The former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández, once an ally of the United States in the fight against drug trafficking in Central America, was found guilty this Friday of importing cocaine into this country and the use of weapons, which could lead him to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Judge Kevin Castel set a tentative date of June 26 to sentence Hernández (also known as JOH), who is 55 years old and who years ago boasted of his close relationship with the United States.
However, the US Government has insistently stated both in documents and during the trial in New York, which today ended with the guilty verdict, that the former president said he wanted to “shove drugs under the noses of the gringos.” , and that “they weren’t even going to notice.” A witness for the Prosecutor’s Office, accountant José Sánchez, claimed to have heard that comment during a meeting that Hernández allegedly had with a drug trafficker.
He had already recounted that same dialogue during the drug trafficking trial opened in New York against Tony Hernández, Juan Orlando’s younger brother and former deputy for the National Party, sentenced in 2021 to life imprisonment.
The former president already seemed to be in the eye of the storm during his brother’s trial – before Judge Castel himself – but he always denied his relationship with drug traffickers, alleging that the testimonies that implicated him were false.
False or not, those same drug traffickers returned to sit in the witness chair at his trial to accuse him again of having accepted bribes in exchange for protecting drug trafficking through Honduras.
The accusations against Juan Orlando cover from 2004 to 2022, a time during which the US maintained its relations with Honduras while investigating the politician’s participation in drug trafficking, an investigation that also included several Honduran drug traffickers and Tony, who was at his side. “present” manner during his brother’s trial.
Tony Hernández was mentioned several times for his relationship with several cartels and having received the million dollars that, according to the accusation, the Sinaloa cartel donated in 2013 for his brother’s presidential campaign.
For its part, his defense presented the former president as a kind of champion in the fight to stop the passage of drugs through Honduras, and highlighted the laws he adopted since the presidency of the national Congress (2010-2014) to hold traffickers responsible. for his crime in promoting a constitutional amendment for the extradition of Hondurans as well as the confiscation of assets resulting from illicit money, among others.
Ironically, both laws ended up harming Hernández when he was extradited to the United States in 2022, two months after leaving the presidency, and several properties were confiscated.
The defense also highlighted its relationship with John Kelly, former head of the Southern Command and later head of the presidential office under Donald Trump, who in 2015 praised the Hernández Government and its efforts to combat drug trafficking and protect its citizens from violence, despite the fact that weeks earlier Human Rights Watch had pointed out the “rampant crime and impunity regarding human rights” in that country.
“I had a policy against all those people because I couldn’t stand them,” said the former president, referring to the drug traffickers, when he decided to testify at his own trial, in which he also said that he asked Kelly, then head of the Southern Command, for help with which met several times to stop the flow of drugs passing through Honduras.
However, the US accused him of having turned his country into a “narco-state” which he transformed into a kind of “highway” for the entry of thousands of kilos of cocaine into the United States.
