NEW YORK — Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was once touted by US authorities as a key ally in the war on drugs. Now federal prosecutors say the political leader ran his Central American nation as a “narco-state,” collecting millions of dollars from violent cartels to fuel his takeover.
Nearly two years after his arrest and extradition to the US, Hernández will now stand trial in Manhattan federal court on drug trafficking and weapons charges. Jury selection begins on Tuesday.
It’s a stunning fall from grace for a political leader who has long been seen — by both Democratic and Republican administrations — as beneficial to U.S. interests in the region, including fighting the illegal drug trade and helping to slow the waves of migrants crossing the southern US. border.
That Hernández is being tried in the US and not in his native country underlines Honduras’s institutional weakness, said Raúl Pineda Alvarado, a Honduran political analyst and former three-term congressman of Hernández’s National Party.
“For Hondurans, it means how weak our democracy is in terms of the separation of powers,” he said. “Politicians are not subject to any control.”
Federal authorities say Hernández profited from the drug trade that brought hundreds of thousands of kilos of cocaine into the U.S. for nearly two decades, sometimes even working with Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel.
The millions of dollars in drug money that began flowing to Hernández around 2004 in turn fueled his rise from congressman representing his rural home province in western Honduras to president of the National Congress and then two consecutive presidential terms from 2014 to 2022, prosecutors say.
In exchange for bribes that supported his political aspirations, drug traffickers were allowed to operate in the country with near impunity, receiving information to evade authorities and even law enforcement escorts for their shipments.
During his first winning presidential campaign, Hernández solicited $1.6 million from a drug trafficker to support his campaign and those of other politicians in his conservative political party, federal prosecutors say.
His brother also received a $1 million campaign donation from infamous Sinaloa boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, promising that the cartel’s drug shipments would find safe passage through Honduras if Hernández was elected.
Federal prosecutors in New York spent years working their way through Honduran drug trafficking organizations before reaching the person many thought was at the top: Hernández.
He was arrested at his home in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, in February 2022, just three months after leaving office, and extradited to the US in April that year.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland said at the time that Hernández abused his position as president “to run the country like a narco-state.”
Hernández’s lawyers declined to comment ahead of the trial, in which prosecutors are expected to rely on testimony from drug traffickers and corrupt Honduran law enforcement officials and politicians.
The former president, who earned a master’s degree from the State University of New York at Albany, has steadfastly maintained his innocence and said the charges are revenge against drug traffickers he extradited to the US.
Hernández faces federal charges including drug trafficking conspiracy and possession of machine guns and destructive devices.
Meanwhile, his co-defendants – former head of the Honduran National Police, Juan Carlos Bonilla, and Hernández’s cousin, Mauricio Hernández Pineda – both pleaded guilty to drug trafficking charges in recent weeks in the same Manhattan courtroom. where he will be tried.
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Associated Press editor Christopher Sherman in Mexico City contributed to this report.
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Follow Philip Marcelo on twitter.com/philmarcelo.