The former president’s attorney says Hernandez, who faces drug charges, is being treated like a “prisoner of war.”
Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández has pleaded not guilty to drug charges in the United States, and his attorney has complained that he is being held as a “prisoner of war” in a New York federal jail.
Hernandez, 53, appeared on united states federal court Tuesday with ankle chains and spoke through a Spanish interpreter saying he was not guilty.
The was extradited to the United States last month and accused of participating in a “corrupt and violent drug trafficking conspiracy to facilitate the importation of hundreds of thousands of kilograms of cocaine into the United States.”
The former president, who served two terms between 2014 and January 2022, has maintained that he is innocent. He lost his immunity from prosecution when he handed over power to the first female president of Honduras, xiomara castroin January.
Defense attorney Raymond Colon said Tuesday that Hernandez was being held in solitary confinement and had not been allowed to call his family.
“Obviously, he has been treated like a prisoner of war, not like any other inmate,” Colón said.
US District Judge P. Kevin Castel ordered the government to investigate Hernández’s conditions of detention and report back to him within a week. The judge also set a preliminary trial date for January 17.
The US indictment had charged Hernandez with three counts of drug and weapons-related crimes that could land him decades in prison if convicted.
Damian Williams, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said during a press conference Thursday night that Hernandez was involved in “rampant corruption and massive cocaine trafficking” that fueled the violence in Honduras.
“Honduras became one of the most violent countries in the world during the defendant’s presidency, and while Hernández accumulated money and political influence, the people of Honduras endured conditions of poverty and violence,” he said.
Hernandez has previously denied the allegations. In a video message posted before his extradition, he said: “I am innocent; I have been and am being unfairly subjected to prosecution.”
His brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández was sentenced for life in prison in the US in March 2021 for “a life of drug trafficking,” the investigating judge said. In that trial, prosecutors said Juan Antonio distributed drug-related bribes to his brother, then the acting president of Honduras.
The United States also extradited former Honduran police chief Juan Carlos Bonilla on Tuesday to face drug-related charges, the AFP and Reuters news agencies reported.
In April, US authorities accused Bonilla of abusing “his positions in the Honduran law enforcement agencies to break the law and play a key role in a violent international drug trafficking conspiracy.”
But, like Hernández, Bonilla has denied the accusations. “I go with the presence of the Almighty, head held high, with a clear conscience that I owe nothing to the United States,” Bonilla wrote in a letter published in local media last week.