Digna Asusena Valle Valle was for decades the matriarch of the Valles, one of Honduras’ most important drug trafficking family clans. For years, the family established important criminal and political networks that established them as key intermediaries for trafficking cocaine from Colombia to the United States. However, the arrest of Digna Asusena in 2014 spelled the beginning of the end for the Valles’ criminal empire.
History
Digna Asusena — the eldest of the Valle siblings — was born on December 15, 1966, in the municipality of La Encarnacion, in the department of Ocotepeque, in western Honduras.
Before drug trafficking, the Valle family was dedicated to cattle rustling and cigarette smuggling. In the 1990s, the family moved into drug trafficking, establishing themselves as key intermediaries in transporting cocaine from Colombia to Honduras, and from there to Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States.
The peak of their success came in 2009, when a coup in Honduras created chaos that allowed cocaine to flow more easily through the country. From that point on, the Valles were regularly shipping multiple tons of cocaine to the United States.
While her brothers Miguel Arnulfo and Luis Alonso were the leaders of the criminal organization, Digna Asusena played an important role in the family’s finances. She was also a key figure in maintaining the Valle’s social control over the community of El Espíritu — primarily through the power of money and guns.
Digna Asusena was captured on July 20, 2014, in the city of Miami, United States. Soon after that, the family’s decline began. Authorities seized more than 50 of the family’s properties in August that year. Then in October, her brothers, Miguel Arnulfo, Luis Alonso, and Jose Inocencio were captured and later extradited to the United States.
In February 2015, Digna Asusena pleaded guilty to drug trafficking to obtain a reduced sentence in the United States. A few months later, she was sentenced to 11 years and two months in prison, with five years of probation. But her sentence was reduced, and she was released early, in November 2018, after becoming a witness for US authorities and providing important information about collaborators from the family’s drug trafficking and money laundering network. Since then, she has been living in the state of Texas, after the US government accepted her request for political asylum.
Criminal Activity
Digna Asusena Valle played an important role in her family’s drug trafficking activities, acting as a liaison with other criminal actors; coordinating the logistics of drug shipments to the United States, Guatemala, and Mexico; and managing the money sent to Colombia.
She and the rest of her family laundered drug money through coffee-growing companies, cattle ranches, gyms, hardware stores, cable television companies, and hotels.
The Valles also appropriated hundreds of hectares of land on the border with Guatemala, which were used for drug trafficking.
Geography
The center of operations for Digna Asusena Valle and the Valles was the department of Copán, in western Honduras, on the border with Guatemala. Their influence was concentrated mainly in the small town of El Espíritu. However, the family’s influence also extended to the department of Cortés, in the northwest of the country.
Allies and Enemies
Digna Asusena Valle and her family had widespread connections that included powerful criminals and politicians in Honduras and nearby countries, such as Mexico. One of her key allies was Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias “El Chapo,” the top leader of the Sinaloa Cartel. In fact, according to testimonies from residents of El Espíritu reported by news outlets, El Chapo used to visit the Valle family in Honduras while he was evading justice after escaping from prison in 2001.
During one of those visits, in 2013, El Chapo met with Antonio “Tony” Hernandez, brother of then-Honduran presidential candidate Juan Orlando Hernández. The meeting was arranged through Amilcar Ardón, the mayor of El Paraíso, a small Honduran town, who later testified in US courts that Chapo delivered large sums of money to Hernández’s campaign in exchange for protection for his Honduran allies, the Valle family.
However, the deal appeared to collapse following Digna Asusena’s arrest. This led some of the Valle brothers to launch an attempt on the life of Juan Orlando Hernández, as revenge for the capture of their sister.
Prospects
Following the capture of Digna Asusena and the brothers of the Valle clan, some of her sons were allegedly left in charge of the family’s criminal businesses.
Like Digna Asusena, some of her siblings have already served their sentences in the United States. However, unlike her, they have returned to Honduras. This includes Jose Inocente Valle, the youngest of the brothers, who after serving a sentence for drug trafficking in the United States returned to Honduras in 2023, where he remains free.