New York, New York - The former police chief of Honduras was sentenced to 19 years in prison on Thursday for conspiring to import cocaine into the US, officials said.

Juan Carlos Bonilla Valladares (64), nicknamed "El Tigre," was arrested by US law enforcement as part of an investigation that implicated former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez.

Hernandez was sentenced to 45 years in prison in June after he was convicted of trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine into the US.

Damian Williams, US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Bonilla "abused his official positions and rose to power by facilitating cocaine trafficking on a massive scale."

Bonilla used "violence, including murder, to protect ton-quantities of cocaine headed for the United States, for the benefit and at the behest of his powerful drug trafficking and political partners," Williams said in a statement.

According to US prosecutors, Hernandez turned the Central American country into a "narco-state" during his 2014-2022 presidency.

He was convicted in March of having facilitated the smuggling of hundreds of tons of cocaine – mainly from Colombia and Venezuela – to the US via Honduras since 2004, starting long before he became president.

Hernandez used the drug money to enrich himself and finance his political campaign and commit electoral fraud in the 2013 and 2017 elections, prosecutors said.

His legal woes began in earnest in 2018 when his brother, Juan Antonio Hernandez, was arrested in Miami and sentenced in March 2021 to life imprisonment for "large-scale" drug trafficking.