NEW YORK — On Friday, Juan Orlando Hernández, the ex-president of Honduras and a longtime U.S. ally, was convicted in a New York federal courtroom on three counts of narcotics trafficking and related weapons offenses. True to form, the mainstream American media’s coverage of the verdict was sketchy, limited to brief reports that barely mentioned his significant connections to the U.S. government. By hiding America’s long-running complicity in Hernández’s crimes, the media completely missed the most shocking element of the story.
If the U.S. media had listened to the scores of enraged Hondurans and Honduran-Americans who jammed the spectator sections of the courtroom and noisily demonstrated outside throughout the trial, they would have understood that, in the words of one protester, “the gringos were protecting JOH.” (In Honduras, Hernández is…
