TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras—Carolina Echeverría didn’t think twice about opening the door to a group of people covered from head to toe in medical PPE. Her husband Andrés Urtecho, the former national police chief of Honduras, was sick with COVID-19.
But as Urtecho watched from the security camera feed in the room where he was isolating, the five supposed health workers seized Echeverría. They had not come to offer treatment, but to carry out an assassination.
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He rushed out to save his wife.
“I went out into the hall with the gun in my hand and fired about 11 shots,” said Urtecho in an interview with a local radio station, who took a bullet to the leg during the exchange.
When his gun jammed, the assassins brought Echeverría into the hall with a pistol pointed at her head. “My wife turned her face towards me and then they shot her in the left temple,” he said.
The assassins fled, shedding their disposable gowns before hopping into a waiting taxi.
Echeverría, 60, was both a lawyer and a politician—two professions that carry great risk in one of the world’s most crime-ridden and corrupt countries. At this point, it isn’t clear whether she or her husband was the primary target of the attack.
In recent years, Urtecho, 68, who is also a lawyer, has represented several clients with links to organized crime, including a former legislator who is awaiting sentencing on drug trafficking charges in New York.
The July 25 attack on the couple’s home in an exclusive neighborhood in Tegucigalpa, the capital, left little doubt that the assailants were hired professionals. In recent years, criminals in Honduras have disguised themselves as police or military officers to commit murder or stage kidnappings. But this appears to be the first time that assassins have taken advantage of the pandemic to pose as medical personnel.
Finding out how they knew that there was someone in the house sick with COVID-19 could be key to the investigation. “That information could only be known by people in the house, where there were three workers, a niece, my wife, my son and his wife,” said Urtecho.
Echeverría was registered to run in this November’s general election to take back her seat in Congress, where she represented her home department of Gracias a Dios from 2006 to 2010. Her region is part of a sparsely populated, coastal area known as the Mosquitia that is a major transshipment point for drug traffickers smuggling cocaine from South America to the U.S.
Urtecho said that his wife, who was running for the opposition Liberal Party, had rejected $400,000 to give up her spot on the ballot, but that he didn’t know who offered her the money and wanted her out of the election.
In Honduras, which U.S. prosecutors have called a “narco-state,” politics and drug trafficking have long been intertwined. The killings of numerous politicians have been linked to organized crime, and several have been accused or convicted of drug trafficking, including the Liberal Party legislator who represented Gracias a Dios from 2014 to 2018.
Echeverría, a mother of four, was laid to rest in her remote hometown in Gracias a Dios. Police have reportedly so far only detained the driver of the taxi used as a getaway car, but it isn’t clear if he was part of the assassination team.
