Honduran ex-president convicted of helping send tons of cocaine to U.S.

Former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, a one-time American ally, was convicted in a New York court Friday of helping drug traffickers send tons of cocaine to the United States in exchange for hefty bribes that fueled his political career.

The verdict underscored the extent to which narcotics gangs have penetrated some Latin American governments. Hernández was accused of using police and the military to guard U.S.-bound cocaine shipments, and of sharing sensitive U.S. law enforcement information with traffickers. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacob Gutwillig said Hernández “paved a cocaine superhighway to the United States.”

Yet even as Hernández presided over what prosecutors called a “narco-state,” U.S. authorities continued to work closely with him. In December 2019, President Donald Trump praised the Honduran leader for his cooperation on curbing migration and narcotics shipments. “We’re stopping drugs at a level that has never happened,” Trump said. Hernández also met with Joe Biden and Mike Pence when each served as vice president.

“How is it possible the U.S. government did not know this stuff was going on?” said Dana Frank, a historian and Honduras expert at University of California at Santa Cruz. “They chose to look the other way.”

U.S. policy toward Central America in recent years has been heavily focused on curbing migration – sometimes crowding out other issues, such as corruption and democratic backsliding, analysts said. But former U.S. diplomats said the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Justice Department didn’t inform the executive branch that they were investigating Hernández.

The case was one of the most significant U.S. prosecutions of a Latin American leader since the 1992 conviction of former dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega, accused of making Panama a springboard for drug shipments to the United States. Noriega – a U.S. partner during the Cold War – was captured in a U.S. invasion of the Central American country.

Prosecutors alleged that Hernández began cooperating with traffickers in 2004, when he was a congressman. Over the next 18 years – including while he served as president from 2014 to 2022 – he helped traffickers move at least 500 tons of cocaine to the United States, according to the indictment.

In Honduras, citizens have been mesmerized by news of the trial, which began Feb. 20. Hernández’s conservative National Party had dominated the country of 10 million people for more than a decade, taking power after a 2009 coup ousted leftist president Mel Zelaya.

But Hernández’s rule was marked by corruption and drug-trafficking scandals and allegations of irregularities in his 2017 reelection. Opposition candidate Xiomara Castro – Zelaya’s wife – won the presidency in 2021.

Hernández denied the U.S. charges and said many of the witnesses were convicted drug dealers seeking reduced sentences or revenge. “I had a policy against all those people,” he testified. “They did a lot of damage to the country.”

Hernández faces a sentence of up to life in prison.

The trial offered an unusually detailed look at the way drug traffickers have become major sources of campaign financing in Latin America and have bribed security officials and politicians to operate with impunity.

The case “is not just about Juan Orlando Hernández, as a person, but about how these illicit networks operate,” said Ana María Méndez-Dardón, the Central America director for the Washington Office on Latin America.

Frank, the academic, said the trial provided an “extremely damning” look at U.S. policy. Former American diplomats who dealt with Honduras said that for years, Hernández had appeared to be a good partner – backing extraditions and a reform of the corruption-riddled police.

U.S. data showed a decrease in drug shipments during Hernández’s tenure.

“Today’s verdict makes all of us who collaborated with him look either complicit or gullible in the eyes of the Honduran public,” said John Feeley, who was a top official in the State Department’s Latin America bureau during Hernández’s presidency. “We were neither, but we were unaware of the investigation that was being conducted by DEA when he was still in office.”

Hernández was arrested on U.S. charges in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, in February 2022, a few weeks after he left office. He was subsequently extradited.

While U.S. diplomats may have been unaware of any drug ties during the early years of Hernández’s presidency, the accusations had piled up in recent years. In 2019, his brother Tony was convicted in a U.S. court on charges of drug trafficking. U.S. prosecutors said the brother received a $1 million donation from Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán in 2013 that was intended for Juan Orlando Hernández, then running for president. (Hernández denied the allegation.)

In 2021, during another trial, U.S. prosecutors described a meeting between Hernández and an accused trafficker, Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez, where the then president allegedly said they would “shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.” The former Honduran leader denied making the remark.

In recent years, federal prosecutors in New York have convicted several major Latin American drug traffickers, as well as some officials accused of aiding them. A former Mexican minister of security, Genaro García Luna, was found guilty last year of accepting millions of dollars in bribes from the Sinaloa drug cartel.

But not all the cases have resulted in guilty verdicts. In 2020, U.S. prosecutors accused a former Mexican defense secretary, Salvador Cienfuegos, of working with the criminal underworld. But the Justice Department dropped the case amid internal questions about its solidity and blowback from the Mexican government, which threatened to drastically reduce anti-drug cooperation.

—-

Lorena Rios in Monterrey, Mexico, contributed to this report.