Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez was sentenced today by a New York court to 45 years in prison in the United States of America (US) for allowing drug traffickers to use his country's police to help smuggle tons of cocaine into the US.
The judge fined Hernandez eight million dollars (7,5 million euros). A jury convicted him in March in Manhattan federal court after a closely watched two-week trial in Honduras.
U.S. prosecutors say Hernandez has been working with drug traffickers since 2004, taking millions of dollars in bribes as he rose from congressman to speaker of the House to head of state. Prosecutors had asked for a sentence of life in prison, plus 30 years.
"I'm innocent," Hernandez said at the sentencing. "I was wrongly convicted," he said, claiming he was not allowed to introduce evidence to prove his innocence and said he was being persecuted by political rivals and drug traffickers.
At the trial, he said that drug money was given as bribes to virtually all political parties in Honduras, but that he did not receive bribes.
Hernandez, a two-term president of Honduras, was arrested at his home in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, three months after he left office in 2022 and was extradited to the US in April of that year.
Witnesses at the trial included traffickers who admitted responsibility for dozens of murders and said Hernandez was an "enthusiastic protector" of some of the world's most powerful cocaine dealers, including notorious Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who is serving a life sentence in USA.
The former president's brother, Juan Antonio "Tony" Hernandez, a former Honduran congressman, was sentenced in New York to life in a US prison in 2021 for drug trafficking.
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