The special 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.
The trial of Mr. Hernandez, 55, has been postponed several times since his extradition from Honduras to the United States in April 2022 and is scheduled to take place for nearly a month in the Federal Court of the Southern Jurisdiction of New York in Manhattan, according to the largest prosecutors in the United States
The former Honduran head of state (2014-2022), who describes himself as “innocent”, was extradited almost two years ago – a highly publicized process at the time – at the end of his presidency after he was accused of aiding and abetting the smuggling of 500 tons Cocaine in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes.
He will be detained and appear alone in the box as his two co-defendants, 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 “the cartels’ revenge, a conspiracy orchestrated so that no government will ever resist them again.”
As president, he worked closely with the administration of former US President Donald Trump (2017-2021) and won praise in Washington for drug seizures and the fight against organized crime.
If found guilty of the three charges against him – drug trafficking conspiracy and two others for trafficking and weapons possession – Mr Hernandez could spend the rest of his life behind bars.
A conviction would see 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, Mexico's former anti-narcotics “tsar”, ex-minister Genaro Garcia Luna, was found guilty of drug trafficking in New York. His sentence will be announced on June 24th.
For US federal prosecutors, the former Honduran president had actually become a drug trafficker and had turned his small Central American country into a “narco-state” with the help of the military, police and civilians.
His indictment in New York also accuses him of enriching himself with drug money, financing his campaigns and committing voter fraud in the 2013 and 2017 elections.