On January 27, 2014, when Juan Orlando Hernández was inaugurated as president of Honduras, his biography published by the official government portal celebrated that he was the youngest president to have held that position since 1980. He was 45 years old and was a kind of a catracho political meteor, specifically of the then very strong National Party. A decade later – with an illegal re-election in the middle and after having held power without major checks – the former president achieved another milestone – not at all flattering – on his resume: he became the first former president of Honduras convicted of drug trafficking in the foreign. The JOH empire, as this politician is known, finally collapsed as of January 2022, after handing over power to Xiomara Castro.
The end of the JOH era came last week when a federal court in New York prosecuted him, and found him guilty, of associating for more than a decade with drug traffickers who paid bribes to ensure that more than 400 tons of cocaine reached the United States. The sentence was handed down by Judge Kevin Castel, after a trial that attracted international attention.
A jury of 12 Americans in the Southern District Court of New York convicted Hernandez of turning Honduras “into a narco-state,” despite the fact that he was publicly a president who was friendly to the United States government. But Hernandez’s sins followed him to the moment he was convicted, and they were not only related to drug trafficking. Judge Castel told the audience on the day he read out the sentence against Hernandez: “He is not being sentenced for corruption in Honduras, that is up to the Honduran people.”
Hernández was found guilty of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and possessing firearms, among other drug trafficking-related charges. Since his arrest in February 2022 and his subsequent extradition in April of the same year, the former president has publicly maintained that he is innocent. He alleges that the judicial process was full of “errors and injustices.”
Despite the severity of the sentence, which also includes five years of supervised release and a fine of $8 million, Hernández and his defense have expressed that they will appeal the decision.
Originally from the lands of the “untamed” chief Lempira
Juan Orlando Hernández was born on October 25, 1968 in the village of Río Grande, Gracias, capital of the department of Lempira, in an agricultural production environment. He attended high school in the city of San Pedro Sula and then studied at the National Autonomous University of Honduras, where he graduated as a lawyer and notary. Afterwards, he studied a master’s degree in Public Administration in the city where he was convicted: in New York, at the State University of that city.
During his years at the Honduran university he was linked to political and student movements. In 1990, Hernández’s brother, Marco Augusto, arrived at the First Secretariat of the Legislative Power and appointed him assistant. This is when JOH begins to have relations with the National Party. During those years he fulfilled political coordination functions in Lempira, but his political rise occurred in 1998 when he was elected deputy. In 2010 he became president of the National Congress during the Administration of Porfirio Lobo and in 2012 he won the internal elections of the National Party to be the presidential candidate.
The National Party opted for Hernández’s leadership as a fundamental pillar to continue controlling the State of Honduras, especially after the coup d’état against Manuel Zelaya in 2009. JOH assumed the presidency of Honduras in 2014 in this way: “I am Juan Orlando Hernández, from the lands of the indomitable Cacique Lempira; with the support of the majority of the people. “I am the president of Honduras.” It was a turbulent presidential period.
In 2015, the Honduran people took to the streets to accuse the Hernández Government of corruption. The Indignado movement in Honduras was inspired by the achievements of the International Commission against Corruption and Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) and driven to the streets by allegations of large-scale corruption such as the embezzlement of millions from Social Security in Honduras. That year, people began to ask for the president’s resignation, but on the contrary, Hernández had the plan to be re-elected even though the Constitution prohibits it.
Instead of responding to popular outcry or resigning in the face of serious allegations of his involvement in embezzling social security funds to finance his political campaign, Hernandez continued down the path of an autocrat: he concentrated all power, emulating Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua; he militarized the country and was illegally and fraudulently re-elected in 2018. At that time, his political adversaries claimed that JOH had ties to drug trafficking.
Links with drug trafficking
Before, in 2012, in Honduras not only did extraditions of drug traffickers to the United States begin, but also voluntary surrenders that represented a true earthquake for the country’s political forces. When Los Cachiros, famous Honduran drug traffickers, testified in the United States, many became nervous. And when they confessed that former president Porfirio Lobo Sosa received bribes from him and his son coordinated the entire relationship, the floor began to shake for the ruling National Party and also for the other important parties.
The son of the former president, with whom Juan Orlando Hernández co-governed after the 2009 coup, is imprisoned in the United States. The network of corruption around Cachiros case penetrated deep into the structures of the State, especially the structures of the ruling party. From 2009 to 2012, the homicide rate increased, reaching its peak in 2011, according to a report on citizen security by the Or
ganization of American States (OAS).
“The government took control of all the powers of the State, and the DEA entered and left the territories freely, taking and bringing presidents to talk about the fight against drugs, in their helicopters, with their conditions. The duo of power: Lobo Sosa and Juan Orlando Hernández. The hard-line policy against organized crime that they promulgated in their government, apparently is only a cover for what is happening: a relationship of concubinage between the mafias and the State,” reconstructs in an article the Contracorriente media.
But what ended up burying Juan Orlando Hernández was the trial against his brother, the National Party deputy Antonio Tony Hernández in 2021, who was convicted of drug trafficking in the Southern District Court of New York. Tony was exposed as an intermediary between political power and criminal power in Honduras.
The former president was captured at his residence in Tegucigalpa on February 15, 2022, a few days after concluding his second term, and on April 21 of that year he was taken, handcuffed by his hands and feet, to New York, where last Wednesday he was sentenced to 45 years in prison, instead of the life sentence requested by the Prosecutor’s Office.
Currently, the wife of Juan Orlando Hernández is running for the presidency of Honduras for the 2025 elections for the National Party and her campaign is based on proclaiming that her husband is innocent and that the drug traffickers conspired to take revenge on the president who fought them the most. She and her daughters campaign politically in the neighborhoods and towns of Honduras carrying a T-shirt with the phrase that Hernández said when being tried in a New York court: “Tell the world that I am innocent.”
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