Ex-president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández sentenced to 45 years in U.S. jail for cocaine trafficking

A court docket in New York on Wednesday sentenced former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández to 45 years in jail after he was convicted of trafficking a whole lot of tons of cocaine into the United States.

Anti-Hernández protesters gathered exterior the Manhattan courthouse forward of the sentencing with placards decrying the previous head of state’s crimes.

The sentence, which additionally included an $8 million high quality, was lower than the life imprisonment that prosecutors had sought —though Hernández’s age, 55, means he might die behind bars.

Hernández , who U.S. federal prosecutors stated turned his Central American nation right into a “narco-state” throughout his presidency from 2014 to 2022, has beforehand indicated by his authorized crew he would attraction his conviction.

Hernández was convicted in March of getting facilitated the smuggling of some 500 tons of cocaine —primarily from Colombia and Venezuela— to the United States through Honduras since 2004, beginning lengthy earlier than his presidency.

Hernández used the drug cash to complement himself and finance his political marketing campaign, and commit electoral fraud within the 2013 and 2017 presidential elections, prosecutors stated.

He was extradited to the United States in 2022, accused of aiding drug smugglers in return for hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in bribes.

“Hernández obtained hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in drug cash from a number of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking organizations in Honduras, Mexico, and elsewhere, and used these bribes to gasoline his rise in Honduran politics,” federal prosecutors beforehand said.

Hernández follows within the footsteps of different former Latin American heads of state convicted within the United States, like Panama’s Manuel Noriega in 1992 and Guatemala’s Alfonso Portillo in 2014.

Prosecutors said the previous president had labored intently with the Sinaloa Cartel, one among Mexico’s most violent felony organizations. Its founder, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, is serving a life sentence within the United States.

“When the chief of Honduras and the chief of the Sinaloa Cartel work hand-in-hand to ship lethal medicine into American communities, each need to be held accountable within the United States,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram stated in a statement. “This case ought to ship a transparent message that nobody is above the regulation or past our attain.”