The Supreme Court of Honduras authorized, this Monday (28), the extradition to the United States of the country’s former president, Juan Orlando Hernández.
Hernández is accused in the US of participating in a drug trafficking scheme. He turned himself in to the Honduran police in February of this year and was awaiting a decision on his future.
He was also added to the list of people accused of corruption or undermining democracy in the Northern Triangle of Central America — the region of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
Hernández, who left the Honduran presidency on January 27 after eight years in office, is accused by New York prosecutors of having links to drug trafficking since 2004. According to the prosecution, the former president participated in an operation to Honduras received tons of cocaine from Colombia and Venezuela — the drug’s final destination would be the US.
His brother, former congressman Tony Hernández, was sentenced in March 2021 to life imprisonment in the US for the same crime.
The former president denies all the accusations and says that they are revenge carried out by the same traffickers that his government captured or extradited to American territory.
The acronym JOH, as Hernández is known, lost the last presidential elections to Xiomara Castro, of Libre (Liberty and Refoundation Party), who became the first woman to assume the presidency of the Central American country. She came to power supported by her husband, former president Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted in a 2009 coup.
In addition to the economic deterioration and the intense waves of emigration, one of the challenges for the new Honduran leader is the fight against corruption and drug trafficking in the country.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) recorded 309,000 arrests of Hondurans at the country’s southern border in the last fiscal year ending September 2021, making nationality the second-largest source of migrants to the country, second only to Mexico, with 608,000 arrests.
