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The criminal hypocrisy of Hernandez’s drug conviction in a US court
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Al Jazeera
Posted: January 29th, 2025
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/3/17/the-criminal-hy...
On Friday, March 8, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted on three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy in a Manhattan federal court. Extradited to the United States shortly after completing his second presidential term in 2022, the 55-year-old Hernández is up against a mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years in jail. US Attorney General Merrick Garland accused Hernández of having run Honduras as a “narco-state where violent drug traffickers were allowed to operate with virtual impunity”. Hernández was until very recently a good chum of successive US administrations, which appointed him a vital ally in the so-called “war on drugs” and flung money at Honduras accordingly. The messianically right-wing leader came to power five years after the 2009 US-facilitated coup d’état against Manuel Zelaya. The fabricated pretext for the coup ... was that Zelaya was scheming to remain president of Honduras in violation of the constitutional one-term limit. Later this limit was quickly dispensed with in order to enable the continued reign of Hernández. Post-election protests triggered a characteristically lethal response from Honduran security forces, which didn’t stop the US from continuing to fund those very same forces. The CIA’s narco-operations have spanned the globe from Pakistan to Laos to Venezuela, while many an international narco-politician has – like Hernández – found at least fleeting favour with the US government.
Note: Read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.
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