Former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez has been sentenced in New York for his conviction on charges that he enabled drug traffickers to use his military and national police force to help get tons of cocaine into the United States.

Judge P Kevin Castel sentenced Hernandez to 45 years in a US prison. A jury convicted him in March in Manhattan federal court after a two-week trial, which was closely followed in his home country.

“I am innocent,” Hernandez said at his sentencing. “I was wrongly and unjustly accused.”

He had faced a mandatory minimum of 40 years in prison and up to life in prison after he was convicted of conspiring to import cocaine into the US and two weapons counts.

Hernandez, 55, served two terms as the leader of the Central American nation of roughly 10 million people.

Hernandez was arrested at his home in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, three months after leaving office in 2022 and was extradited to the US in April of that year.

US prosecutors say Hernandez worked with drug traffickers as long ago as 2004, taking millions of dollars in bribes as he rose from rural congressman to president of the National Congress and then to the country’s highest office.

Hernandez acknowledged in trial testimony that drug money was paid to virtually all political parties in Honduras, but he denied accepting bribes himself.

Hernandez insisted in a lengthy statement made through an interpreter that his trial was unjust because he was not allowed to include evidence that would have caused the jury to find him not guilty.

He said he was being persecuted by politicians and drug traffickers.

“It’s as if I had been thrown into a deep river with my hands bound,” he said.

Trial witnesses included traffickers who admitted responsibility for dozens of murders and said Hernandez was an enthusiastic protector of some of the world’s most powerful cocaine dealers, including notorious Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who is serving a life prison term in the US

His brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernandez, a former Honduran congressman, was sentenced to life in a US prison in 2021 in Manhattan federal court for his own conviction on drug charges.