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- BBC News World
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image source, Getty Images
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Juan Orlando Hernández was president of Honduras between 2014 and 2022.
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A judge of the Supreme Court of Honduras authorized this Wednesday the extradition of former President Juan Orlando Hernández to the United States, where he is required for drug trafficking crimes.
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The Honduran Judiciary reported in a statement that the First Instance Extradition Judge, Edwin Ortez, decided “to grant the extradition request submitted by the Court of the Southern District of New York” on Hernández.
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The former president (2014-2022) is accused in the US of three crimes associated with an alleged conspiracy to traffic thousands of kilograms of drugs in that country.
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The decision came after an evidentiary hearing of more than 11 hours.
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Lawyers for Hernández, who was arrested in February, rejected the accusations. They assured that they will appeal the decision before the Supreme Court, according to the lawyer Rosa Bonilla.
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the accusations
The accusations and suspicions about the former president are not new.
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In 2018, his brother Juan Antonio Hernández, who was a national deputy, was captured in Miami, also accused of crimes related to drug trafficking.
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In March 2021, the former deputy was found guilty of trafficking 150 tons of cocaine from Honduras to the US and sentenced to life imprisonment.
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It was from this direct family link that suspicions reached the former president, who has always rejected these accusations.
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image source, Reuters
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Upon being arrested, Hernández was handcuffed hand and foot.
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Although during the eight years that Hernández was in power he became one of Washington’s main allies in the region, things began to get complicated long before he stepped down as president on January 27.
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But his departure from office, which left him without presidential immunity, was the trigger for the judicial measure.
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During the trial of the brother, it became clear how drug trafficking groups infiltrated almost all spheres of power in Honduras, from the judicial field through the public force to reach power eexecutive.
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In fact, the prosecutors in the case themselves singled out Juan Orlando Hernández, accusing him of “facilitating the use of Honduran armed forces personnel as security” for drug traffickers.
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Another of the cases that affected Hernández, and that finally triggered the process against the former president, was that of Geovanny Fuentes Ramirezalso tried by a court in New York and found guilty in early February of this year.
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Fuentes was sentenced to life in prison for trafficking five tons of cocaine and another 30 years in prison for illegally carrying weapons, considering that he protected his merchandise with the use of machine guns.
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image source, Getty Images
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The US government accuses Hernández of, among other things, “facilitating the use of Honduran armed forces personnel as security” for drug traffickers.
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During the judicial proceeding against Fuentes Ramírez, it was indicated, through several testimonies, that one of his partners would be Juan Orlando Hernández.
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One of the witnesses in that case indicated that he heard Hernández say that he wanted to put drugs “in the noses of the gringos” by flooding the United States with cocaine.
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