Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez faces American justice
This Tuesday, February 20, 2024, the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, is on trial for drug trafficking and alleged arms trafficking in New York, just a few years after leaving office.
President Juan Orlando Hernandez, on December 1, 2021 during an address to the Nation, in Tegucigalpa. © AFP PHOTO / CHONDURAN PRESIDENCY
By: RFI Follow
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Justice can sometimes be very quick. A little over two years ago,
Juan Orlando Hernandez
still presided over the destiny of his country. He was considered a clean man for
Honduras
, and even initially considered by the Trump administration as a reliable ally in the fight against drug trafficking. But sometimes things change, and U.S. law enforcement has been hoarding information about his role in exporting 500 tons of cocaine to the United States for years.
For US federal prosecutors, the former Honduran president had in fact become a drug trafficker and had transformed his small Central American country into a “
narco-state
” with the help of military, police and civilians. His indictment in New York also accuses him of having enriched himself with drug money, of having financed his electoral campaigns and of having engaged in fraud during the 2013 and 2017 elections.
As a result, he was arrested, then extradited in a spectacular and rapid manner after the end of his functions in 2022. American justice accused him of having received bribes worth millions of dollars, he denounced a conspiracy and a revenge of the cartels. He faces life imprisonment. Several times postponed since his extradition from Honduras to the United States in April 2022, the trial of Juan Orlando Hernandez, 55, is to be held for nearly a month in the federal court of the southern jurisdiction of New York, in Manhattan , one of the largest prosecutors in the United States.
His co-defendants plead guilty
Sentence to which his brother, former deputy Tony Hernandez, has already been sentenced by the same New York court for similar facts. Things aren't looking great for the former president, as two of his co-defendants, his cousin and the former Honduran police chief, have chosen to let go and plead guilty. They could be the star witnesses in this trial.
A conviction would make him join other former Latin American leaders tried and convicted in the United States, such as Panamanian Manuel Noriega in 1992 and Guatemalan
Alfonso Portillo
in 2014. In 2023,
Mexico's former wrestling "
czar
" anti-drug minister, former minister Genaro Garcia Luna, was found guilty in New York of drug trafficking. His prison sentence will be pronounced on June 24.
(And with
AFP
)
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