Ex-president of Honduras found guilty in drug trafficking trial

For more than a decade, Juan Orlando Hernández exercised power in Honduras, first as a member of Congress, then as leader of that body and finally as president of the country.

On Friday, a US jury in Federal District Court found Mr Hernández guilty of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and of possessing and conspiring to possess “destructive devices,” including machine guns.

During his first presidential campaign in 2013, Mr. Hernández, a member of the right-wing Honduran National Party, portrayed himself as a law-and-order candidate who could counter the epidemic of drugs and crime that had swept the country.

But prosecutors in the United States say Mr. Hernández was allied with the same forces he claimed to oppose. A series of witnesses testified at a conspiracy trial in Manhattan that Mr. Hernández’s political success was fueled by drug proceeds funneled to him by cocaine traffickers he treated as business partners.

Prosecutors have said that Mr. Hernández received millions of dollars from human trafficking organizations in Honduras, Mexico and elsewhere, including from Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, a Mexican drug lord and the former leader of the Sinaloa cartel. In return, prosecutors added, Mr. Hernández allowed large quantities of cocaine to pass through Honduras on their way to the United States.

He bragged that he would “stuff the drugs right into the noses of the gringos,” according to US prosecutors.

Evidence and testimony presented at Mr. Hernández’s trial painted a bleak picture of a country where drugs and politics were long intertwined and people who worked in politics routinely demanded and accepted bribes.

Rows of benches in the trial courtroom were filled each day with Hondurans who said they had come to watch Mr. Hernández face a judicial process of the kind that some doubted could have taken place in his home country.

Some of those onlookers laughed derisively as Mr. Hernández, dressed in a business dark suit, testified toward the end of the trial, insisting that he had no ties to the drug trade and that witnesses who had testified to the contrary were “professional liars.” goods.

An attorney expanded on that idea during his summary, going through a list of crimes — including a total of 224 murders — linked to several former traffickers who served as government witnesses.

“This was a cast of characters that you have never seen before and will never see again as long as you live,” said attorney Renato Stabile. “During the trial, these people told you they were liars. They told you they were murderers.”

But a prosecutor, Jacob H. Gutwillig, told jurors that Mr. Hernández had accepted “cocaine-based bribes” from cartels and “protected their drugs with the full might and might of the state — the military, the police and the legal system .”

Although former foreign leaders sometimes appear in court in the United States, they are not often prosecuted for drug-related crimes. The closest parallel to Mr. Hernández is General Manuel Antonio Noriega, the former leader of Panama, who was found guilty in 1992 in federal court in Miami of allowing the Medellín drug cartel to move cocaine into the United States through his country shipping in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes.

By the time Mr. Hernández resigned as president in 2022, he was a deeply unpopular figure in Honduras. His government had done little to blunt the effects of crime or create a stable economy, causing many citizens to leave the country. Hernández’s successor as president, Xiomara Castro, accused him of turning the nation into a “narco-dictatorship,” and thousands of Hondurans celebrated when he was extradited to New York three months into his term.

The trial of Mr. Hernández was relatively simple and based mainly on testimony from witnesses, including a Honduran drug investigator and the former traffickers, including two men who said they had pleaded guilty to serious crimes and face possible life sentences in U.S. prisons.

The investigator, Miguel Reynoso, testified that he was present when Honduran authorities stopped a group of vehicles with hidden compartments and found firearms, grenades and nearly $200,000 in U.S. money wrapped in plastic. Authorities also found notebooks with Mr. Hernández’s initials, on which Manhattan prosecutors detailed drug transactions.

Mr. Reynoso testified that the notebooks were placed in sealed plastic bags and that he took them, with seals intact, to prosecutors in the United States in 2019.

Among the former traffickers who took the stand was Amilcar Alexander Ardon Soriano, who testified that he had served as mayor of the municipality of El Paraíso while selling drugs, participated in torture and murdered two people, and that he was responsible for the death of more than 50 others. He said he had asked lawmakers, whom he had previously bribed, to vote for Mr. Hernández as president of the Honduran Congress. In return, Mr. Ardon said, Mr. Hernández promised to protect him from prosecutors.

Mr. Ardon added that he donated $500,000 in drug proceeds to Mr. Hernández’s 2013 presidential campaign and that he bribed people in El Paraíso to vote for him. He also said he believed El Chapo had agreed to provide $1 million to that campaign.

Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, a former leader of the ruthless Honduran gang Los Cachiros, was probably the most infamous witness to take the stand. He began secretly cooperating with U.S. authorities a decade ago and admitted to involvement in the deaths of 78 people, including two journalists and an official who served as Honduras’ anti-drug czar.

In 2012, Mr. Rivera testified, he bribed Mr. Hernández with $250,000, delivered to his sister Hilda, in exchange for protection of the Cachiros.

Asked by a lawyer if he felt any remorse for the people he had harmed, Mr. Rivera said he regretted everything he did as a member of what he called “a dangerous gang,” including paying bribes to ‘corrupt gangs’. ‘policemen and politicians.

“They should have tried to get us,” he said, adding that they “allied with us” instead.

Nate Schweber reporting contributed.