Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez was convicted of drug crimes in a U.S. court and sentenced to 45 years in prison.
Hernandez was convicted in March of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and possessing “destructive devices” including machine guns.
New York prosecutors say he ran the Central American country like a “narco state” and took millions of dollars in bribes from drug traffickers to protect them from justice.
“He paved a cocaine highway into the United States, protected by machine guns,” prosecutors said in closing arguments before the conviction.
As part of his sentence, he was also ordered to pay an $8 million (£6.3 million) fine.
“I am innocent,” Hernandez said at the sentencing hearing, according to the Associated Press. “I was wrongly and unjustly accused.”
The judge called him a “power-hungry two-faced politician” during the hearing, the news agency reported.
The 55-year-old man has been held in a Brooklyn jail since his extradition to the United States.
Last month, the Manhattan judge overseeing the case denied his motion for a new trial as his lawyers argued the trial was tainted by incorrect testimony from a law enforcement official who said Honduras was Cocaine trafficking has increased.
U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel found the error “irrelevant” to charges of conspiring with drug traffickers.
“Hernandez’s conviction was based on the testimony of numerous witnesses during a three-week trial that was corroborated in part by phone records and a recovered drug ledger,” Judge Castell wrote.
Hernández served as president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, serving two consecutive terms in the country of more than 10 million people.
He initially campaigned as a law and order candidate, promising to tackle the country’s drug-related crime problem.
Instead, prosecutors accuse him of working with “some of the most prolific drug traffickers in the world to build an empire of corruption and brutal violence based on the illegal trafficking of tons of cocaine into the United States.”
Three months after leaving office, he was extradited to New York and arrested in April 2022 to face federal charges in the United States.
He was previously seen as a strong ally of the United States, which has provided his country with more than $50 million (£39 million) in counter-drug aid, as well as millions more in security and military aid.
In 2019, then-President Donald Trump thanked Hernandez for “working closely with the United States.”
Hernandez in turn thanked Trump and the American people “for their support in our determined fight against drug trafficking.”
Prosecutors later discovered that Hernandez had ties to drug traffickers as early as 2004, and that he had helped smuggle some 500 tons of cocaine into the United States long before he became president.
They say drug traffickers paid him millions of dollars in bribes to allow cocaine to be smuggled into the United States from Colombia and Venezuela through Honduras.
During the trial, several convicted drug dealers testified that they bribed Hernandez.
His lawyers argued that those who testified against him did so for their own benefit.
Hernandez also testified in his own defense, accusing the witnesses who testified against him of being “professional liars.”
Prosecutors accuse him of using drug money to bribe officials to rig Honduras’s 2013 and 2017 presidential elections in his favor.
Hernandez denies the accusations, claiming he was “the victim of a vendetta and conspiracy by organized crime and political enemies.”
He is expected to appeal his conviction.
His brother, a former Honduran congressman, was sentenced to prison in 2021 by the same Manhattan court on multiple drug charges. Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernandez is currently serving a life sentence.
Hernandez is not the first former Latin American head of state to be convicted of drug-related crimes in the United States.
In 1992, Manuel Noriega of Panama was convicted of drug trafficking in a Miami court, and in 2014, Alfonso Portillo of Guatemala was convicted of money laundering in a New York court.
