The former President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, has been sentenced to 45 years in jail after he was convicted of drug crimes by a US court. He was charged guilty in March of conspiring to import drugs such as cocaine into the US and also for the possession of machine guns classified as destructive devices.
Prosecutors in New York have alleged that he ran the Central American Country like a ‘drug state’. Hernández has been found guilty of accepting millions of dollars as bribes from the drug mafia and had protected them from the hands of the law. “He paved a cocaine superhighway to the United States, protected by machine guns,” prosecutors said.
As of now, he has been ordered to pay a fine of 8 million dollars, as a part of his sentence. “I am innocent,” Hernández said at his sentencing hearing, according to the Associated Press. “I was wrongly and unjustly accused.”
The 55-year-old has been detained at a Brooklyn jail since he was extradited to the US. Recently, the judge in Manhattan handling the case denied his request for a new trial. His defence team had claimed that the trial was compromised because a law enforcement agent provided inaccurate testimony stating that cocaine trafficking increased in Honduras while the former president was in power.
However, US District Judge Kevin Castel deemed this mistake insignificant to the charge of conspiring with drug traffickers. “Hernandez’s conviction was based on the testimony, over the course of a three-week trial, of numerous witnesses whose testimony was corroborated in part by phone records and a recovered drug ledger,” Judge Castel wrote.
Hernández served as the president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022 and served a nation of over 10 million people for two consecutive terms. What is interesting to note is that he ran as a law-and-order candidate with the promise of fighting against drug trafficking.
Duly the prosecutors have held him accountable for partnering with, “some of the world’s most prolific narcotics traffickers to build a corrupt and brutally violent empire based on the illegal trafficking of tonnes of cocaine to the United States”.
Three months after his term ended, he was extradited to New York and arrested in April 2022 to face federal charges in the US. He had been regarded as a staunch ally of the US, receiving over $50 million (£39 million) in anti-narcotics assistance along with additional millions in security and military aid for his country.
In 2019, then-President Donald Trump thanked Hernández for “working with the United States very closely”. Hernández returned the favor and thanked the former president and people of America for, “for the support they have given us in the firm fight against drug trafficking”.
During the prosecution, it was found out that he had established links with the drug traffickers that went as far back as 2004, much before he was a candidate for the president, and also the fact that he had aided in smuggling 500 tonnes of cocaine to the US. Several drug traffickers had testified of bribing him during the trials, to traffic cocaine from Colombia and Venezuela through Honduras into the US territory.
Although Hernández’s lawyers had argued that the drug traffickers testified against him for their own gain. Prosecutors have alleged that the supposed money earned from drug trafficking was used in rigging the 2013 and 1017 Presidential elections in his favour. In his denial of the allegations, Hernández claimed that he became a “victim of a vendetta and a conspiracy by organised crime and political enemies”. He is expected to move a plea against his conviction.
In 2021 for a separate drug trial, the Manhattan Court sentenced his brother as well who is a congressman from Honduras, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández is now serving a life sentence. Hernández is not the first in the list of ex-Latin American Presidents facing prosecution in drug trafficking cases. In 1992 Manuel Noriega of Panama faced similar trials in a Miami court in 1992, and similarly, Alfonso Portillo was convicted of money laundering in New York in 2014.
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