Honduran President Hernandez allegedly helped smuggle cocaine into US [View all]

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Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández helped smuggle tons of cocaine into the United States, a U.S. prosecutor said Tuesday at the trial of an accused drug trafficker.

That defendant, Geovanny Fuentes, bribed the president with $25,000 in cash and this made Fuentes "untouchable," prosecutor Jacob Gutwillig said in opening arguments at the New York federal trial.

The president said the prosecutor, "made the defendant bullet-proof."

Fuentes paid the money to Hernández in meetings in 2013 and 2014, the prosecutor said. Hernández, 52, who denies all the allegations against him, has been in power since January 2014.

The president's brother, Tony Hernández, was convicted of large-scale drug trafficking (at least 200 tons) at a New York trial in 2019.

At: https://www.dailysabah.com/world/americas/honduran-president-hernandez-allegedly-helped-smuggle-cocaine-into-us

Good boy: Then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson hosts Honduran President Orlando Hernández at the State Department in 2017.

Court documents, which identify Hérnandez as a co-conspirator in a New York case, quoted him as saying he wanted to "shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos' by flooding the United States with cocaine."

The president's brother Tony is a convicted drug trafficker, and cocaine exports from Honduras have soared under his regime.