MANHATTAN (CN) — In closing arguments on Wednesday, federal prosecutors urged jurors to convict Juan Orlando Hernández, the former two-term president of Honduras, on drug trafficking conspiracy and weapons charges for directly facilitating an international cocaine trade from Colombia to the United States that flowed through the small Central American country.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacob Gutwillig told jurors that while Hernández was in office, he and his brother conspired to accept millions of dollars from drug traffickers who in turn received protection from arrests, extradition and seizure of their shipments.
The former head of state even flagrantly bragged he would “shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos,” the prosecutor said.
“He paved a cocaine superhighway to the United States, protected by machine guns,” Gutwillig said, noting that Hernández deployed his power over the country’s national military, police and justice system to support the transport of massive quantities of cocaine.
Prosecutors said Hernández’s campaigns for congress in 2009 and president in 2013 were bankrolled by contributions from drug traffickers linked to the Cachiros, Valle Valles and Sinaloa cartels, just like the presidency of his predecessor, Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo Sosa.
While in office, he protected “the ones that fueled his rise and kept him in power,” Gutwillig said.
“Make no mistake, the drug traffickers he stood up to were the ones that threatened to expose him,” the prosecutor said.
According to several convicted drug traffickers who testified at trial as cooperating witnesses, the cartels guarded their cocaine labs and truck caravans with AK-47 machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, bazookas, and Claymore mines, while officers from the corrupt National Police escorted the shipments armed with AR-15 rifles and 9mm handguns.
Gutwillig directed jurors to review a pair of notebooks by the Honduran military police, along grenades and around $200,000 in cash, from a secret compartment in a car in which a trafficker was a passenger.
The notebooks contain ledgers that prosecutors assert included Juan Orlando Hernández’s initials, “JOH,” side-by-side with the financial details of cocaine transactions.
During the defense’s summation on Wednesday afternoon, Hernández’s attorney Renato Stabile told jurors that the price of cocaine “was getting jacked up” during his tenure as president because “he was dropping the hammer” on the drug trade, increasing the risk involved for traffickers.
Stabile told jurors that Hernández had been wrongfully charged and insisted the prosecution’s evidence presented at trial was insufficient to meet the burden of proving guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
“No specific details. No specific dates,” he said.
Stabile rejected the testimony by criminal cooperating witnesses as lies and exaggerations peddled by crooks seeking “the golden ticket” that will reduce their hefty prison sentences.
Taking the witness stand in his own defense on Tuesday, Hernández flat-out denied helping drug traffickers or accepting bribes, and instead presented himself as a reformer politician committed to “terminating” drug trafficking.
Hernández testified he cooperated with U.S. law enforcement, including by extraditing some two dozen individuals.
The 55-year-old former president of Honduras faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years and up to life in prison if convicted on a trio of drug and weapons counts: conspiring to manufacture and import cocaine into the United States; using and carrying machine guns and destructive devices during and in furtherance of the cocaine importation conspiracy; and conspiring to use and carry machine guns and destructive devices during and in furtherance of the cocaine importation conspiracy.
He is the first head of state to stand trial in the United States since former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.
Hernández was arrested at his home in the Honduran capital city Tegucigalpa in April 2022 and was extradited to the United States.
Three months prior to his arrest, Hernández had been president of the Central American nation, a position he'd held since 2014.
The trial is being presided over by U.S District Judge Kevin Castel. The George W. Bush appointee also oversaw the case against Hernández’s brother, who was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years and ordered to forfeit $138 million.
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