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Honduras’s former president Juan Orlando Hernández was handed a 45-year prison sentence on Wednesday for facilitating cocaine transit to the US, capping the swift prosecution of a former US ally and sending a warning to leaders across the region.
Hernández, who led Honduras from 2014 until 2022, was convicted in a US federal court in Manhattan in March for his role in an armed conspiracy to move more than 400 tonnes of US-bound cocaine through the Central American country.
Prosecutors said during the trial that he told allies he would stuff drugs “right up the noses of the gringos”. They said that in exchange for his partnership with Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, he received millions of dollars in bribes that helped finance his political ambitions.
Hernández, 55, has maintained his innocence, and during the trial pointed to extraditions he oversaw of drug traffickers as proof. The longtime politician with the conservative National party also worked closely with the US government in his two terms in office.
“As President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world, and the people of Honduras and the United States bore the consequences,” US attorney-general Merrick Garland said in a statement on Wednesday.
“The justice department will hold accountable all those who engage in violent drug trafficking, regardless of how powerful they are or what position they hold,” he added.
A number of former Latin American officials have been prosecuted in the US in recent decades over their ties to the booming illegal drug trade.
The case against Hernández was unusually speedy: he was arrested weeks after leaving office and given a sentence less than two-and-a-half years later. By contrast, the sentencing for Mexico’s former security minister Genaro García Luna — who was convicted last year of drug trafficking offences and accused of also taking bribes from the Sinaloa cartel — has been delayed until later this year, almost four years after he was arrested in 2019.
Julio Raudales, vice-rector of the National Autonomous University of Honduras, said Hernández’ conviction, which came on the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Trafficking, was significant.
“Without a doubt it’s a clear signal for the rest of the leaders and politicians in Latin America that any conspiracy to send drugs to the US or use politics as a way to help narcos do the same will be condemned,” he said.
Hernández adopted tough-on-crime policies and oversaw a decline in homicide rates from some of the highest in the world. Murder rates remain elevated, however, and gangs continue to run extensive networks of extortion that threaten citizens.
His successor, left-wing President Xiomara Castro, has increasingly turned to policies inspired by El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, who has imprisoned about 2 per cent of the country’s adult population, to try to contain the violence. Earlier this month, she vowed to build a 20,000-strong megaprison.
