The former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández was sentenced this Wednesday to 45 years in prison and five more years of supervised release by a New York court for several crimes related to drug trafficking and weapons possession. Hernández, who is spared the life sentence requested by the Prosecutor’s Office, had assumed his fate before hearing the sentence. “The most likely thing is that I will be imprisoned for life,” he stated upon his arrival at the court. However, the former president once again declared himself innocent and described the trial as “unfair and improper.”
Judge Kevin Castel also imposed a fine of $8 million on the former president and called on his defense to clarify within two weeks how he will pay the penalty. Hernandez, 55, had been convicted in March of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and conspiring to possess “destructive devices,” including machine guns.
The sentence confirms the fall from grace of the former ruler, who while he remained in power, between 2014 and 2022, had always declared himself a faithful ally of the United States in the fight against drug trafficking. Almost three years ago, his brother Juan Antonio was also sentenced in New York to life imprisonment for the same cause. Two years earlier, the Manhattan prosecutor’s office accused the president, in power at the time, of receiving a million dollars from Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán.
The trial began last February with other explosive incriminations by the prosecution. The US authorities accused the former president of having used the Police, the Army and the judicial system of his country to “protect” drug traffickers and “amass” a fortune. “That man [Hernández] “I send tons and tons of cocaine to the United States,” the representative of the prosecution, David Robles, stated then. “He used his power to protect drug traffickers and receive a lot of money in return,” he said.
Before reading the sentence, Judge Castel said this Wednesday that Hernández was “a two-faced man.” That is, with one he proclaimed his commitment against drug trafficking and with the other he facilitated the importation of tons of cocaine worth up to 10 million dollars. Furthermore, he assured that with this sentence – if he fulfills it in full he will be released from prison with 100 years – a message is sent “to those who are educated and well dressed, so that they do not believe that they are going to escape the accusations.”
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