The former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez He boasted of being a faithful ally of USA in the fight against drugs, but this Wednesday a judge in NY He was sentenced to 45 years for drug trafficking.
President of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, barely three months passed from when he handed over the presidential command to the leftist Xiomara Castro until he was extradited to the United States accused of conspiring to traffic drugs and weapons.
The 55-year-old right-wing lawyer was extradited on April 21, 2022. He was subject to the same extradition law that he approved under pressure from Washington in 2012, when he was president of Congress.
Judge Kevin Castel also sentenced him to pay an $8 million fine and serve 5 years of supervised release at the end of his prison sentence.
“I’m innocent”
Short in stature, with an athletic build and given to daily exercise, JOH – the acronym by which he is known in his country – is defined as an “upright Indian”, due to his military haircut.
In high school he graduated as an infantry second lieutenant from the Liceo Militar del Norte, in San Pedro Sula, before graduating as a lawyer from the National Autonomous University of Honduras and completing a master’s degree in Public Administration in New York, from 1994 to 1995.
Married to lawyer Ana García, they have four children.
He fell from grace as president when his brother, Juan Antonio ““Tony” Hernández, was arrested in November 2018 at the Miami airport and sentenced in March 2021 to life imprisonment for drug trafficking. “big scale”.
After being arrested in Honduras in February 2022, JOH considered himself a victim of a “revenge” of the bosses extradited by his government to the United States. Many of them testified against him in New York.
“I’m innocent”, JOH proclaimed before hearing the sentence.
A witness told the trial that he heard the former president boast that he was going to “putting drugs under their own noses” and they didn’t leave “to give no account.”
“Large scale corruption”
Political opponents branded Hernández as “dictator” and they accused him of having enriched himself during his government.
They also accused him of having violated the Constitution by having himself re-elected in the second term, and of controlling the powers of the State for his benefit, in particular the justice system, which endorsed his controversial candidacy, and the electoral court, which proclaimed his victory despite complaints of fraud.
“Hernández has used an extensive political career where, taking advantage of the different public positions he has held, he formulated a structural system of large-scale corruption,” assured the NGO National Anti-Corruption Council.
Replacement of judges
Born on October 28, 1968 into a rural lower-middle class family of 17 siblings, in the western department of Lempira, JOH entered politics in 1990 as assistant to his brother Marco Augusto in the Congressional secretariat.
Since 1998 he was a deputy and during the Porfirio Lobo government (2010-2014) he held the presidency of Congress.
A son of former president Porfirio Lobo, Fabio, was sentenced in the United States for drug trafficking to 24 years in prison in 2015 and testified against JOH at trial.
As president of Congress, JOH promoted the replacement of four of the five judges of the Constitutional Chamber. Those appointed in his place later gave the green light to his presidential re-election.
Already as president, Hernández promoted social aid programs such as “solidarity bag” of food and housing programs for poor families, but its detractors considered it a mechanism to buy consciences and votes.
The former president, who in 2021 told AFP that at the end of his term he would retire to write his memoirs, showed an image of serenity before his process.
One day before his arrest, when everything indicated that the authorities were coming for him, he published a photo of himself playing with his German shepherd dogs.
Source: Gestion
Ricardo is a renowned author and journalist, known for his exceptional writing on top-news stories. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he is known for his ability to deliver breaking news and insightful analysis on the most pressing issues of the day.
