On March 8, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted of drug trafficking and weapons charges in the Southern District of New York. Over the course of his eight years in power between 2014 and 2022, Hernández was alleged to have aided the trafficking of at least 500 tons of cocaine into the US homeland.
The trial left little room for doubt that Honduras under Hernández and his predecessor Porfirio Lobo was nothing short of a narco-state. What went largely unsaid in the courtroom, however, was the uncomfortable truth that for years Hernández was the golden boy of Washington. Given that the United States aided Hernández’s rise to power, and that successive US presidents treated him as a valued regional client, his conviction stands as a scathing indictment of the DC uniparty and the shockingly corrupt, blatantly ineffectual way it has waged the war on drugs.