Prosecutors say he accepted millions of dollars to protect drug traffickers.
March 8, 2024, 4:30pm ET
• 3 minute read
Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez was sentenced Friday in federal court in Manhattan on drug trafficking charges.
Hernandez, who served as president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, had been charged by U.S. authorities with drug trafficking and weapons offenses related to large amounts of cocaine imported into the United States over the past two decades. Prosecutors allege he took bribes from El Chapo's Sinaloa cartel and other drug networks to line his pockets, fund political campaigns and rig elections to win two presidential elections. are doing.
Prosecutors say he instead protected drug traffickers, including his own brother Tony Hernandez, who was convicted of drug trafficking in the United States in 2019 and sentenced to life in prison.
Mr. Hernandez even identified himself as a partner of the United States on crime, drug and immigration policy, as he was undercover investigation by U.S. law enforcement over his involvement in drug trafficking.
He was indicted and arrested in February 2022, just three weeks after leaving office, and extradited to the United States several months later.
In this November 1, 2021 file photo, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández delivers the State of the Nation Statement on the second day of COP26 at the SECC in Glasgow, England.Pool, file from Getty Images
Two co-defendants, former Honduran police chief Juan Carlos Bonilla and Hernandez's cousin Mauricio Hernandez, pleaded guilty.
The former president has maintained his innocence and said the charges were the result of drug traffickers defaming him in revenge for a crackdown on the drug trade.
The U.S. Department of Justice said that during his administration, Hernandez and his co-conspirators trafficked more than 400 tons of U.S.-bound cocaine through Honduras.
“Juan Orlando Hernandez has abused his position as president of Honduras to run the country as a narco-state where violent drug traffickers are allowed to operate with virtual impunity, and the people of Honduras and the United States have suffered the consequences. “We were forced to suffer,” the US said. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “As today's convictions demonstrate, the Department of Justice is destroying the entire ecosystem of drug trafficking networks that harm the American people, no matter how far or how far they must go.”
The case attracted attention in Hernandez's country, and the media called it the “trial of the century.”
Hernandez is scheduled to be sentenced on June 26, and is facing life in prison.
-ABC News' Conor J. Finnegan and Victoria Moll Ramirez contributed to this report.