The Honduran government under President Xiomara Castro has been negotiating since May with the UN to set up this mission, dubbed the International Commission Against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (CICIH).
The agreement to establish in Honduras an international commission backed by the United Nations with a mandate to help fight corruption, similar to the one that had operated in Guatemala, will be signed within the day, the foreign ministry of the Central American country announced on Wednesday .
The Honduran government under President Xiomara Castro has been negotiating since May with the UN to set up this mission, dubbed the International Commission Against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (CICIH).
President Castro met yesterday in New York with the Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, and the signing of the agreement is expected to take place today, according to Honduran diplomacy.
CICIH will have a role similar to a United Nations-backed entity that began operating in Guatemala in 2008, with judicial members and investigators from abroad.
The UN had agreed to the creation of that commission, CICIG, because organized crime had great influence over key Guatemalan institutions, particularly the prosecution and the police.
CICIG was kicked out of Guatemala in 2019 by the president at the time, Jimmy Morales, who refused to renew its mandate, a few months after declaring the Colombian judge who headed it persona non grata.
Xiomara Castro, the wife of former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted in a bloodless military coup in 2009, made the fight against corruption, backed by the UN, the centerpiece of her election campaign that brought her to power in January.
In November 2021, when she was now president-elect, she began talks on the creation of the commission with UN Secretary-General Guterres.
CICIH has a precedent: the Support Mission Against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (MACCIH), created by the Organization of American States (OAS) and in four years helped to bring to justice dozens of corrupt parliamentarians, public officials and businessmen.
But former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández refused to renew the OAS agreement and the mission ceased operations in January 2020.
Former president Hernandez, 55, was extradited to the US in April on charges that he was involved in the trafficking of some 500 tonnes of cocaine in collaboration with Colombian and Mexican cartels between 2004 and 2022.
According to US prosecutors, Mr Hernandez, who has pleaded not guilty, turned Honduras into a “narco-state”, implicating at least in part the military and police in trafficking drugs to the US market.
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