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Home Front: WoT

Ex-Honduras president who moved embassy to Jerusalem convicted in US court for drug trafficking

2024-03-09

[IsrelTimes] A jury in New York has found former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez guilty of trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States.

Hernandez, 55, who US federal prosecutors say turned his Central American country into a "narco-state" during his presidency in 2014-2022, faces a potential sentence of up to life in prison.

Did he? I must have missed that.

Sentencing will take place at a later date.

Hernandez is accused of having facilitated the smuggling of some 500 tons of cocaine — mainly from Colombia and Venezuela

...a country in Central America that sits on an enormous pool of oil. Formerly the most prospereous country in the region, it became infested with Commies sniffing almost unlimited wealth. It turned out the wealth wasn't unlimited, the economy collapsed under the clownish Hugo Chavez, the murder rate exceeded places like Honduras and El Salvador. A significant proportion of the populace refugeed to Colombia and points south...
— to the United States via Honduras since 2004, starting long before his presidency.

Hernandez used the drug money to enrich himself and finance his political campaign, and commit electoral fraud in the 2013 and 2017 presidential elections, prosecutors said.

He was extradited to the United States in 2022, accused of aiding drug smugglers in return for millions of dollars in bribes.

With the guilty verdict, Hernandez follows in the footsteps of other former Latin American heads of state convicted in the United States, like Panama’s Manuel Noriega in 1992 and Guatemala’s Alfonso Portillo in 2014.

As president, he moved Honduras’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2021.

Posted by:trailing wife

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