The Montes Bobadilla clan is a Honduran drug trafficking organization based in the remote village of Francia, in Honduras’ northern department of Colón. It is one of the country’s oldest trafficking networks and has been a key driver of the recent expansion of coca crops cultivated for cocaine production in the country. 

The Montes Bobadilla clan has long corrupted elements of the Honduran state and helped finance the winning 2013 campaign of disgraced former President Juan Orlando Hernández. The clan’s leader, Juan Carlos Montes Bobadilla, is one of the most wanted criminals in Honduras and the United States, with the US State Department offering a $5 million bounty for information leading to his capture.

History 

The Montes Bobadilla network was reportedly founded in the 1980s by Pedro Garcia Montes, a Honduran national who moved cocaine through the country on behalf of Colombia’s powerful Cali Cartel. Montes climbed the cartel’s ranks and eventually moved to Colombia to become its senior accountant. 

Pedro recruited his cousin, Alex Adan Montes Bobadilla, to oversee the logistics of the group’s operation in Honduras, a role that included coordinating deliveries of cocaine by speedboat and laundering drug proceeds. The Cali Cartel collapsed in 1995, but the Montes Bobadilla network continued to move both their own drug shipments and the shipments of other traffickers, charging a 10% fee for consignments that transited their territory. 

Their clients included the Valles and the Cachiros, two of Honduras’ largest trafficking organizations. Together, the groups coordinated the import and transport of multi-ton cocaine shipments from Colombia to Honduras’ remote eastern departments of Colón and Gracias a Dios using a variety of trafficking methods, including planes, boats, and submarines. 

As their power grew, the Montes Bobadilla family and their criminal associates increasingly corrupted security forces and became involved in brazen acts of violence. In 2009, the clan helped finance the murder of Honduras’ top police official and anti-drugs chief, Julián Arístides González. Years after the murder, leaked video footage confirmed that the assassins who ultimately carried out the hit were police officials on the payroll of multiple criminal groups, and the execution was planned inside the Honduran National Police headquarters. 

The Montes Bobadilla clan also became close to Honduras’ political elite and funneled at least $300,000 of drug money into the winning presidential campaign of former President Juan Orlando Hernández. At the time, a key leader of the clan, Herlinda Ramos Bobadilla, boasted of the group’s contribution at a party held for the brother of Honduras’ then-President Porfirio Lobo. The festivities were attended by representatives of Honduras’ other large drug trafficking organizations. 

The fortunes of the Montes Bobadilla clan were radically transformed by the unexpected fall of their former business partners, the Valles and the Cachiros. While these criminal groups helped propel Hernández to power, their relationship with him quickly soured after Hernández extradited drug traffickers linked to the Valle network to the United States. 

In response to the extraditions, members of the Valles hatched a plan to assassinate Hernández. The plot was ultimately foiled by Honduran security forces, and Hernández doubled down on his effort to extradite the Valles. 

As US prosecutors gathered more information from extradited members of Honduran criminal groups, the leaders of the Cachiros also felt pressured to surrender to US authorities. One of them, Devis Rivera, filmed videos on a spy watch, showing how the traffickers bribed high-level Honduran politicians, apparently in an attempt to collect evidence before his detention that could potentially reduce his sentence. 

The leftover business, abandoned by these two groups, fell into the hands of the Montes Bobadilla clan, which was quietly catapulted into becoming a billion-dollar organization, according to a source inside Honduras’ Attorney General’s Office. 

The downfall of their former associates also seemed to teach the group the importance of keeping a low profile despite their newfound wealth. And while Honduran security forces occasionally took swipes at the clan’s properties, they never managed to meaningfully challenge the group’s power. 

That low profile unraveled on May 2, 2022, however, after the US State Department offered $15 million for information leading to the capture of three people they identified as heading the network: brothers Juan Carlos Montes Bobadilla and Tito Montes Bobadilla, and their mother Herlinda Bobadilla. Within weeks, Honduran security forces conducted a violent sweep in Colón that led to the detention of Herlinda and the death of her son, Tito. 

Only Juan escaped. He remains the last fugitive with the Montes Bobadilla surname. 

Leadership 

Juan Carlos Montes Bobadilla, alias “Mono,” is the current leader of the Montes Bobadilla clan and one of Honduras’ most wanted criminals. He took de facto control of the group in 2022 after narrowly escaping a counter-drug trafficking operation that led to the death of his brother and the arrest of his mother and the group’s former leader, Erlinda Ramos Bobadilla. 

The Montes Bobadilla network is an archetypal family-based clan, a type of criminal group that has increasingly supplanted the role of large cartels in Honduras’ drug trafficking landscape, according to analysts consulted by InSight Crime. Without centralized control, these clans work together to form networks that are more resistant to incursions from the security forces. 

Members of the Montes and Montes Bobadilla families have led the clan since it emerged in the 1980s, though they have frequently recruited high-level members from outside the family to manage the group’s logistical operations. 

Geography 

The Montes Bobadilla clan is based in Francia, a remote village in Colón, and they control large swathes of Honduras’ Caribbean coast. The region is a transshipment center for cocaine, with traffickers frequently cutting hidden runways into surrounding jungle, crash landing planes on rural roads, or beaching drug-laden speedboats onto nearby shores. 

Francia also lies along the only road connecting the mainland to Honduras’ most eastern department, Gracias a Dios, a key node on both air and sea routes for cocaine – giving the group strategic power over the drug shipments of rival groups.       

The Montes Bobadilla network has long mastered a variety of trafficking methods, including the use of aircraft, land vehicles, boats, and narco submarines, according to a US indictment against them. In 2024, Honduras military forces even discovered two new artificial canals, cut from the sea to an inland warehouse, allegedly used by the group to receive and store drug shipments. 

Colón is the epicenter of Honduras’ nascent coca industry. In recent years, at least two coca plantations with clandestine laboratories have been linked by security forces to the Montes Bobadilla clan. The production of coca paste in Honduras allows the group to diversify their income and cut costs, analysts told InSight Crime. 

The region has also long registered Honduras’ highest homicide rates and is a center for drug trafficking, drug production, and vicious land conflicts. 

Allies and Enemies

The Montes Bobadilla clan successfully leveraged their territorial command of remote regions in eastern Honduras to become part of the drug trafficking logistics of groups that would have otherwise been their rivals, like the Valles and Cachiros. 

The Montes Bobadilla network has no known enemies. 

Prospects

The flexible alliances cultivated by the Montes Bobadilla clan, combined with their strategic stranglehold of a key drug trafficking route, have allowed the group to thrive as others have foundered. While key members of the Montes Bobadilla family have been detained, the group has continued to operate and diversify their activities, pointing to their continued strength. 

The clan has historically used people from outside the family to manage their criminal operations, something that has increased the group’s resilience to the capture of previous clan kingpins. Their remote Colón base, far from the clutches of security forces with access to tracts of forest, mountains, and sea, will complicate efforts to detain the remaining members of the group. 

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