Former Honduran president sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking in the United States

Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández boasted of being a staunch ally of the United States in the fight against drugs, but on Wednesday a New York judge sentenced him to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking.

President of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, it took only three months from the moment he handed over the presidential mandate to leftist Xiomara Castro to his extradition to the United States on charges of conspiracy to traffic drugs and weapons.

This 55-year-old right-wing lawyer was extradited on April 21, 2022. The same extradition law that he approved under pressure from Washington in 2012, when he was president of Congress, was applied to him.

Judge Kevin Castel also ordered him to pay an $8 million fine and serve 5 years of supervised release at the end of his prison term.

I am innocent

Small, athletic and given to daily exercise, JOH – the acronym by which he is known in his country – defines himself as an “indio pelo parado” (Indian with straight hair), due to his hairstyle military style.

In high school, he graduated as an infantry second lieutenant at the Northern Military High School in San Pedro Sula, before earning a law degree at the National Autonomous University of Honduras and completing a master's degree in public administration in New York from 1994 to 1995. Married to lawyer Ana García, they have four children.

He fell from grace while president when his brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, was arrested in November 2018 at Miami airport and sentenced in March 2021 to life in prison for “large-scale” drug trafficking.

After being arrested in Honduras in February 2022, JOH considered himself a victim of “revenge” by the drug lords extradited by his government to the United States. Many of them testified against him in New York. “I am innocent,” JOH proclaimed before hearing the sentence.

One witness testified at trial that he heard the former president boast that he was going to “put the drugs up the gringos' noses” and that they “won't even notice.”

Large-scale corruption

Political opponents called Hernández a “dictator” and accused him of enriching himself during his rule. They also accused him of having violated the Constitution by being re-elected for a second term and of controlling the powers of the State for his benefit, in particular the justice system, which endorsed his controversial candidacy, and the electoral court, which proclaimed his candidacy. victory despite allegations of fraud.

“Hernández relied on a long political career where, taking advantage of the various public functions he held, he formulated a structural system of large-scale corruption,” assured the NGO National Anti-Corruption Council.

Replacement of judges

Born on October 28, 1968 into a lower-middle-class rural family of 17 siblings in the western department of Lempira, JOH entered politics in 1990 as an assistant to his brother Marco Augusto in the Congress secretariat. Since 1998 he was a deputy and, during the government of Porfirio Lobo (2010-2014), he held the presidency of Congress.

Fabio, the son of former President Porfirio Lobo, was sentenced in the United States to 24 years in prison for drug trafficking in 2015 and testified against JOH during the trial.

As President of Congress, JOH promoted the replacement of four of the five magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber. Those who were appointed in their place then gave the green light for his presidential re-election.

As president, Hernández promoted social assistance programs such as the “solidarity bag” consisting of food and housing programs for poor families, but his critics saw this as a mechanism to buy consciences and voice.

The former president, who in 2021 declared that at the end of his term he would retire to write his memoirs, showed an image of serenity in the face of his process.

The day before his arrest, when everything indicated that the authorities were coming for him, he published a photo of himself playing with his German shepherds.