2010 World Cup photo key to drug trafficking case

Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández has been jailed for 45 years in the US. The Daily Maverick reports that a photograph of him and drug traffickers at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa was addressed during his sentencing procedures. Apart from indirectly contributing to his fate, the photograph hints at the top-tier global criminals who have visited SA. If it is indeed authentic, as US authorities seem to suggest, it depicts Hernández with cocaine traffickers, one of whom backed him with drug money. On 26 June, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York issued a statement saying that, from about 2004 to 2022, Hernández ‘was at the centre of one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world’. ‘During his political career, Hernández abused his powerful positions and authority in Honduras to facilitate the importation of over 400 tons of cocaine into the US,’ the statement added. Hernández was extradited to the US in 2022 and convicted in March this year of importing cocaine and weapons.

DM in 2023 reported that two convicted drug traffickers in the US had testified about attending the 2010 World Cup and that the photograph suggested they were with Hernández. According to the US Government’s sentencing submission filed against Hernández last week, he and his associates had partnered with Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán Loera, the leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, the world’s largest drug-trafficking gang. El Chapo was sentenced to life imprisonment in the US in 2019.

Full Daily Maverick report