Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez’s trial for drug trafficking charges in the United States is set to begin on Tuesday, where a New York jury will determine if he governed Honduras as a “narco-state”.
Hernandez, who held office from 2014 to 2022, had close ties to Washington and received significant aid in anti-narcotics and military support. He was supported by former President Donald Trump for his crackdown on migration.
However, three months after his presidency ended, he was charged by federal prosecutors in Manhattan for allegedly accepting millions of dollars in bribes from cocaine traffickers. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland accused him of abusing his power to operate the country as a “narco-state”.
These charges came after his brother, former congressman Tony Hernandez, was convicted of U.S. drug charges and sentenced to life in prison. A prosecutor at his trial claimed that Juan Orlando Hernandez protected his brother.
Juan Orlando Hernandez has pleaded not guilty to three counts of cocaine importation conspiracy and illegal weapons possession. He has been in detention at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center since his extradition in April 2022.
If convicted on all counts, he faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years up to life in prison. The trial, which commences with jury selection on Tuesday, is expected to last two to three weeks.
Prosecutors alleged that during his 2013 campaign, Hernandez accepted $1 million from Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel. This money was reportedly used to bribe officials to manipulate voting results in his favor. Similar tactics were used in his 2017 re-election, according to prosecutors.
“This rampant corruption and massive cocaine trafficking came at a cost to the people of Honduras,” said Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, following Hernandez’s extradition.
Hernandez has claimed that drug traffickers have falsely accused him in an attempt to reduce their own sentences and seek revenge for his administration’s law enforcement actions. Similar arguments have been made by other high-ranking Latin American officials charged by the U.S., including former Mexican security minister Genaro Garcia Luna, who was convicted last year on charges of taking bribes from El Chapo.
Two co-defendants who were initially set to be tried alongside Hernandez – his cousin Mauricio Hernandez and former Honduras national police chief Juan Carlos Bonilla – pleaded guilty to drug trafficking earlier in February.
“I’m really curious to see if this is going to be a prosecution that is just going to exhibit a long list of finger-pointing at him by convicted former drug dealers, or if this is going to be a prosecution showing unquestionable evidence that he was actually involved,” said Edgar Zurita, a former law enforcement official at Mexico’s U.S. embassy and current managing director at investigations firm Nardello & Co.
El Chapo was himself convicted of drug trafficking in 2019 and sentenced to life in prison.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Alistair Bell)
