Honduras former President Juan Orlando Hernández, 55, also known as JOH, was sentenced today to 540 months in prison and 60 months of supervised release for cocaine importation and related weapons offences.
The former two-term president was in office until weeks before his extradition to the United States in April 2022. Hernández was convicted on March 8 following a three-week jury trial.
“As President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world, and the people of Honduras and the United States bore the consequences,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.
“The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is relentlessly focused on dismantling drug trafficking organizations that threaten the safety and health of the American people,” said DEA Administrator Anne Milgram.
Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández financed his political career with drug trafficking profits and abused his authority as President of Honduras to traffic hundreds of tons of cocaine to the United States, she stated.
“Let me be clear, political actors who use their power to traffic in drugs and corruption will be brought to justice in the United States,” added Milgram.
“As the former two-term president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández had every opportunity to affect positive change for his country,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams for the Southern District of New York.
Instead, Williams explained, Hernández helped to facilitate the importation of an almost unfathomable 400 tons of cocaine to this country: billions of individual doses sent to the United States with the protection and support of the former president of Honduras.
William said, “Now, after years of destructive narco-trafficking of the highest imaginable magnitude, Hernández will spend 45 years where he belongs: in federal prison.”
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