By: Staff Writer
February 23, 2024
Former Honduras President Juan Orlando Hernandez’s trial on U.S. drug trafficking charges began Tuesday with the former Donald Trump anti-drug ally on the other side of the law.
Hernández is the first former head of state to face drug-trafficking charges in the United States since another former US ally, the Panamanian strongman Gen Manuel Noriega, over 30 years ago.
The trial will be arguably the biggest test yet of the Drug Enforcement Agency’s strategy to bring to account public officials who facilitate drug trafficking to the US.
Hernández has dismissed the accusations as retaliation by the cartels seeking revenge for his anti-narcotics policies and cited his cooperation with – and the accolades received from – US authorities as evidence of his innocence.
Brick after brick of cocaine flowed for years into the United States from countries like Venezuela and Colombia, all of it funneled through the tiny Central American nation of Honduras.
Aircraft flown from clandestine dirt airstrips and smuggler vessels disguised as fishing trawlers found a safe haven there, U.S. officials said. And the ruthless gangs that operated them, the officials said, had a partner and protector in the country’s two-term president, Juan Orlando Hernández.
Prosecutors accuse him of running a “corrupt and violent drug-trafficking conspiracy” while in office, in which he accepted millions of dollars in exchange for facilitating cocaine shipments to the US.
Early in his tenure, in 2015, Hernández faced allegations he had siphoned money from Honduras’s Social Security Institute. Critics later blamed him for failing to protect public figures like environmental activist Berta Cáceres, who was assassinated in 2016.
His reelection in 2017 was likewise tarnished by suspicions of electoral fraud.
In court this week, US prosecutors described Hernández as a leader who used his position for personal gain, transforming Honduras into a “narco-state”. In one case, they allege he collected approximately $1 million from the Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in exchange for protecting the Sinaloa cartel.
Hernández has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers argued this week that he, in fact, stood up to drug trafficking.
On Wednesday, defense attorney Renato Stabile used his opening statement to tell the jury that many of the expected witnesses — former drug traffickers who claim to have been protected by Hernández — cannot be trusted because of their violent pasts, insinuating they had exaggerated or lied in exchange for reduced sentences.