MANHATTAN (CN) — The prosecution’s star witness in the drug trafficking trial of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández told jurors Thursday that he met several times with the then-presidential candidate to arrange the financing of his election campaign in 2013 with money from cocaine traffickers, including a million dollars in cash from Mexican cartel kingpin Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.
Wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, convicted drug trafficker and former Honduran mayor Alexander Ardon testified that “not once” while Hernández was in office for two terms was any shipment of his large-scale cocaine trafficking operation ever intercepted by the country’s national law enforcement agencies.
Instead, Hernández and his predecessor, Porfirio “Pepe Lobo” Sosa, provided armed security for truckloads of cocaine headed north from South America to the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico through his municipality El Paraiso, Copan, an important cocaine trans-shipment point on the Honduras border, in exchange for millions of dollars in campaign contributions, Ardon said, speaking through a Spanish language interpreter.
“Chapo told Tony that he wanted to open new drug trafficking routes in Honduras,” he said. “Tony Hernández said that if Juan Orlando won, he could help him out with that.”
The Honduran president and his brother Tony Hernández arranged for Honduran national police armed with machine guns to escort box trucks and cattle trucks carrying around 1,500 kilograms of cocaine bound for the United States via El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel, he testified.
Ardon said he helped rig elections in 2013 and 2017 so that Hernández would win his terms after the brothers promised to shield their drug trafficking allies from extradition to the United States.
“I gave money to the mayors for them to bribe people with, and I gave money to people in El Paraiso to vote for Juan Orlando Hernández,” he testified.
Ardon was the second former Honduran mayor charged in the Southern District of New York with crimes related to drug trafficking. In July 2018, Arnaldo Urbina Soto, the former mayor of Yoro, Honduras, was charged in a separate Indictment with conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and related firearms offenses.
In taking a plea deal with U.S. prosecutors, Ardon confessed to participation in 56 murders, torture and trafficking up to 250 tons of cocaine into the United States, but testified Thursday afternoon he only personally committed two murders.
Facing life in prison on those guilty pleas, Ardon testified he would like his sentence reduced to time served for his cooperation in the case against Juan Hernández.
The trial is being presided over by U.S District Judge Kevin Castel. The George W. Bush appointee also oversaw the case against Tony Hernández, who was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years and ordered to forfeit $138 million.
The 55-year-old former president of Honduras faces up to three terms of 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 was arrested at his home in the Honduran capital city, Tegucigalpa, in April 2022, and extradited to the United States.
Three months prior to his arrest, Hernández had been president of the small Central American nation, a position he had held since 2014.
Juge Castel told jurors he anticipates the trial will take two to three weeks.
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