America puts foreign leader in the dock accused of grand-scale drug-running

Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduras president, attends his drug trafficking trial in federal court in Manhattan, New York – JANE ROSENBERG/REUTERS

As he listened to the lurid testimony against him in a New York courtroom this week, Juan Orlando Hernández may have wondered how he became so luckless as to be charged by the US Department of Justice with grand-scale drug-running.

Washington is usually deeply reluctant to investigate foreign heads of state, even ones who are, like the former president of Honduras, allegedly up to their necks in the cocaine trade.

But the one-time US ally is facing the possibility of life behind bars for his alleged role in a narcotics trafficking conspiracy. It is the latest example of apparent duplicity as the US struggles to find trustworthy partners in its war on drugs.

Mr Hernández is thought to be the first ex-head-of-state put on criminal trial in the United States since Manuel Noriega, the former dictator of Panama, in 1991.

Manuel Noriega, the corrupt dictator of Panama known as ‘Pineapple Face’, was overthrown after the US invasion in 1989 and spent 25 years in jail – Bettmann

Yet although the indictments in both cases are eerily similar, the differences between the two figures are stark.

Noriega was an autocratic army general with a penchant for knocking off political opponents who infamously waved a machete while publicly challenging President George HW Bush to arrest him.

Mr Hernández, meanwhile, is a chubby, bespectacled, elected politician whose apparent crackdown on the cartels during his 2014-2022 presidency garnered typically superlative praise from Donald Trump as recently as 2019.

Juan Orlando Hernandez signs an agreement with Donald Trump for Honduras to accept more asylum seekers heading to the US – REUTERS

On meeting his Honduran counterpart in Florida, the then US president declared that Washington and Tegucigalpa were together “stopping drugs at a level that has never happened”.

Yet the picture painted this week in federal court is utterly at odds with that image.

Mr Hernández is not just accused of facilitating the shipment of thousands of tons of cocaine to the US but also co-opting the police, military and other public institutions in the Central American nation, which is wracked by grinding poverty and extreme gang violence, helping turn it into what the prosecution calls a “narco-state”.

Witnesses have told the court over the last week that he took millions of dollars in bribes to shut down counter-narcotics raids or warn the traffickers when they were imminent. That includes a total of $2.4 million (£1.9 million) from the Sinaloa cartel of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, then the world’s most powerful druglord.

Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, the head of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, being escorted to a helicopter in Mexico City in 2014 following his capture in the beach resort of Mazatlan – Eduardo Verdugo/AP

On one occasion, Guzmán is even alleged to have flown into Honduras by helicopter to hand deliver $1 million in cash to the president’s brother, Tony Hernández. On another, Orlando Hernández is accused of deliberately promoting a corrupt officer, Juan Carlos Bonilla – notorious for once allegedly killing a member of a rival cartel with a bazooka – to become head of the national police.

Bonilla was due to be in the dock with the ex-president but struck a plea deal with prosecutors just before the trial and is now expected to testify against him. Tony Hernández is already serving a lengthy sentence in the United States after being sentenced to life for drug-trafficking in 2021.

The ex-president’s lawyer, Renato Stabile, has dismissed the credibility of several of the cartel leaders now testifying against his client – including one, Devis Rivera, leader of the Cachiros cartel, who referred in court to Orlando Hernández as “my business partner”.

‘These people are psychopaths’

“These are depraved people,” Mr Stabile said. “These are psychopaths. These are people not worthy of your trust. Mr Hernández doesn’t sit down with drug dealers. He stood up to drug dealers.”

Whatever the eventual verdict, the case highlights how Honduras has become the most important logistical hub for cocaine shipments from the Andes to Mexico, from where it enters the world’s largest consumer market, the United States – and the uphill battle the US faces in finding regional allies to help it break this chain.

Much of the cocaine enters Honduras via speed boats and even homemade submarines along the remote Caribbean coast, controlled by the Cachiros. It then exits via the western border, controlled by the Valle Valle clan, to Guatemala and on to Mexico.

Honduras’ underdevelopment and rugged terrain – as well as its runaway corruption – facilitates the flow. With few roads penetrating the dense jungle, locals often rely on light aircraft to get around and clandestine airstrips dot the rainforest.

Although the problem goes back at least to the 1980s, recent international developments may have allowed it to intensify, including a failure to hold Orlando Hernández to account for his unconstitutional reelection in 2017.

Juan Orlando Hernandez is taken in handcuffs to a waiting aircraft as he is extradited to the United States to face drug trafficking charges in Tegucigalpa in 2022 – Elmer Martinez/AP

“The lack of pressure and scrutiny from the Trump administration allowed Orlando Hernández to get away with it and may even have encouraged him,” says Will Freeman, a Latin America fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington-based think-tank.

Carlos Hernández, the head of the Association for a Fairer Society, a Tegucigalpa-based anti-corruption group, adds: “Drug trafficking involves huge amounts of money and Honduras is a very poor country. It was fertile ground.”

“The narcos have bought everyone who was anyone here. It’s sad and embarrassing but true. Some of us have been saying this for years. And some of us have been killed for saying it.”

In the case of Orlando Hernández, it appears to been considered so flagrant – even behind the veneer of a conservative champion of the rule of law and war on drugs – that Washington felt impelled to act. He was arrested in February 2022, just weeks after stepping down from office, and swiftly extradited.

The trial is expected to last another week.

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