Political Quotes

“Juan Orlando Hernandez is the former President of Honduras, a country I lived in when I worked with Jesuit missionaries in 1980 and 1981. In a landmark criminal prosecution, he was convicted by a jury in an American Federal court of a massive conspiracy to traffic more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States while he was President of this very poor country. Trial testimony included a witness who quoted Hernandez saying that he wanted to "shove drugs right up the noses of the gringos and they're never even going to know it." The case against Hernandez began when Donald Trump's Department of Justice prosecuted his brother Tony in 2019. During that trial and the subsequent trial of the former Honduran President in 2024, evidence showed that President Hernandez led a conspiracy to distribute cocaine in the United States, engaged in serious firearms offenses, and collected millions of dollars in bribes from some of the most dangerous criminals in the world, including Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman of the Sinaloa Cartel. These actions coincided with a spike in violent crime in Honduras, rendering it, for a time, the most dangerous nation on Earth, forcing many Hondurans to leave their country, some coming to the United States. The jury that heard the 3-week-long case against the disgraced former President convicted him on multiple offenses. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison.”