' pluralistic indigenous heritage into one category, as generalized "Maya".

The story reports on an initiative by the "Friendship Society Bulgaria – Honduras" who will be traveling to La Ceiba, a city on the north coast of Honduras, east of San Pedro Sula. There, they say, is found the only river in the world named after their native country, the Rio Bulgaria:

Inquiries have shown that a Bulgarian community has been living in the Central American country for 100 years. At the beginning of 20 century they discovered an unknown river and named it Bulgaria in honor of their native country.

That brought me only a moment's pause. While I had no previous knowledge of a Bulgarian immigrant population, the North Coast is incredibly diverse, and waves of immigrants around the turn of the 20th century were drawn there by the business opportunities created by internationalization of the banana industry.

The expedition will bring Honduran photographers Nimer Alvarado and Mervin Corales to trace the course of this river from its headwaters near Tegucigalpita (a small town, not the capital city), as it runs from Pico Bonito, one of Honduras' astonishing national parks, to La Ceiba.

So far, so good. The article notes that the photographic trek is

carried out in cooperation with the culture center in La Ceiba.

This is one of the local "Casas de Cultura", an initiative pushed forward under former Minister of Culture Rodolfo Pastor Fasquelle beginning in his first term in that position between 1994 and 1996. Casas de Cultura are intended to encourage public participation in the exploration of specifically local histories. It would seem like nothing could be more localized than a coherent Bulgarian community with sufficient sense of national origin to lead them to name a local landmark in memory of that country.

But wait:

The photographs taken will be displayed in an exhibition called Rio Bulgaria – the Bulgarian Presence in the Land of Maya [emphasis added]

So in what sense were Bulgarians living near La Ceiba "in the land of the Maya"? None, really.

We do know quite a lot about the prehispanic people of the north coast of Honduras. They lived in towns, the largest of which probably had populations of a few thousand people, whose remains are recognizable as mounds today, mapped by archaeologists visiting the area since the first half of the 20th century. At least one large archaeological site is directly adjacent to La Ceiba itself, although not developed for visitation. Based on ceramics, it probably dated to the Classic period-- more or less 500-1000 AD. And, also based on these ceramics, the people living near La Ceiba were not the same as the people of Copan, who we refer to today as Maya.

Who were the people living near La Ceiba? To answer that question, we enter into speculative territory, and need to take into account how archaeologists know who lived anywhere. The common approach is to take the people who Europeans described in the 16th century as most likely descendants of those who had lived in the same place earlier. Notice that this means we assume that people stayed in place, unless there is some strong evidence that they moved; this conservative assumption can sometimes be misleading.

But if we take this common approach, then the likely people of the area around La Ceiba would be the ancestors of the indigenous group today known as Pech, previously called Paya. Pech are recognized as the indigenous people who occupied the island of Roatan in the sixteenth century. The northeast coast opposite the Bay Islands was the earliest focus of Spanish occupation, including massive slave raiding of the indigenous population. This began a long history of depletion of Pech population, including forced resettlement and voluntary movement away from exploitation.

The surviving Pech are among the indigenous groups officially recognized by the State of Honduras, under ILO 160, the Convention Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries of 1989, which was ratified in 1995. According to Minority Rights Group International (MRG), an NGO tracking global diversity, today there are about 2000 Pech who

have resisted total assimilation and, under the national bilingual programme, have developed Pech-language courses and Pech teachers.

In fact, you can find a YouTube video of Pech children singing the Honduran national anthem in translation.

Does it matter that a promotional notice of a pretty bizarre "cultural" exchange between Bulgaria, of all places, and Honduras, erases the historical connection of Pech to the land they once occupied, and replaces it with a generalized "Maya" identity?

Well, yes, it does. Cultural diversity has been a focus of struggle in Honduras for decades. In these struggles, the erasure of other pasts and their replacement with a single Maya past breaks connections between contemporary people and the territory they once occupied. It can lead to investment in understanding one valued indigenous culture to the exclusion of understanding the others that Honduras recognizes. And it undermines attempts fostered by some Honduran intellectuals to forge a national identity that recognizes historical complexity for a nation today working to accommodate various forms of difference.

As MRG puts it

For most of its post-independence history the culture of national unity forged by the state has been on the basis of a mestizo ideal... As a consequence traditional indigenous and minority populations have historically been marginalized, ignored or discriminated against....

This despite the fact that

Unlike other countries of the region, in the 1980s Honduras officially recognized the multicultural composition of its society and the need to protect the economic, cultural and human rights of its ethnic peoples. This helped to create an official space for indigenous and minority populations to work towards having their rights recognized and their needs addressed.

So yes, it matters when a photographic exhibition planned to be shown nationally and internationally erases local identity. And it is especially ironic when this takes place in the context of re-discovering the complexity of European heritages of modern Honduras.

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A historical footnote: the erasure of Pech identity and its replacement by Maya identity has a long literary history.

When Christopher Columbus made his only landfall on the mainland of the Americas in 1502, it was on the north coast of Honduras, across from the Bay Islands-- that is, in the region of La Ceiba. He had first captured a canoe off the island of Guanaja, which, like Roatan, was likely inhabited by Pech speaking people. Most reports today identify the canoe as "Maya traders", ignoring the original accounts, written closest to the time of the incident. These clearly identify the canoe as coming from one of the islands, and its passengers as local people.

Most pernicious, modern accounts base the identification of this canoe on a sixteenth-century general historian, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, who wrote that

this vast region [the mainland of northern Honduras] is divided into two parts, one called Taïa and the other called Maïa

Or, that is what he is said to have written. In fact, the manuscript of his book clearly has "Païa", not "Taïa", the name previously used for the people who call themselves Pech.