By Gustavo Palencia
TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) – A former Honduran presidential candidate who confessed to laundering drug money arrived in his home country on Friday afternoon, after serving a three-year sentence in a U.S. prison.
Some members of former minister Yani Rosenthal’s opposition Liberal Party said he should run in the November 2021 election.
A banker and former lawmaker, Rosenthal landed in the northern city of San Pedro Sula on a private plane and was greeted by supporters, some with banners that read “Yani for president”
Honduras’ political elite in recent years has become entangled with traffickers that use the Central American nation as a staging post for cocaine moving from Colombia to the United States.
President Juan Orlando Hernandez’s brother, a former lawmaker, last year was convicted of drug trafficking in a U.S. trial in which accusations were aired linking the president to cartels. Hernandez has denied wrongdoing.
Rosenthal, a member of a prominent and politically connected business family, held the post of minister of the presidency from 2006 to 2008.
“We want him to be the Liberal Party’s presidential candidate, and then to become the president of Honduras,” legislator Christian Saavedra said.
Saavedra said Rosenthal was the best option to unite the Liberal Party, one of the country’s two traditional ruling forces.
Some 14 of the party’s 26 congress members want the 55-year-old Rosenthal to run, he said. Rosenthal has not said if he would seek the candidacy.
In 2017, a federal court in New York sentenced Rosenthal to three years imprisonment and ordered him to pay a fine of $2.5 million after he pleaded guilty to laundering money for the Los Cachiros gang through companies under the Inversiones Continental group his family owned. Most of the companies have since shut.
One of his cousins, Yankel Rosenthal, a former minister for Hernandez, was sentenced to five months in prison for the same offense. Having served his sentence, he also returned to Honduras.
(Editing by Leslie Adler)
