Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado is Honduras’ former president and a convicted drug trafficker. He is serving a 45-year sentence in the United States after being found guilty of drug trafficking and weapons charges on March 8, 2024.
Multiple US administrations regarded Hernández as a staunch pro-US ally while he was in power, and provided hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Honduras to strengthen the country’s security forces and fight the so-called war on drugs. But during the trial, the court heard how Hernández subverted Honduras’ state institutions, including the military and the police, and put them at the service of some of the most powerful criminal organizations on the planet.
As head of congress and then president, Hernández was the country’s most powerful political figure for more than two decades, but his tenure was roiled by persistent accusations of corruption among members of his inner circle, including his sister and his brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, who is also imprisoned in the US after being convicted of drug trafficking in 2019.
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) said Hernández and his co-conspirators trafficked more than 400 tons of cocaine through Honduras during his time in the Honduran government. Hernández has repeatedly denied all drug-related accusations and claimed that the witnesses who testified against him at his trial were drug traffickers with a vendetta.
History
Hernández started his political career in his hometown of Gracias, in the western department of Lempira, joining the ranks of the right-wing National Party (Partido Nacional) in the 1990s. He was elected Lempira’s congressman in 1997.
In 2010, Hernández was elected President of the National Congress, cementing his rise within the ruling party. But as his power grew, he was increasingly dogged by allegations of corruption. During his tenure as head of Congress, the congressionally-controlled Departmental Development Fund misappropriated an estimated $360 million in funds, using them to fill party coffers and finance campaigns. The fund was under the stewardship of Hilda Hernández, Hernández’s sister, who ran Honduras’ Ministry of Social Development and Inclusion.
Hernández was first elected president in 2013. Investigations by the country’s anti-corruption commission later revealed that millions of dollars in embezzled funds were funneled to Hernández’s first presidential campaign.
Hernández won a second term in 2017. His re-election, however, was marred by controversy – including the country’s Supreme Court voiding single term limits for presidents to allow him to run again – and accusations of voter fraud.
At the same time, a wave of traffickers indicted in the United States began to provide testimony that implicated Hernández in receiving bribes. Then in 2018, his brother Tony was arrested on drug charges at a Miami airport. Court documents that came to light in his brother’s case identified Hernández as being a co-conspirator.
His brother’s high-profile trial in 2019 made the then-president the subject of even more damning allegations. During the trial, Alexander Ardón, a former drug trafficker and mayor, testified that Tony had traded protection for Ardón’s operations for a $2 million contribution to his brother’s campaign.
US prosecutors also alleged that former Sinaloa Cartel kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias “El Chapo,” had hand-delivered $1 million to Tony that was meant for the former president.
Prosecutors also spoke of a ledger confiscated from Nery Orlando López, a drug trafficker, that listed $440,000 in payments to “JOH y su gente,” or JOH and his associates. The president is commonly referenced by his initials. López was brutally murdered in prison just one week after Tony’s trial.
Usually loath to name sitting presidents in criminal indictments, US prosecutors continued to allege in various cases and his brother’s sentencing that President Hernández took bribes directly and had participated firsthand in his brother’s drug trafficking scheme. The most explosive allegation came when a witness during the 2021 trial of drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez testified that President Hernández had boasted about deceiving US anti-drug forces.
“We are going to shove the drugs up the noses of the gringos, and they won’t even know it,” the president allegedly said.
Still, Hernández retained his status as a key US partner, willing to accommodate then-President Donald Trump and his crusade to stop migrants from reaching the US-Mexico border. He was also considered an ally in the US’s so-called War on Drugs. As President, he often opined that nobody had done more to dismantle and extradite Honduras’ drug-trafficking groups than himself.
It was only in 2021, more than a decade after repeated allegations of serious misconduct, that Washington truly began to distance itself from the Hernández administration. In February of that year, eight Democratic senators proposed a sanctions bill, in which they said that Hernández had engaged in a pattern of criminal activities.
By November 2021, voters in Honduras had had enough of Hernández’s ruling National Party. Xiomara Castro won a decisive victory in the presidential election, and speculation soon swirled that Hernández could be indicted by US prosecutors upon leaving office.
Following the loss, Hernández was immediately appointed to the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN) in a bid for immunity from prosecution.
But just weeks after leaving office, US prosecutors asked for his extradition on drug trafficking and weapons charges. Hernández was detained at his home on February 15, 2022. Police placed him in shackles and a bulletproof vest, a shocking and once unthinkable sight.
Hernández was convicted on drug trafficking and weapons charges on March 8, 2024. A judge later sentenced him to 45 years in prison on June 26, coinciding with the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking.
Criminal Activities
The US Southern District of New York found Hernández guilty of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and also guilty of two further weapons charges. In a sentencing document, prosecutors described Hernández as “one of the most culpable [defendants] ever prosecuted in the United States.”
The primary way Hernández participated in the cocaine trafficking conspiracy was by using his presidential power to protect the activities of drug traffickers, including his brother Tony Hernández, in exchange for bribes. However, prosecutors also believe that Hernández had at least some involvement in the operation of cocaine laboratories himself and partnered with Geovanny Fuentes Ramirez, a prolific former drug trafficker, to run a drug lab in the Northern department of Cortés.
Hernández’s trial revealed more information about the links between the Hernández National Party and the Sinaloa Cartel. In 2013, former cartel leader Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias “El Chapo,” flew to personally deliver a $1 million contribution to Hernández’s winning 2013 presidential campaign. Hernández’s brother, Tony, received the money from El Chapo in the town of El Paraíso, a small town in the Western Highlands of Copán.
