Juan Orlando Hernández: the former president of Honduras is sentenced to 45 years in prison in the US for drug trafficking

Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández received a 45-year prison sentence this Wednesday for drug trafficking crimes in the United States.

A Manhattan court in New York had found him guilty in March conspire to import cocaine into the United States and possessing “destructive devices,” such as machine guns.

New York prosecutors alleged that Hernández had run the Central American country as a “narco-state” and accepted millions of dollars in bribes from drug traffickers to protect them from the law.

“Pavement a cocaine highway towards the United States, protected by machine guns,” prosecutors said in their final arguments before announcing the sentence.

As part of his sentence, he was also ordered to pay a fine of US$8 million.

“I am innocent,” said Hernández at his sentencing hearing, according to the Associated Press agency, and claimed to have been “wrongly and unjustly accused.”

During the hearing, the judge called him a “power-hungry two-faced politician.”

The 55-year-old former president is in custody in a Brooklyn jail (New York) since he was extradited to the United States.

The Manhattan judge overseeing the case last month denied his motion for a new trial after his lawyers argued that the proceedings were tainted by incorrect testimony from a law enforcement officer who testified that cocaine trafficking had increased in Honduras. during the former president’s term.

U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel ruled that the error was “immaterial” in relation to the charge of conspiracy with drug traffickers.

“Hernández’s conviction was based on the testimony, during the course of a three-week trial, of numerous witnesses, whose accounts were partly corroborated by phone records and a recovered drug ledger,” Judge Castel wrote.

Hernandez was president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022 and served two consecutive terms in this nation of more than 10 million people.

He initially ran as a law and order candidate, promising to address the country’s drug crime problem.

However, prosecutors accused him of associating with “some of the world’s largest drug traffickers to build a corrupt and brutally violent empire based on the illegal trafficking of tons of cocaine to the United States.”

Three months after leaving the position, it was extradited to New York and arrested in April 2022 to face federal charges in the United States.

It had previously been considered an important ally of the United States, sending Honduras more than $50 million in anti-drug assistance and several million dollars more in security and military aid.

In 2019, then-President Donald Trump thanked Hernández for “working very closely with the United States.”

Hernández, for his part, thanked Trump and the American people “for the support they have given us in the firm fight against drug trafficking.”

Prosecutors later discovered that Hernández was linked to drug traffickers since 2004long before becoming president, and had facilitated the smuggling of some 500 tons of cocaine into the United States.

They claimed that drug traffickers paid them millions of dollars in bribes to allow cocaine to be smuggled from Colombia and Venezuela through Honduras into the United States.

During the trial, several convicted drug traffickers confessed to bribing Hernández.

His defense argued that those who testified against him did so for their own benefit.

Hernandez also took the stand to testify in his own defense, accusing the witnesses who spoke against him of being “professional liars.”

Prosecutors alleged that he had used drug money to later bribe officials and manipulate the presidential elections in his favor of Honduras from 2013 and 2017.

After denying the accusations, Hernández stated that he became “a victim of a vendetta and a conspiracy by organized crime and political enemies.”

He is expected to appeal his conviction.

His brother, a former congressman from Honduras, was jailed by the same Manhattan court in 2021 on separate drug charges.

Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández is currently serving a life sentence.

Hernández is not the first former Latin American head of state convicted of a drug-related crime in the United States.

Panamanian Manuel Noriega was convicted on drug trafficking charges in a Miami court in 1992, and Alfonso Portillo of Guatemala was sentenced on money laundering charges in a New York court in 2014.

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