Honduras extradites José Luis Oliva Meza, ‘Lord of the Skies’, to the US on drug trafficking charges

Honduran authorities have extradited this Thursday José Luis Oliva Meza, known as ‘El señor de los cielos’, to the United States to stand trial for alleged drug trafficking offenses.

The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has carried out the transfer of the accused, who was handed over at 08.20 hours to the US authorities at the Hernan Acosta Mejia Air Base, located in the capital, Tegucigalpa, as reported by the newspaper ‘El Heraldo’.

The agents transferred Oliva Meza to the air base, where they gave him medical examinations and took his fingerprints. Subsequently, thirteen agents guarded him until he arrived at the aircraft.

A Texas court asked in April 2021 to prosecute Oliva, also a naturalized Nicaraguan national with the identity Raduan Omar Zamora Mayorga, for “conspiring to manufacture and distribute five kilograms or more” of a mixture with cocaine “with the intent, knowledge, and reasonable cause to believe that such substance would be unlawfully imported into the United States.”

On May 15, the defendant — who had already been arrested in August 2020 for illegal weapons possession — was arrested in the northern municipality of La Ceiba.

A month later, the trial judge resolved to grant the extradition of ‘The Lord of the Skies’ to the Eastern District Court of Texas.

For almost a decade, the Latin American country has extradited more than thirty Hondurans to the United States, most of them between 2016 and 2017, the newspaper said.