The former President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of narcotics charges in a US court, has been sentenced to 45 years in jail.
Hernández was convicted in March of plotting to transport cocaine into the United States and possessing “destructive devices” such as machine rifles.
Prosecutors in New York claimed he controlled the Central American country like a “narco-state” and collected millions of dollars in bribes from drug traffickers to protect them from prosecution.
“He paved a cocaine superhighway to the United States, protected by machine guns,” prosecutors said in their closing arguments ahead of his conviction.
In addition to his term, he was sentenced to pay an $8 million fine (£6.3 million).
“I am innocent,” Hernández stated at his sentencing hearing, according to the Associated Press. “I was wrongly and unjustly accused.”
According to the news agency, the judge referred to him as a “two-faced politician hungry for power” throughout the hearing.
The 55-year-old has been jailed in a Brooklyn jail since his extradition to the United States.
Last month, the Manhattan judge handling the case denied his plea for a retrial after his lawyers contended that the trial was tainted by false testimony from a law enforcement official who claimed cocaine trafficking increased in Honduras during the ex-president’s tenure.
US District Judge Kevin Castel deemed the inaccuracy “immaterial” to the charge of conspiracy with narcotics dealers.
“Hernandez’s conviction was based on the testimony, over the course of a three-week trial, of numerous witnesses whose testimony was corroborated in part by phone records and a recovered drug ledger,” Judge Castel wrote.
Hernández was Honduras’ president from 2014 to 2022, serving two consecutive terms in a country of more than ten million people.
He first ran as a law-and-order candidate, promising to combat the country’s drug-related crime.
Instead, prosecutors accused him of partnering with “some of the world’s most prolific narcotics traffickers to build a corrupt and brutally violent empire based on the illegal trafficking of tonnes of cocaine to the United States”.
Three months after leaving office, he was extradited to New York and arrested in April 2022 on federal accusations in the United States.
He was formerly seen as a staunch supporter of the United States, which paid his country more than $50 million (£39 million) in anti-narcotics assistance, as well as millions of dollars in security and military help.
In 2019, then-President Donald Trump complimented Hernández for “working very closely” with the United States.
Hernández, in turn, praised Mr. Trump and the American people “for the support they have given us in the firm fight against drug trafficking.”.
Prosecutors later discovered that Hernández was tied to drug traffickers as early as 2004, long before he became president, and that he enabled the transport of approximately 500 metric tonnes of cocaine to the United States.
They claimed drug traffickers paid him millions of dollars in bribes to allow cocaine to be trafficked from Colombia and Venezuela through Honduras and into the US.
During his prosecution, numerous convicted drug dealers admitted to bribing Hernández.
His lawyers said that the individuals who testified against him were doing it for personal gain.
Hernández also spoke in his own defence, accusing the witnesses who testified against him of being “professional liars.”.
Prosecutors claimed that he used the drug money to bribe officials and sway Honduras’ 2013 and 2017 presidential elections to his advantage.
Hernández denied the claims, claiming that he was a “victim of a vendetta and a conspiracy by organised crime and political enemies.”
He is expected to appeal his conviction. His brother, a former Honduran legislator, was jailed in the same Manhattan court in 2021 on separate narcotics allegations.
Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández is now serving his life sentence.
Hernández is not the first former Latin American head of state to be convicted of a drug-related offence in the United States.
Manuel Noriega of Panama was convicted of cocaine trafficking in a Miami court in 1992, while Alfonso Portillo of Guatemala was convicted of money laundering in a New York court in 2014.
