honduras
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Crazy news coming out of Central America as the former President of Honduras was just sentenced to four decades in prison for moving the kind of weight that would impress El Chapo.
According to the New York Times, Juan Orlando Hernández was just hit with a 45-year sentence in prison after he was found guilty of helping gangs move hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States during his eight-year stint as the president of the small Central American country. Even though he buddied up to the U.S. and presented himself as an anti-drug ally, Hernández was working in conjunction with traffickers to import cocaine into America and was eventually busted for his role in the operation in 2022 after leaving office in disgrace.
Having accumulated millions of dollars for his dirty work from Honduras, Mexico and other countries during his presidency, Hernández was singled out by lower level workers who his lawyers say were lying in an attempt to get lighter prison sentences.
The New York Times reports:
Prosecutors countered that Mr. Hernández’s arguments “reflect an alternate reality.” They wrote that he had protected “his drug trafficking co-conspirators from prosecution and extradition, giving safe harbor to violent, massive cocaine traffickers as they used Honduras as a springboard for pumping cocaine into the United States.”
The verdict in Mr. Hernández’s trial came after weeks of evidence that he had received millions of dollars from drug organizations in Honduras, Mexico and elsewhere. In addition to statements by former traffickers, that evidence included testimony from a Honduran investigator and notebooks with Mr. Hernández’s initials that prosecutors said detailed drug transactions.
By early 2022, when Mr. Hernández was detained in Honduras less than a month after leaving office, he had become deeply unpopular there. His successor as president, Xiomara Castro, accused him of turning the country into a “narco-dictatorship” and officials in the United States said that Mr. Hernández had used drug money during both of his presidential campaigns to bribe election officials and manipulate the vote.
Hernández was eventually convicted and sentenced Wednesday (June 26), in Federal District Court in Manhattan. Though some were upset that Hernández got such a stiff sentence, other’s rejoiced at the news as they blame him for the horrible state that Honduras finds itself in these days.
More from the Times:
Some in the overflow room jeered when Mr. Hernández, dressed in a dark suit, testified in his own defense. At one point he denied associations with drug traffickers even as prosecutors displayed a photograph of him posing at a World Cup soccer match in South Africa with a notorious narco kingpin.
After Mr. Hernández was convicted, crowds of Hondurans celebrated outside the courthouse, chanting in Spanish and displaying an orange prison jumpsuit with handcuffs connected by a long chain. One woman held up a sign reading, “No clemency for narcopolitics.”
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The former president of Honduras was convicted in a federal court of trafficking tons of cocaine into the United States and aiding local cartels.
On Friday (March 8), a Federal District jury in New York City found former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández guilty of conspiracy to import cocaine, illegally using and carrying machine guns, and possessing machine guns as part of a “cocaine-importation conspiracy.” Also known as JOH, the 55-year-old Hernández was charged with smuggling over 500 tons of cocaine into the United States from Colombia and Venezuela via Honduras since 2004, before his ascension to the presidency. “He paved a cocaine super-highway to the United States,” said federal prosecutors during the trial, stating that he worked with the infamous Sinaloa drug cartel headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and enriched himself as the country sank into high levels of corruption and poverty.
Hernández had portrayed himself as a “law and order” candidate with the right-wing Honduras National Party in 2013 on his way to his first term as president. His vows to crack down on traffickers and crime received praise from the Trump administration, but prosecutors aided by a slew of witnesses testified about how much he was allied with the cartels in the country as well as Mexico and other countries who paid him millions. The disgraced politician once said he’d “stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos,” according to witnesses, “and they won’t even notice.” It’s the first such prosecution of a foreign politician since the prosecutions of former Panamanian General Manuel Noriega in 1992 and Guatemala’s Alfonso Portillo in 2014 and comes three years after the conviction of his brother, Juan Antonio on similar charges.
Witnesses for the prosecution included Devis Leonel Rivera, head of the powerful Los Cachiros cartel; Fabio Lobo, the son of former president Porfirio Lobo (2010-2014) and Alexander Ardon, a member of Hernández’s former party. Rivera, who admitted to being involved in 78 murders including that of two American journalists, testified that he personally bribed Hernandez with $250,000. “They should have tried to catch us,” he said on the stand, saying that instead “they allied with us.”Outside of the courthouse, many celebrated the verdict with signs in Spanish reading, “No clemency for narcopolitics.” Hernández is scheduled to be sentenced on June 26 and faces life in prison.
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