Ex-president of Honduras found guilty of drug crimes

Image source, Reuters

Juan Orlando Hernández, the ex-president of Honduras, has been found guilty of drug trafficking charges in a federal US court.

Hernández was convicted on Friday of conspiring to import cocaine into the US, and possessing “destructive devices” including machine guns.

Prosecutors said the ex-president ran Honduras like a “narco-state”, protecting and accepting bribes from drug traffickers.

Hernández now faces life in prison.

The 55-year-old former president had denied any wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty in the case.

He was convicted by a jury in a Manhattan federal court after about two days of deliberations.

Hernández was president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, serving for two consecutive terms.

He initially ran as a law-and-order candidate who promised to address the issue of drug-related crime in the country.

Instead, prosecutors accused him of 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 leaving office, he was extradited to New York and arrested in April 2022 to face federal charges in the US.

Hernández was once seen as a strong US ally. During his leadership of Honduras, the country received more than $50m (£39m) in anti-narcotics assistance from the US, as well as additional millions of dollars in security and military aid.

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

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

Prosecutors later uncovered that Hernández was linked with drug traffickers as far back as 2004, long before he became president, and that he had facilitated the smuggling of around 500 tonnes of cocaine to the US.

They said drug traffickers paid him millions of dollars in bribes to allow cocaine to be smuggled from Colombia and Venezuela through Honduras on to the US.

In one allegation, prosecutors said that Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán had given Tony Hernández – the ex-president’s younger brother – $1m (£778,450) as a bribe for Juan Orlando Hernández.

During his trial, several convicted drug traffickers testified that they had bribed Hernández.

Prosecutors also alleged that he had used the drug money to then bribe officials to manipulate Honduras’ 2013 and 2017 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”.

“I had a policy against all those people because I could not stand them,” Hernández said of drug traffickers when testifying at his own trial. “They did a lot of damage in the country.”

His lawyers argued that those who testified against him were doing so for their own gain.

Hernández has been held at a Brooklyn jail since his extradition.

He will be sentenced at a later date.

Hernández is not the first ex-Latin American head of state to be convicted of a drug-related crime in the US.

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