A trial in New York puts a small and devastated nation on edge

In the noise of the New York City news cycle, the criminal case currently unfolding in Lower Manhattan against former President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras barely registers.

For Hondurans, it is a rare opportunity for national justice.

The prosecution of Mr. Hernández in Federal District Court on charges of conspiring to import narcotics has gripped the small Central American country and its expatriates, drawing a cross-section of the 40,000 Hondurans living in New York City, as well as others from outside of the state and even from Honduras itself.

“He sent our country to hell,” said Flavio Ulises Yuja, 62, who had traveled from Honduras to Florida for a vacation but abruptly changed his plans and flew to New York to attend the trial.

The trial puts a spotlight on the misery of a country plagued by corruption, poverty and lawlessness. And even as Americans debate the weaknesses in their own democracy and legal system, Hondurans see American courts as a place for something not available at home: due process and a measure of justice.

Hondurans are present outside the courthouse every day. During the first week of the trial, dozens of people gathered in the cold, chanting through megaphones and marching with Honduran flags and homemade signs denouncing Mr. Hernández. A Brooklyn woman grabbed $7 homemade tuna and turkey sandwiches from a cooler.

Every day, Mr. Hernández is led into a packed courtroom, where a squadron of Honduran reporters take notes. Mr. Hernández led his country for eight years until early 2022, when he was extradited to the United States shortly after leaving office.

During the many high-profile trials held in this Lower Manhattan courthouse — including those of former President Donald J. Trump and crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried — network film crews have gathered at the front with state-of-the-art news vans outfitted with lighting units. During the Hernández trial, newscasters recorded each day’s events on their iPhones and broadcast the news via social media.

The proceedings they send home detail a culture of corruption in Honduras that allowed vast quantities of cocaine to flow into the United States. Mr Hernández, who has denied wrongdoing, is accused of running a “narco state” from the capital Tegucigalpa, raking in millions through violent cartels.

To the extent that Honduras is known to Americans at all, it may have a history of poverty, political instability – and American intervention. This includes the so-called Banana Wars, which began in the late 19th century to strengthen the political power of fruit companies, and the presence of the US military in the 1980s in support of the Contra guerrillas fighting Nicaraguan leaders.

By the 2000s, drug traffickers enjoying political protection helped Honduras become a major transshipment point for cocaine shipments from South America, much of which went to the United States to feed the drug’s voracious appetite.

Shannon K. O’Neil, an expert on Latin America at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the trial would not overhaul corruption in Honduras overnight, but that a U.S. prosecution would be a deterrent can be.

“It does matter when an all-powerful person is brought to justice,” she said. “Watching a president overthrown and possibly end up in a supermax prison in the US could have a chilling effect on other leaders and elites, both in Honduras and other Latin American countries.”

Many Hondurans blame Mr. Hernández for promoting their country’s decline, and celebrations broke out when he was extradited.

Sisters Eugenia Brown, 69, and Aurora Martinez, 64, recently sat next to reporters in the front row at the trial and nodded their heads at stories of murder, drug trafficking and corruption. They gasped during testimony that Mr. Hernández had ordered his police chief to kill rivals.

The sisters, Honduran immigrants, said they traveled from New Jersey and the Bronx to see justice finally served.

“It’s embarrassing for Honduras, but it’s also a good thing because at the end of the day we want justice,” Ms. Brown said.

Martha Rochez, 60, another Honduran immigrant who now lives nearby in Chinatown, walked out of the courtroom, visibly upset, and leaned against a wall.

‘I want to see him in prison. He made us suffer. He made my family suffer,” she said. ‘I couldn’t bear to hear what they had done to my country. My back hurts just listening to the way they behaved towards our people.”

About 2,000 miles away, in Honduras, whose population of 10 million is barely larger than that of New York City, the case is a sensation from the Mosquito Coast to Tegucigalpa. About half the population lives in poverty, gang violence is endemic and that of the country gross domestic product per capita is only about $3,400, compared to $83,000 in the United States.

“JOH may be guilty there, but the damage to the country has already been done,” said Suyapa Mendez, 63, a vegetable seller at a market in Tegucigalpa who used a common nickname for Mr. Hernandez.

Some residents of the capital were betting on which figures from the country’s overlapping worlds of crime and government would be called next to testify. Some of Mr. Hernández’s political allies called the case a reward for his lack of cooperation with U.S. authorities and expressed skepticism that he could receive a fair trial.

But Mario Sierra, 69, a furniture maker who watched the trial on television from his workshop, said the Hondurans were “grateful that they took him because nothing could be done with him here.”

‘We already know he’s a narco. We always knew that here,” he said, “but only the gringos could condemn him.”

New York City is about one-third Hispanic, but Hondurans – spread across parts of the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn – make up only roughly 0.5 percent of the total population, dwarfing in numbers compared to groups like Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, and in more in recent years, Mexicans and Ecuadorians.

Decades of corruption, crime and unemployment also drove waves of Hondurans to the United States, helping to explain a sign recently held by a protester outside the courthouse: “Narco government forces people to emigrate.”

Victor Velasquez, 47, stood watching everything and taking pictures. He said he drove all night from Virginia with his wife and their teenage son to take a friend, also a Honduran immigrant, to an asylum hearing in Lower Manhattan.

“These are processes that we cannot have in our countries; it shows how much corruption we have there, that other countries need to intervene,” said Mr. Velasquez, who added that corruption in the Honduran government had driven out the nonprofit where he worked and cost him his job.

Outside, Alex Laboriel, 41, of Brooklyn, called it difficult — embarrassing, even — to watch the former president of his native country stand trial.

“There are a lot of feelings of outrage,” he said. “It’s a pain you don’t just feel in a courtroom. It is a pain that we had to understand by living through it.”

“I wish this happened in Honduras,” he added.

Rommel Gómez, 40, a journalist for Radio Progreso, called the trial a test for every Honduran.

“It is not just Juan Orlando Hernández who is on trial,” he said. “It’s the state.”

Joan Suazo contributed reporting from Tegucigalpa, Honduras.