Juan Orlando Hernández
Juan Orlando Hernández was president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, two terms, the second forbidden by a constitution whose ban on re-election he had removed by removing the judges who would have enforced it. Three weeks after he left office he was arrested at his house in Tegucigalpa, in chains, at Washington's request. He was flown to New York, tried in March 2024 for taking millions of dollars from the cartels whose cocaine he had promised to stuff up the gringos' noses. He was convicted and sentenced to forty-five years. The presidency was the military police he created in 2013. There was the murder rate that fell from seventy-nine a hundred thousand to forty, which he claimed, and the ZEDE charter cities law revived. There was the social security institute looted of three hundred million dollars by his party, which financed his campaign of 2013 and which the torch marches of 2015 protested for months. There was the anti-corruption mission of the OAS invited in 2016 to quiet them and expelled in 2020 when it got close. There was the election of November 2017, in which he was behind by five points with more than half the votes counted, after which the count stopped for thirty-six hours and resumed with him ahead. The OAS said it could not be trusted and the Trump administration recognised it anyway. There were the twenty-two demonstrators shot by the military police in the weeks after, and the caravans of 2018 and 2019, thousands of Hondurans walking north to the American border from a country its government had made unliveable. His brother Tony, a congressman, was convicted in New York in 2019 of trafficking a hundred and eighty-five tonnes of cocaine and sentenced to life. The trial produced the evidence that the president had taken a million dollars from El Chapo. He was born in Gracias, Lempira, the fifteenth of seventeen children of a coffee grower. He studied law and, at the State University of New York, public administration. He sat in Congress from 1998 and was its president from 2010. He was the National Party's candidate chosen over Lobo's men. He is in a federal prison in West Virginia. His wife campaigns for his release from a country that, in the election of 2025, returned his party to office.
- Lived: 1968 CE – ?
- Nationality: Honduran
- Roles: president, lawyer, politician
