Juan Orlando Hernández, former president of Honduras, was extradited Thursday from Honduras to the United States to face charges of drug trafficking and other weapons-related crimes in federal court in the Southern District of New York.
Hernández will remain Thursday night in a jail in Brooklyn, New York.
On Friday,
he will appear in Manhattan criminal court at 3:00 pm for his first hearing.
The attorney general, Merick Garland, affirmed this Thursday at a press conference that Hernández helped traffic more than 500 tons of cocaine between 2004 and 2022 and had even accepted 1 million dollars in bribes from the Mexican drug trafficker Joaquín
El Chapo
Guzmán in 2013 to protect their illicit businesses in Honduras.
Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, center, is led in handcuffs to a plane awaiting extradition to the United States from an Air Force base in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Thursday, April 21, 2022. Elmer Martinez / AP
"He abused his position as president of Honduras to operate the country as a narco
-state , in order to enrich himself, come to power and corruptly stay in it," Garland said.
The accusation that was presented this Thursday affirms that the former president participated during his two terms between 2014 and 2022 in a conspiracy to facilitate the importation of hundreds of tons of cocaine and received millions of dollars to protect drug trafficking organizations with law enforcement. public and the Honduran Army.
"The charges we are announcing today seek to finally bring Hernandez to justice after years of corruption, violence and drug trafficking," said Damian Williams, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
The US authorities assured that Hernández used the resources he obtained from drug trafficking to finance
