A balancing act in Honduras

Post Reports

The Washington Post

Daily News, Politics, News

4.4 • 5.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2021

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As President Biden seeks to reset immigration policy, uncertainty surrounds the U.S. relationship with Honduras and its president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who is implicated in drug trafficking.

For four years, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández built his governing program around the demands of the Trump administration, which in turn stayed out of Honduras’s domestic affairs.

Now, that arrangement is ending, and Hernández is finding himself in a precarious position as the United States pivots from one administration to another.

Mexico City bureau chief Kevin Sieff spent a week with Hernández and his team. He spoke with producer Alexis Diao about that surreal week, and how the biggest threat to Hernández could be an extradition treaty he pushed through himself.

Subscribe to The Washington Post: postreports.com/offer

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports.
0:08.9	I'm Martine Powers.
0:10.4	It's Thursday, February 25th.
0:18.2	One of the things that I think the Honduran government, but also other governments, not
0:22.2	just in Central America, but around the world, figured out, was that under Trump, if you
0:26.8	gave the US government what it wanted, which in Central America was deterring migration,
0:32.9	you could get away with a lot at home.
0:36.1	That's Kevin Seaf, the post-Mexico-City Bureau Chief.
0:40.6	He's been reporting on how foreign leaders have to pivot when a new US president takes
0:45.0	office.
0:46.0	In this case, Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez.
0:50.0	The Trump administration basically had one priority in Central America, and that was stopping
0:54.7	migration.
0:55.7	And so, one of the ways they tried to do that in Central America was signing agreements
1:00.8	with the countries in the northern triangle.
1:03.4	So, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
1:05.6	Now, when an illegal immigrant is arrested at our border, they can be sent to a neighboring
1:10.2	country instead of into a US community.
1:14.0	Prior to my getting here, countries wouldn't accept them.
1:17.3	They would say, no, no, no.
1:18.5	I said, well, you've got to take them first.
1:21.5	So, basically, it created a kind of buffer where asylum seekers had no right effectively
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Washington Post, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Washington Post and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.