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A New York jury has convicted former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández on drug trafficking and firearms charges after a two-week trial in which he was accused of using his office to help move more than 400 tonnes of US-bound cocaine through the Central American country.
The conviction on Friday capped a spectacular fall for the former leader, a one-time close ally of the US government who was arrested just weeks after he left office in 2022.
Prosecutors told jurors he engaged in an 18-year scheme to aid the drug traffickers in return for millions of dollars in bribes, at one point saying he would “stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos”.
Honduras, with a population of 10mn people, hosts the most important US military base for trying to disrupt drug networks, but its political system has been corrupted by money from organised crime. It is also one of the largest sources of illegal migration to the US as its citizens flee gang violence and one of the highest poverty rates in Central America.
Hernández, whose brother Tony was sentenced to life in prison for drug trafficking charges in 2021, will be sentenced in June and could also spend the rest of his life in prison. His lawyer said he will appeal against the verdict.
The 55-year-old “had every opportunity to be a force for good in his native Honduras” but instead “chose to abuse his office and country for his own personal gain and partnered with some of the largest and most violent drug trafficking organisations in the world,” US attorney Damian Williams, whose office brought the charges, said following the verdict.
For decades, US prosecutors have extradited and tried former Latin American officials for ties to drugs, but the prosecution against Hernández was unusually swift. Mexico’s former security minister Genaro García Luna was arrested in 2019, years after he left office, but is yet to be sentenced for his drug trafficking conviction.
Hernández’s defence lawyers argued at trial that prosecutors relied heavily on witnesses who had committed crimes themselves, including a total of 224 murders. The former president, who took the stand in his own defence, pointed to his efforts in office to arrest and extradite drug traffickers.
In his closing argument, Hernández’s lawyer, Renato Stabile, emphasised to the jury that the government had elicited testimony from people who “told you they kill for revenge, they kill for business reasons, and sometimes they kill for no reason at all”.
He added that the cartel members “couldn’t assassinate [Hernández] with their guns so they are here to assassinate him with their lies”.
Prosecutors said Hernández’s public image as the scourge of drug cartels was cultivated because “he needed to make it seem like he was trying to stop drug trafficking” while he “worked closely with some of the most powerful drug traffickers in Honduras”.
They added that Hernández only “extradited the traffickers who were causing him trouble”.
Hernández left office with a complex legacy. He won a second term in 2017 after a controversial court decision that allowed him to run for re-election, leading to large-scale, deadly protests. In 2021, Hondurans gave a strong mandate to left-wing President Xiomara Castro, who promised to fight corruption but has since been accused of backsliding on the rule of law.
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