Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez was convicted of drug crimes in a U.S. courtroom and sentenced to 45 years in jail.
Hernandez was convicted in March of conspiring to import cocaine into the USA and possessing “harmful units” together with machine weapons.
New York prosecutors say he ran the Central American nation like a “narco state” and took hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in bribes from drug traffickers to guard them from justice.
“He paved a cocaine freeway into the USA, protected by machine weapons,” prosecutors stated in closing arguments earlier than the conviction.
As a part of his sentence, he was additionally ordered to pay an $8 million (£6.3 million) advantageous.
“I’m harmless,” Hernandez stated on the sentencing listening to, in keeping with the Related Press. “I used to be falsely and unjustly accused.”
The decide referred to as him a “power-hungry two-faced politician” throughout the listening to, the information company reported.
The 55-year-old man has been held in a Brooklyn jail since his extradition to the USA.
Final month, the Manhattan decide overseeing the case denied his movement for a brand new trial as his attorneys argued the trial was tainted by incorrect testimony from a legislation enforcement official who stated Honduras was Cocaine trafficking has elevated.
U.S. District Decide Kevin Castel discovered the error “irrelevant” to the cost of conspiring with drug traffickers.
“Hernandez’s conviction was primarily based on the testimony of quite a few witnesses throughout a three-week trial that was corroborated partly by telephone data and a recovered drug ledger,” Decide Castell wrote.
Hernández served as president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, serving two consecutive phrases within the nation of greater than 10 million individuals.
He initially campaigned as a legislation and order candidate, promising to sort out the nation’s drug-related crime drawback.
As an alternative, prosecutors accuse him of working with “a number of the most prolific drug traffickers on the planet to construct an empire of corruption and brutal violence primarily based on the unlawful trafficking of tons of cocaine into the USA.”
Three months after leaving workplace, he was extradited to New York and arrested in April 2022 to face federal prices in the USA.
He was beforehand seen as a powerful ally of the USA, which has offered his nation with greater than $50 million (£39 million) in counter-drug assist, in addition to hundreds of thousands extra in safety and army assist.
In 2019, then-President Donald Trump thanked Hernandez for “working intently with the USA.”
Hernandez in flip thanked Trump and the American individuals “for his or her help in our decided struggle towards drug trafficking.”
Prosecutors later found that Hernandez had ties to drug traffickers as early as 2004, and that he had helped smuggle some 500 tons of cocaine into the USA lengthy earlier than he turned president.
They are saying drug traffickers paid him hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in bribes to permit cocaine to be smuggled into the USA from Colombia and Venezuela by means of Honduras.
In the course of the trial, a number of convicted drug sellers testified that they bribed Hernandez.
His attorneys argued that those that testified towards him did so for their very own profit.
Hernandez additionally testified in his personal protection, accusing the witnesses who testified towards him of being “skilled liars.”
Prosecutors accuse him of utilizing drug cash to bribe officers to rig Honduras’s 2013 and 2017 presidential elections in his favor.
Hernandez denies the accusations, claiming he was “the sufferer of a vendetta and conspiracy by organized crime and political enemies.”
He’s anticipated to attraction his conviction.
His brother, a former Honduran congressman, was sentenced to jail in 2021 by the identical Manhattan courtroom on a number of drug prices. Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernandez is at the moment serving a life sentence.
Hernandez shouldn’t be the primary former Latin American head of state to be convicted of drug-related crimes in the USA.
In 1992, Manuel Noriega of Panama was convicted of drug trafficking in a Miami courtroom, and in 2014, Alfonso Portillo of Guatemala was convicted of cash laundering in a New York courtroom.
