Former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández is escorted by police special forces in Tegucigalpa on April 21, 2022, to a plane bound for New York to face U.S. drug trafficking charges. NEW YORK — Former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández was sentenced by a U.S.
At the request of the United States, Honduran police arrested Hernández within weeks of his departure from office in January 2022, and he was extradited to face federal charges in New York.His prosecution has raised questions about whether the U.S. government ignored his alleged criminal activities as they sought his help in slowing migration toward the southwest border.
Former U.S. diplomats have denied that. They’ve said the case illustrates Washington’s bureaucratic dysfunction: State Department officials were left in the dark about the Justice Department investigation.Hernández has maintained his innocence. He has accused jailed drug dealers of giving false testimony against him in exchange for reduced sentences; he is expected to appeal.
“Mr. Hernández did more to combat narcotrafficking in Honduras than any Honduran President before or since,” his lawyer, Renato Stabile, wrote in a request for the mandatory minimum sentence, 40 years in jail.“As a direct result of the defendant’s crimes, Honduras became one of the world’s largest transshipment points for United States-bound cocaine and one of the most violent places in the world,” they said in their written submission.
Hernández’s conservative National Party assumed the presidency of the country of 10 million in 2009 after leftist president Mel Zelaya was toppled in a coup. But the party was weakened by corruption and drug-trafficking scandals. It lost the presidency in 2021 — to Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro.
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