Former Honduran president sentenced for helping traffickers get cocaine into US
NEW YORK — Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was sentenced Wednesday in New York for his conviction on charges that he enabled drug traffickers to use his military and national police forces to bring tons of cocaine into the United States.
Judge P. Kevin Castel sentenced Hernández to 45 years in prison in the US and fined him $8 million. A jury convicted him in March in a Manhattan federal court after a trial period of two weekswhich was followed closely in his home country.
“I am innocent,” Hernández said at his sentencing. “I was wrongly accused.”
Castel called Hernández a “two-faced politician, hungry for power” who protected a select group of traffickers.
Hernández wore an all-green prison uniform as he stood in court with his lawyers. Two US marshals stood behind him.
Prosecutors had asked for a life sentence, plus 30 years.
Hernández, 55, served two terms as leader of the Central American nation of about 10 million people.
Hernández was arrested at his home in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, three months after leaving office in 2022. was extradited to the US in April of that year.
U.S. prosecutors say Hernández worked with drug traffickers as early as 2004 and took millions of dollars in bribes as he rose from rural congressman to president of the National Congress and then to the country’s highest office.
Hernández acknowledged in a court statement that drug money was paid to virtually all political parties in Honduras, but he denied taking bribes himself.
Hernández, in a lengthy statement through an interpreter, emphasized that his trial was unjust because he was not allowed to add evidence that would have led the jury to find him not guilty. He said he was persecuted by politicians and drug traffickers.
“It’s like I’ve been thrown into a deep river with my hands tied,” he said.
Trial witnesses included human traffickers who acknowledged responsibility for dozens of murders and said Hernández was an enthusiastic protector of some of the world’s most powerful cocaine dealers, including notorious Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who ran a U.S. serving a life sentence.
His brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, a former Honduran congressman, was lifetime in a US prison in 2021 in Manhattan federal court for his own sentencing on drug charges.