We thought he was untouchable, protected by the impunity that reigns in Honduras around organized crime. On Monday March 28, the magistrates of the Supreme Court nevertheless definitively validated the extradition to the United States of the former Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernandez (2014-2022). The one who presented himself as a herald of the fight against drugs will join dozens of his compatriots, accused like him of cocaine trafficking.
Washington did not delay to request his extradition: only three weeks after he handed over power to Xiomara Castro (left), it is bound hand and foot that “JOH”, as he is called in his country, appeared in front of television cameras when he was arrested on February 15.
American justice accuses him of having participated in a “conspiracy having transported more than 500 tons of cocaine” through Honduras to the United States, from Colombia and Venezuela. He reportedly received millions of dollars from various drug-trafficking organizations, including at least $1 million from the ex-head of the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, to fund his 2013 presidential campaign. former president is also accused of using and carrying weapons to import drugs.
“A structural system of large-scale corruption”
On March 17, a trial judge granted the extradition request. On Monday, the members of the Supreme Court, meeting in plenary assembly, rejected the appeal made by his defense and unanimously validated his extradition. A decision this time without appeal, “which is not a condemnation”, recalled in a press release the family of the former president, “but the validation of an administrative procedure so that Juan Orlando can be tried by a foreign court”.
Member of the National Party (PN, right) then President of Congress between 2010 and 2014, elected President for the first time in 2014, Juan Orlando Hernandez had succeeded in 2017 in being re-elected – which the Constitution prohibited – thanks to a controversial decision of the Supreme Court whose composition he himself had modified. A re-election which had provoked demonstrations repressed in blood, with around thirty deaths, but validated by the American president, Donald Trump.
“Hernandez had a long political trajectory where, taking advantage of the various public offices he held, he set up a structural system of large-scale corruption”, explains in a report entitled “The fall of an ex-president” the National Anti-Corruption Council, an independent NGO.
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