MANHATTAN (CN) — A New York City jury on Friday found former two-term Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández guilty on all counts for conspiring with cartel-backed drug traffickers while he was in office to shuttle truckloads of cocaine through the small Central American country.
The unanimous verdict to convict Hernández, a former U.S. ally, arrived Friday afternoon after eight and a half hours of deliberation. Jurors were handed the case for deliberations around 11:30 a.m. on Thursday morning following more than two weeks of trial testimony.
Sentencing has been set for June 26, 2024, at 11:00 a.m.
At closing arguments on Wednesday, federal prosecutors accused Hernández, who was president of Honduras from 2014 through 2022, of paving “a cocaine superhighway to the United States” through Honduras, with heavily-armed national military and police escorting cattle trucks loaded with millions of dollars’ worth of South American cocaine bound for Mexico and the U.S. to the north.
Multiple convicted drug traffickers testified at trial pursuant to cooperation agreements with prosecutors.
They each detailed a pattern of paying cash bribes to Hernández with the proceeds of drug trafficking through a proxy and receiving protections for their operations: Armed military personnel provided security detail for trucks packed with cocaine headed north from South America to the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico; protection from capture and seizure of property by Honduran law enforcement; no extradition to the United States on criminal charges; and government contracts for shell companies used for laundering cartels’ dirty money.
Prosecutors said the narco-bribery conspiracy goes back to Hernández’s predecessor, Porfirio “Pepe Lobo” Sosa, who was president of Honduras from 2010 to 2014.
One of Porfirio Lobo’s sons, Fabio, testified seeking a reduction in his 24-year prison sentence on drug trafficking charges.
Taking the witness stand in his own defense earlier in the week, Hernández flatly denied ever meeting with drug traffickers or accepting bribes, and instead presented himself as a reformer politician committed to “terminating” drug trafficking in the country.
Hernández testified he cooperated with U.S. law enforcement, including by extraditing some two dozen individuals, and training Honduran special forces with the United States’ Southern Command military operations in South and Central America.
On cross-examination Tuesday afternoon, prosecutors pressed Hernández about a photograph that shows him at the World Cup in 2010 in matching light blue Honduran team uniforms with Miguel Arnulfo Valle Valle, one of the two brothers who headed the Valle Valle cartel, wrapping his arm around Hernández.
“Sir, I don’t know Mr. Arnulfo Valle,” he responded, casting doubt on the veracity of the photo, suggesting there had been some public debate about whether that photo was a “montage.”
Hernández’s denial of having ever met Valle stunned Assistant U.S. Attorney Kyle A. Wirshba, who reminded Hernández that Valle had attempted to assassinate him and that he just said during direct testimony that he extradited the cartel leader to face criminal charges in the United States.
“That doesn’t make him an acquaintance of mine,” the flustered former president replied.
U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel presided. The George W. Bush appointee also oversaw the case against Hernández’s brother, Antonio “Tony” Hernández, who was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years and ordered to forfeit $138 million, in 2021 for his involvement in trafficking multi-ton loads of cocaine through Honduras to the U.S.
He was convicted after a two-week trial in 2019 of charges that carried a mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years in prison.
The jury in Tony Hernández’s trial deliberated for less than a day before finding him guilty of all counts, including drug conspiracy, weapons possession and lying to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
He has filed an appeal to the Second Circuit seeking to overturn his conviction on drug, weapons and false statement charges, arguing he was interrogated by a federal agent without an attorney present.
Tony Hernández also asked Judge Castel to suppress statements made after his arrest because he was interrogated outside the presence of his attorney, despite federal agents knowing he had one, but the judge denied his motion, saying agents did not have “actual knowledge” he had an attorney at the time of the interrogation.
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