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US court convicts Honduran president’s brother of drug trafficking
NEW YORK, Oct 19, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – A New York court convicted the Honduran
president’s brother of drug trafficking Friday, a verdict immediately
rejected by the Central American leader while opponents called for his
resignation.
Tony Hernandez was found guilty on all four counts following a trial in
Manhattan that lasted almost two weeks.
President Juan Orlando Hernandez said his brother had been convicted with
“testimony from confessed murderers.”
“On behalf of my family, and personally, it is with great sadness that I
received word of the verdict in New York,” the president wrote on Twitter.
Tony Hernandez was arrested at a Miami airport in November 2018 on charges
including conspiring to import cocaine into the United States, possessing
machine guns and making false statements.
The former Honduran congressman, 41, is due to be sentenced on January 17.
He faces between five years and life in prison.
Following the verdict, opposition parties in Honduras called for street
protests to demand that the president step down.
Manuel Zelaya, the former president of Honduras who was overthrown in a
coup in 2009, tweeted that the verdict had “unmasked the drug and corruption
network run by the government of Honduras.”
Although he wasn’t on trial himself, the court proceedings featured
compromising allegations against the president.
Prosecutors said the Honduran leader took millions of dollars in bribes
from drug lords including jailed Mexican kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
President Hernandez, an ally of US President Donald Trump, dismissed the
accusation as “absurd” and “less serious than Alice in Wonderland,” in a
tweet.
The Manhattan prosecutor’s office filed a motion in August alleging that
President Hernandez received at least $1.5 million in drug money from one of
the prosecution’s cooperating witnesses for his first campaign, and $40,000
for the second.
– Monogrammed cocaine –
He has rejected the accusations and has not been formally charged by the US
judicial system.
The US government successfully argued that Tony Hernandez was a large-scale
drug trafficker who worked from 2004 to 2016 with others in Colombia,
Honduras and Mexico to import cocaine into the US by plane, boat and
submarine.
He helped facilitate more than 200 tons of cocaine into the US. Some of the
it was labeled with his initials “TH,” prosecutors argued.
Hernandez made millions of dollars from the trafficking and used the
proceeds to influence three presidential elections, according to US
attorneys.
The prosecution also said Hernandez, who served as a member of the Honduran
Congress from 2014 to 2018, was involved in at least two murders of rival
drug traffickers in 2011 and 2013.
Defense lawyers questioned the credibility of the witnesses, many of them
former drug traffickers, some of which had been convicted of murder, but
those arguments did not influence the 12 jurors who took less than two days
to convict.
Hernandez’s lawyer said his client would appeal.
“The legal battle continues,” Omar Malone told reporters outside court.
US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) special agent Wendy Woolcock
welcomed the verdict, adding in a statement that the DEA and its partners
would hunt traffickers “regardless of social status.”
US prosecutors have aggressively pursued current or former Honduran public
officials and their relatives over drug trafficking allegations.
The verdict comes after Guzman, the 62-year-old former co-leader of
Mexico’s feared Sinaloa drug cartel, was convicted in New York in February of
smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines and marijuana
into the United States.
He has been jailed for life, a sentence he is appealing.
BSS/AFP/GMR/0950 hrs