The indictment against Hernández (53) that the American justice system revealed on Thursday, paints a jet-black picture of a shrewd narcopolitician. Long before he became president, he was already involved in international drug trafficking. The suspicions date back to 2004. “Hernández took part in a corrupt and violent drug smuggling plot that facilitated the importation of tons of cocaine into the United States.”
He received millions of dollars for his services, including from Mexican drug cartels. One of his contacts was former cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who has been detained in the US since 2017.
‘Narcostate’
Hernández bought not only beautiful things with his drug money, but above all power. He financed his campaigns and electoral fraud with it; first in 2013, later in his controversial re-election in 2017. Once president, he turned Honduras into a “narco-state,” the indictment said.
According to the Americans, he protected drug criminals, including his younger brother Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández (in an American cell since 2018), passed on police information to drug traffickers, deployed the police and military to protect drug transports and allowed ” brute force’ by criminal gangs go unpunished.
Honduras, a Caribbean country with ten million inhabitants, is ideally positioned between cocaine-producing South American countries such as Colombia and Peru and that immense market in the north, the US. The Americans conclude: Hernández and his criminal friends made Honduras ‘one of the largest transfer centers in the world for cocaine’.
A miracle
Such a powerful man would never give up that power just like that, Hondurans argued last spring during a visit of de Volkskrant to Honduras with certainty. No one entertained any illusions about the elections in the fall. They would be fraudulently won by an ally of Hernández, he himself would never go to prison.
But the miracle happened. Leftist Xiomara Castro, wife of 2009 deposed President Manuel Zelaya, has just defeated the deeply hated, corrupt clique of the National Party. And JOH, who celebrated his reelection in 2017 by cracking down on protests, disappeared from the stage. Once dethroned, his criminal connections also turned out to be worth little.
Castro took office in January, less than a month later a lonely Hernández locked himself in his house to avoid extradition to the US. It did not help. The state apparatus that had collaborated with criminals on his behalf now led him to prison with chains around his ankles.
farm family
Hernández grew up as the fifteenth child in a farming family of seventeen children. His childhood was spent among vast grasslands and green mountains in western Honduras. As a 19-year-old law student, he met his future wife at the university in the capital. They had four children together. He became a lawyer and also completed a degree in public administration – with a focus on American law.
In his early twenties he took his first steps at the National Party, a conservative power party that has been in existence for more than a century. He went to work as an assistant to his brother, who was a Member of Parliament. Eight years later, in 1998, he was elected himself. The dexterous Hernández made a quick advance through the Partido Nacional.
His brother Tony, ten years younger, rose simultaneously in drug crime. The US indictment describes how in 2005 MP Juan Orlando received 40 thousand dollars from his brother for passing on police information. The criminal organization that Tony Hernández was part of was able to transport cocaine to Guatemala without any problems.
While the Hernández brothers went down the criminal path, President Zelaya took an increasingly leftist course after taking office in 2006, much to the dismay of Honduras’ powerful financial and political elites. The army overthrew Zelaya in 2009. Later that year, Porfirio Lobo, the National Party candidate, won controversial new elections. The United States was quick to accept the result, as it did twice later with Hernández.
The narco president played for the stage ally of the US, the indictment now states. Not only that, it was him. He could do business with Obama and Trump. He had a good rapport with the latter in particular: as long as he stopped migrants, the US did not meddle in Honduran affairs. On Friday, Hernández heard in a New York court, shaking his head, what the Americans are now accusing him of. Perhaps the fate of his brother awaits him: lifelong.