On Friday, March 8, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted on three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy in a Manhattan federal court. Extradited to the United States shortly after completing his second presidential term in 2022, the 55-year-old Hernández is up against a mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years in jail.

Following the conviction, US Attorney General Merrick Garland accused Hernández of having run Honduras as a “narco-state where violent drug traffickers were allowed to operate with virtual impunity”. The US Department of Justice, Garland righteously bleated, has now shown its commitment to “disrupting the entire ecosystem of drug trafficking networks that harm the American people, no matter how far or how high we must go”.

And yet given the United States’ fundamental role in nurturing and sustaining this very ecosystem in the first place, the guilty verdict can safely be filed under the “Can’t Make This Up” category of imperial hypocrisy.

For starters, recall that Hernández was until very recently a good chum of successive US administrations, which appointed him a vital ally in the so-called “war on drugs” and flung money at Honduras accordingly. The messianically right-wing leader came to power five years after the 2009 US-facilitated coup d’état against Manuel Zelaya, who had dared to steer the country slightly off the straight and narrow path of neoliberal dystopia.

The fabricated pretext for the coup, which took place........

© Al Jazeera