The Sinaloa Cartel also provided a further $2.4 million in campaign contributions to Hernández, some of which was funneled through corrupt port officials.
Several Honduran trafficking organizations also helped finance Hernández’s campaigns. The largest single donation came from the Valles, who paid $4 million to Hernández’s winning 2013 presidential run. The funds were paid in cash and handed over to Tony Hernández in duffel bags in a gas station outside Tegucigalpa, Honduras’ capital.
Alexander Ardón, the former mayor of El Paraíso, also contributed at least $3.5 million in drug trafficking proceeds to the National Party, according to prosecutors. Ardon worked with Tony Hernández and the Valles to move cocaine across Honduras to El Paraíso, where it was shifted across the border and delivered to Sinaloa Cartel associates.
As president, Hernández promoted Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla to the post of Chief of the Honduran National Police. Bonilla allegedly worked with Tony and was directly involved in the protection of drug traffickers and their activities. This included direct participation in assassinations and the coordination of drug movements with fearsome criminal groups, including MS13.
Hernández’s trial relied primarily on testimony from witnesses and convicted drug traffickers. Key pieces of physical evidence were intercepted phone calls, ledgers which recorded bribes paid by drug traffickers to Hernández, and photographs of Hernández with members of the Valle cartel at the 2010 World Cup. Data extracted from the phone of Fuentes Ramirez also revealed that he had made at least two visits to the presidential palace while Hernández was in power.
Several potential witnesses to Hernandez’s crimes were killed before his arrest. Nery López Sanabria, a former trafficker whose narco-ledgers provided a key piece of evidence in the prosecutions of both Tony Hernández and eventually Juan Orlando Hernández, was brutally murdered by gang members in a maximum security prison, just one week after Tony’s conviction.
Two further witnesses, who allegedly had received copies of security camera footage showing Hernández accepting bribes from Fuentes, were also murdered.
Hernández has repeatedly denied all charges against him and, at his sentencing, described his conviction as a “lynching.”
While he has previously admitted receiving campaign funding from sources known to funnel misappropriated public funds, Hernández has claimed ignorance of the origin of those payments.
Geography
With the protection of the National Party, drug traffickers transformed Honduras into a major thoroughfare for South American cocaine to Mexico and the US.
Western Honduras was the center of power for Hernández and his brother Tony, who was also a National Party congressman. There, Tony began to serve as a political powerbroker with drug trafficking clans. This region remains key for drug-traffickers, who make use of Honduras’ long and porous border with Guatemala.
Both aerial and maritime routes flourished. Clandestine landing strips for drug flights carrying northbound cocaine became common in the more sparsely populated regions of the country. Land routes were also popular among traffickers connected to Honduras.
With Tony’s protection, the Valle Valle brothers controlled the principal land corridor from Honduras into Guatemala, where between 150 to 300 tons of cocaine were trafficked each year since at least 2015. Tony also worked with Alexander Amilcar Ardón, a former drug-trafficker and mayor of the small town El Paraiso.
While the Valle Valle brothers and Ardón were initially rivals, Tony brokered a truce between them, forming a sort of federation, according to court documents. These groups with Tony eventually all worked together to supply multi-ton cocaine shipments to the Sinaloa Cartel.
It was Ardón who initially introduced Tony to El Chapo where the drug lord made a $1 million contribution to Juan Orlando Hernandez’s presidential campaign.
Allies and Enemies
Through Tony, Hernández allegedly offered protection to some of the most prolific drug trafficking organizations in Honduras.
Tony’s principal clients were the Valle Valle brothers, with whom he got his start in large-scale trafficking. Tony brokered a truce between them and the group’s biggest rival, the AA Cartel, according to court documents.
Hernández allegedly provided Tony’s associates with political protection and support from authorities. This included the services of notorious former police chief Juan Carlos Bonilla Valladares, alias “El Tigre,” who is accused of using his position to protect drug shipments on behalf of Tony Hernández.
During Bonilla´s year at the helm of the Honduran National Police, he allegedly oversaw multi-ton loads of cocaine traveling from Colombia and Venezuela on to Guatemala, according to US prosecutors. He also carried out murders on behalf of Tony, according to court testimony. Bonilla was extradited to the US on May 11, 2022. He will be tried with Juan Orlando Hernández.
Hernández was a constant scourge for the country’s opposition, having won his 2017 bid for re-election under dubious circumstances.
Until 2021, however, the political opposition had remained too divided to mount a strong enough campaign to ensure his defeat. This made Xiomara Castro’s decisive victory over her National Party opponent, Nasry Asfura, all the more historic, as it ended 12 years of National Party rule.
One of Hernandez’s more outspoken critics, former Security Minister Ramón Sabillón, ultimately carried out his arrest.
Prospects
A New York Judge sentenced Juan Orlando Hernández to 45 years in jail on 26 June 2024. At 55 years old, Hernández will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars.
He is the third foreign former president convicted of drug trafficking in the United States, and joins the company of Manuel Noriega, Panama’s brutal dictator, who was convicted in 1992 of drug trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering. Andrew Fahie, the former premier of the British Virgin Islands, was also convicted on drug trafficking charges in February 2024.
Hernández faces little chance of early release. Many traffickers convicted in the US enter into plea agreements in exchange for more lenient sentences. However, because prosecutors believe that Hernández was at the top of the cocaine conspiracy and many of his co-conspirators are already in jail, his leverage is limited even if he decides to cooperate with future US drug investigations.
The Honduran government continues to go after Hernández’s old network, many of whom remain in Honduras.
The regular deportation of Hernández’s co-conspirators from the US as their sentences expire has also prompted fears that once fearsome criminal groups, such as the Valles and the Cachiros, may be rekindled in Honduras.