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Crazy news coming out of Central America as the former President of Honduras was just sentenced to four decades in prison for moving the kind of weight that would impress El Chapo.
According to the New York Times, Juan Orlando Hernández was just hit with a 45-year sentence in prison after he was found guilty of helping gangs move hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States during his eight-year stint as the president of the small Central American country. Even though he buddied up to the U.S. and presented himself as an anti-drug ally, Hernández was working in conjunction with traffickers to import cocaine into America and was eventually busted for his role in the operation in 2022 after leaving office in disgrace.
Having accumulated millions of dollars for his dirty work from Honduras, Mexico and other countries during his presidency, Hernández was singled out by lower level workers who his lawyers say were lying in an attempt to get lighter prison sentences.
The New York Times reports:
Prosecutors countered that Mr. Hernández’s arguments “reflect an alternate reality.” They wrote that he had protected “his drug trafficking co-conspirators from prosecution and extradition, giving safe harbor to violent, massive cocaine traffickers as they used Honduras as a springboard for pumping cocaine into the United States.”
The verdict in Mr. Hernández’s trial came after weeks of evidence that he had received millions of dollars from drug organizations in Honduras, Mexico and elsewhere. In addition to statements by former traffickers, that evidence included testimony from a Honduran investigator and notebooks with Mr. Hernández’s initials that prosecutors said detailed drug transactions.
By early 2022, when Mr. Hernández was detained in Honduras less than a month after leaving office, he had become deeply unpopular there. His successor as president, Xiomara Castro, accused him of turning the country into a “narco-dictatorship” and officials in the United States said that Mr. Hernández had used drug money during both of his presidential campaigns to bribe election officials and manipulate the vote.
Hernández was eventually convicted and sentenced Wednesday (June 26), in Federal District Court in Manhattan. Though some were upset that Hernández got such a stiff sentence, other’s rejoiced at the news as they blame him for the horrible state that Honduras finds itself in these days.
More from the Times:
Some in the overflow room jeered when Mr. Hernández, dressed in a dark suit, testified in his own defense. At one point he denied associations with drug traffickers even as prosecutors displayed a photograph of him posing at a World Cup soccer match in South Africa with a notorious narco kingpin.
After Mr. Hernández was convicted, crowds of Hondurans celebrated outside the courthouse, chanting in Spanish and displaying an orange prison jumpsuit with handcuffs connected by a long chain. One woman held up a sign reading, “No clemency for narcopolitics.”
