Video: How Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros Shaped Honduras’ Drug Trade

Mike: [00:00:00] The legendary Honduran drug trafficker Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros has died in US federal prison. I’m Mike Lasusa, Deputy Director of Content for Insight Crime, and I’m here with Sam Woolston, an Insight Crime investigator based in Honduras. Sam, Matta Ballesteros has been out of the game for decades — he spent over 40 years in US prison — but before that, he was a hugely important figure in the cocaine trade. Tell us who he was and how he got his start in the underworld.

Sam: [00:00:29] It is hard to understate the importance of Matta Ballesteros for the cocaine underworld, Mike. This is one of Honduras’s most prolific traffickers, and what he’s famous for is, he did something really smart:  He was one of the first people to link major organized crime groups in Mexico, who were really good at moving drugs with major organized crime groups in Colombia, who are really good at producing drugs. And Matta Ballesteros in Honduras was exactly in the geographical middle. He had networked extensively with criminal operatives in both countries, so he was the perfect person to make these links. And that really paved the way for exponential increases in the quantities of drugs being shipped between the two countries and ultimately onto the United States and Europe, and other places, as well.

Mike: [00:01:19] As you mentioned, at the peak of his power, his network was responsible for these huge cocaine flows: Up to a third of the cocaine entering the US was moved by his network, according to some estimates. So tell us a little bit more about those geographical advantages and some of the innovations in drug trafficking that Matta Ballesteros introduced that helped him to get to that point.

Sam: [00:01:42] Absolutely. So, Matta Ballesteros in some ways was born in the perfect place, Honduras, which is exactly in the middle between North America and South America. So, that was hugely helpful for him. And he turned Honduras into sort of a logistics hub for cocaine shipments. Before Matta Ballesteros, a lot of the cocaine was flying out of Colombia on planes. Groups like the Medellín Cartel were infamous for having small Caribbean islands, and they’d fly small aircraft out of Colombia and then on into the United States to Miami. The problem with planes is, you can only get so much cocaine on board a plane, and it’s also quite an expensive way of shipping, and it’s quite conspicuous as well.

With Matta Ballesteros, what he did and what started to happen when he was around at the peak of his power is large drug shipments started to be put on boats leaving Colombia, and then they’d come in and sort of hit Central America, particularly Honduras’ North Coast. By the way, this method of trafficking is still super common. And from the Honduran coast, the cocaine would come onto land, and then the traffickers and parts of his network would use multimodal drug shipment methods. So, it might go on land using mules; they might use another boat; they might use a plane. And really, what stands out is with this method, you could move a lot of cocaine, and also, it’s a really resilient cocaine supply chain. So if one method fails, Matta Ballesteros would be there with another way of moving the drugs.

Mike: [00:03:13] And he was around for quite a long time. He operated throughout most of the 1980s. Eventually, he did get caught in 1988 and was sentenced to prison in 1990, and then he spent decades in US federal prison. And in the months before he died, a US federal judge granted him compassionate release, saying that the medical conditions that he was suffering from were really severe, and he should be allowed to die outside of prison.  The government appealed that and reversed that decision, forcing him to stay in prison until he died. And I talked with his lawyer a few weeks ago, and he told me that the government was really interested in keeping Matta Ballesteros behind bars until his death due to his connection to this really infamous murder of a DEA agent in the 1980s. Can you tell us a bit more about that case?

Sam: [00:04:06] Absolutely. So, Juan Matta Ballesteros, one of the most famous things about him, and what’s really well known today, is his alleged involvement in the murder of a DEA agent in Mexico, Enrique Kiki Camarena, who was murdered at the hands of operatives of the Guadalajara Cartel. That was in 1985, and that was a real trigger for the United States. They started taking much stronger actions against the alleged kingpins in various criminal organizations because of that murder. It was a transformative moment. And one of the people that they suspected may have been involved was Matta Ballesteros, although they never were able to prove it in court. He was never convicted. I think they found a hair that they alleged belonged to him at the property where Kiki was tortured and ultimately killed. And I think there were also some hotel records that suggested he may have been in the region during the murder, but the evidence wasn’t strong enough to convict him. So even though it’s probably the reason why he’s most famous, the reason why Matta Ballesteros is so well known, it wasn’t a crime that they could ultimately convict him on. Although it doesn’t surprise me that US authorities would want him to stay in a jail cell.

Mike: [00:05:21] And as you say, the evidence connecting him to the Camarena murder was pretty thin, but there’s significant evidence that he was involved in all kinds of other murderous violence during his reign as a crime kingpin. So, it’s not like we’re talking about somebody who was necessarily wrongly imprisoned, and as you said, he didn’t get convicted in that case. But clearly, he’s somebody that leaves behind a really significant legacy in terms of organized crime in Central America. That being said, his arrest didn’t stop trafficking through the region. Tell us a bit about how things evolved after his capture.

Sam: [00:06:00] Since Matta Ballesteros’ capture, cocaine flows have only grown. We have a production boom in Colombia. When Matta was around, they maybe were producing, I don’t know, a couple of hundred tons. Now it’s over 2,000 tons. You also have a boom in consumption, right? The supply is meeting demand. And so really, cocaine flows going through Honduras are just greater than ever before. Readers will probably know about our cocaine roundup every year that we publish — last year, Honduras seized a record amount of cocaine. The authorities always say that high seizures mean they’re doing a really great job at tackling these criminal groups. But we see that the same trafficking methods that were pioneered by bringing cocaine by go-fast boats from Colombia onto the coast of Honduras, this is a constant. The reason why traffickers use this all the time is because it’s highly profitable. Enough cocaine gets through despite high seizures to make it a really worthwhile method, even though it’s 50 years old.

So, cocaine has just grown in Honduras, despite the arrest of Matta Ballesteros in the 80s, and the country has continued to have new kingpins. People who follow the coverage in Honduras will undoubtedly know about Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president who allegedly was part of a big drug trafficking network with his family, and his brother, Tony Hernández, is in jail, and Juan Orlando is sentenced to 45 years. People said that Juan Orlando Hernández had turned Honduras into a narco-state. But what we see and what his legacy tells us is that Honduras always had massive corruption by drug trafficking networks. It always was a place with impunity for these networks. And despite the arrest of kingpins Matta Ballesteros or Juan Orlando Hernández, drug trafficking just continues.

Mike: [00:07:58] Absolutely. And that’s the reason why we continue to cover Honduras so closely. Thanks, Sam, this was a really interesting conversation. And if you want to learn more about Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros and organized crime in Honduras, please check out our coverage at insightcrime.org. Thank you.

Sam: [00:08:15] Thanks, Mike.