From the Liveblog of
Friday, March 8, 2024
Ex-Honduras president who moved embassy to Jerusalem convicted in US court for drug trafficking
A jury in New York has found former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez guilty of trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States.
Hernandez, 55, who US federal prosecutors say turned his Central American country into a “narco-state” during his presidency in 2014-2022, faces a potential sentence of up to life in prison.
Sentencing will take place at a later date.
Hernandez is accused of having facilitated the smuggling of some 500 tons of cocaine — mainly from Colombia and Venezuela — to the United States via Honduras since 2004, starting long before his presidency.
Hernandez used the drug money to enrich himself and finance his political campaign, and commit electoral fraud in the 2013 and 2017 presidential elections, prosecutors said.
He was extradited to the United States in 2022, accused of aiding drug smugglers in return for millions of dollars in bribes.
With the guilty verdict, Hernandez follows in the footsteps of other former Latin American heads of state convicted in the United States, like Panama’s Manuel Noriega in 1992 and Guatemala’s Alfonso Portillo in 2014.
As president, he moved Honduras’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2021.
