After years of speculation in Honduras, the United States formally requested the arrest and extradition of former President Juan Orlando Hernández less than three weeks after he left office.
Honduran security forces surrounded Hernández’s neighborhood Monday night and the Supreme Court of Justice scheduled an urgent meeting Tuesday morning to select a judge to handle the extradition request. A standoff ensued.
It was a long-awaited fall for a leader reviled in his home country, who enjoyed support from the Trump administration, but had been kept at arm’s length by a Biden White House targeting Central America’s endemic corruption as a root cause of migration.The specific charges Hernández’s faces are not known, but federal prosecutors in New York had previously named him a co-conspirator in a drug trafficking case, alleging that his political rise was fueled with drug profits.
Hernández often pointed to the fact that Honduras began allowing the extradition of Hondurans on drug trafficking charges while he was president of the congress as part of his defense. That brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, himself a former Honduran congressman, was sentenced to life in prison on drug and weapons charges in March 2021. At his sentencing Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Laroche characterized the crimes as “state-sponsored drug trafficking.”Juan Orlando Hernández took office Jan. 27, 2014.
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