The exceptional trial of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez for alleged drug trafficking to the United States, including smuggling 500 tons of cocaine, is scheduled to begin Tuesday in New York.
Several times postponed since his extradition from Honduras to the United States in April 2022, the trial of Mr. Hernandez, 55, is to be held for nearly a month in the federal court of the southern jurisdiction of New York, in Manhattan , one of the largest prosecutors in the United States
The former Honduran head of state (2014-2022), who calls himself “innocent”, was extradited almost two years ago – a highly publicized sequence at the time – at the end of his presidency after having been accused of facilitating the smuggling of 500 tons of cocaine in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes.
He will appear detained and alone in the box since his two co-defendants, the former Honduran police chief Juan Carlos Bonilla and a former police officer, Mauricio Hernandez, pleaded guilty to drug trafficking in order to cooperate with American justice and avoid trial. .
Juan Orlando Hernandez has repeatedly claimed that he was the victim of “revenge by the cartels, a plot orchestrated so that no government will ever resist them again.”
When he was president, he worked closely with the administration of former US President Donald Trump (2017-2021), earning praise from Washington for drug seizures and the fight against organized crime.
If he is found guilty of the three charges brought against him – conspiracy to traffic drugs and two others for trafficking and possession of weapons – Mr. Hernandez could spend the rest of his life behind bars.
A conviction would make him join other former Latin American leaders tried and convicted in the United States, such as Panamanian Manuel Noriega in 1992 and Guatemalan Alfonso Portillo in 2014.
In 2023, the former Mexican “tsar” of the fight against drugs, ex-minister Genaro Garcia Luna, was found guilty in New York of drug trafficking. His prison sentence will be pronounced on June 24.
For US federal prosecutors, the former Honduran president had in fact become a drug trafficker and had transformed his small Central American country into a “narco-state” with the help of military, police and civilians.
His indictment in New York also accuses him of having enriched himself with drug money, of having financed his electoral campaigns and of having engaged in fraud during the 2013 and 2017 elections.
