Two family members of Honduras’s Socialist far-left radical President Xiomara Castro resigned from their government positions over the weekend amid an ongoing probe of alleged ties with drug traffickers against lawmaker Carlos Zelaya, President Castro’s brother-in-law.
José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, Castro’s nephew, resigned from his position as Defense Minister while his father, Carlos Zelaya, resigned from his position as lawmaker and secretary of the Honduran Parliament. Carlos Zelaya is the brother of former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, husband of current President Xiomara Castro and who was deposed in a 2009 coup.
Zelaya Rosales explained on Saturday through a social media post that his decision to resign as Defense Minister is so that he can be “freely investigated” by the ongoing probe against his father.
Carlos Zelaya is being investigated by Honduran prosecutors after it was revealed through a now-growing scandal that he held meetings with known Honduran drug traffickers in 2013. Zelaya admitted on Saturday that he met in 2013 with Juan Ramón Matta Waldurraga, son of Honduran drug trafficker Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros — one of the leaders of the Los Cachiros drug gang who presently serves a life sentence in a U.S. prison since 1990.
Zelaya also admitted that a “contribution to the electoral campaign” for the ruling Liberty and Refoundation (Libre) party was offered in the encounter by the drug traffickers but that it was allegedly never received.
“Now I am convinced that the meeting was recorded, I fell into the trap, I assume my responsibility, there is a video [of the meeting],” whose only objective was ‘to talk about an offer of a contribution to the campaign,’” Zelaya told reporters after giving his statement to the prosecutor’s office.
“That meeting never had the endorsement of President [Manuel] Zelaya, he never had neither the endorsement nor the accompaniment, much less knowledge of that meeting, nor did President Castro, it was a unilateral meeting on my part,” he continued.
Matta Waldurraga, who Zelaya admitted meeting in 2013, was absolved by a Honduran court of money laundering charges in December 2023 after he was extradited from Colombia in 2022. Matta Waldurraga pleaded guilty to the crime of conspiracy to traffic drugs at a New York Court in 2017, serving two years in prison on drug trafficking charges.
The resignation of former Defense Minister Zelaya Rosales and lawmaker Carlos Zelaya as part of the drug trafficking probe comes days after President Xiomara Castro announced the abrupt termination of Honduras’s extradition treaty with the United States, which reportedly allowed some 50 Hondurans to face trial in U.S. courts on money laundering charges — including former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was extradited to the United States in 2022 and sentenced to 45 years in prison in June on drug and firearm-trafficking charges.
Castro claimed through a Wednesday social media post that the termination of the extradition treaty with the U.S. was in response to alleged “interference and interventionism,” as well the U.S. government’s “intention to manage the politics of Honduras through its embassy and other representatives.”
“They [the U.S.] attack, ignore and violate with impunity the principles and practices of international law, which promote respect for the sovereignty and self-determination of peoples, non-intervention and universal peace. Enough,” the socialist president said.
The termination of the extradition treaty follows statements given on Wednesday by the U.S. ambassador to Tegucigalpa Laura Dogu, who expressed concerns over a recent meeting between now-former Defense Minister José Manuel Zelaya Rosales and other officials with Venezuela’s Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López on the sidelines of the 4th CISM World Cadet Games, a military sports event held in Venezuela on mid-August.
Padrino López is one of the officials of Venezuela’s socialist Maduro regime that stands accused by U.S. authorities of being a leading figure of the Cartel of the Suns, an intercontinental cocaine trafficking operation run by high-ranking members of the Venezuelan military and by some leading figures of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) that seeks to “flood” the United States with cocaine to harm its people.
The Venezuelan Defense Minister is also one of the Maduro regime officials at the forefront of dictator Nicolás Maduro’s ongoing brutal repressive campaign of protesters and dissidents in the aftermath of the July 28 sham presidential election, which Maduro fraudulently insists he “won.” As of last week, the crackdown has left 25 confirmed deaths and the arbitrary detention of more than 2,400 individuals — including more than 120 minors between the ages of 14 and 17.
“We are very concerned about what has happened in Venezuela, it was quite surprising for me to see the Minister of Defense and the head of the [Honduran] Joint Chiefs of Staff sitting next to a drug trafficker in Venezuela,” Ambassador Dogu told reporters last week.
On Sunday, President Castro appointed Rixi Moncada, a 59-year-old lawyer close to the socialist President’s family, as Honduras’s new Defense Minister following Zelaya Rosales’s resignation. Castro made the announcement during a speech given at the start of the Central American nation’s month-wide independence celebrations.