President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras promised to protect drug traffickers using the nation’s security forces and law enforcement agencies, and to help them flood the United States with cocaine, an American prosecutor said on Tuesday.

“They would — as the president put it — ‘shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos,’” said the prosecutor, Jacob Harris Gutwillig, an assistant U.S. attorney in New York.

The allegations emerged in Federal District Court in Manhattan during opening arguments in the trial of Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez, a Honduran accused of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States from Honduras, as well as of weapons charges.

The trial is also something of a referendum on Mr. Hernández, who has been dogged for years by accusations of possible connections to drug traffickers. He has not been charged, but in court documents filed earlier this year, American prosecutors revealed for the first time that they were investigating the Honduran president.

Mr. Hernández is a key United States ally in the region, and the investigation could jeopardize the bilateral relationship and complicate the Biden administration’s efforts to invest $4 billion in Central America to address violence and corruption, reduce poverty and bolster the rule of law in an effort to stem migration to the United States.

The testimony on Tuesday, which echoed allegations made by prosecutors in court documents filed this year, added to growing pressure on Mr. Hernández. The president has also been implicated in other recent criminal prosecutions, including the conviction of his brother in 2019 in Federal District Court in Manhattan on cocaine trafficking charges, as well as a recent criminal complaint against a former Honduran police chief.

During his brother’s trial, witnesses and prosecutors said Mr. Hernández had accepted millions of dollars for his and his party’s political campaigns in exchange for protecting drug traffickers.

The president, who also was not charged in that earlier case but was described by prosecutors as a co-conspirator, has repeatedly denied the allegations against him, arguing that they come from unreliable witnesses — drug traffickers seeking revenge against Mr. Hernández for his efforts to break up criminal groups and extradite suspects to the United States.

In a series of Twitter posts on Monday, as jury selection in Mr. Fuentes’s trial got underway in Manhattan, Mr. Hernández again declared his innocence, saying that “with my election, the party ended” for drug traffickers.

“I will maintain international cooperation,” he wrote. “But the next government and those of other countries? How will the future be if the narcos win benefits from the USA for their false testimonies, with obvious lies?”

He added, “Inevitable collapse.”

The trial of Mr. Fuentes, who has denied the charges against him, is expected to run into next week. A defense lawyer for Mr. Fuentes, Eylan Schulman, said in his opening argument that his client was “an innocent man wrongly accused of very serious crimes.”

If Tuesday’s statements, coupled with court filings, are any indication, prosecutors are likely to draw a stark portrait of Mr. Hernández as a key player in the drug trafficking industry, which has contributed to the dysfunction and violence that has driven many Hondurans to leave the country in search of safety and better opportunity.

Mr. Gutwillig, the prosecutor, did not mince words in his opening arguments on Tuesday: He called Honduras “a narco-state.”

Mr. Fuentes, he said, “distributed massive quantities of cocaine to the United States,” a business that was enabled through his connections “to police, military and political power in Honduras: mayors, congressmen, military generals and police chiefs, even the current president of Honduras.”

“The defendant owned them all — bought and paid for,” Mr. Gutwillig said.

Mr. Fuentes developed a relationship with Mr. Hernández, who took office in 2014, in a series of secret meetings in 2013 and 2014 during which the men “plotted to send as much cocaine as possible to the United States,” the prosecutor said. Mr. Fuentes paid Mr. Hernández $25,000 for the help.

Mr. Hernández, he said, “made the defendant bulletproof.”

Court records describe conversations between Mr. Hernández and Mr. Fuentes in which the president tells the accused trafficker not to worry about arrest, extradition or the long reach of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. According to prosecutors, Mr. Hernández told Mr. Fuentes that his fight against drug trafficking was a bluff and that he planned to get rid of the extradition policy and swamp the United States with cocaine.

The president also said he was embezzling aid money from the United States using fraudulent organizations, and siphoning money from the country’s Social Security system, according to the documents, which do not mention Mr. Hernández by name, describing him as “CC-4” — meaning co-conspirator 4 — though his identity is clear.

Mr. Hernández offered up the services of the Honduran armed forces and the attorney general’s office to facilitate cocaine transportation, and noted his own interest in accessing Mr. Fuentes’s cocaine laboratory, which was near Puerto Cortés, a major commercial shipping port, prosecutors said.

He also gave Mr. Fuentes the phone number of his brother, Tony Hernández, according to court documents.

After their meetings, prosecutors said, Mr. Fuentes received military equipment, including military uniforms, bulletproof vests and police badges.

Mr. Fuentes’s defense lawyers do not deny that their client knows the president. But Mr. Schulman said Tuesday that his client and Mr. Hernández were introduced by Mr. Fuentes’s mentor, Fuad Jarufe, a businessman, who also introduced Mr. Fuentes to the vice president and to members of the military.

Democratic senators in the United States last month introduced a bill urging President Biden to impose sanctions on Mr. Hernández and to suspend security assistance for the Honduran police and military.

“The United States cannot remain silent in the face of deeply alarming corruption and human rights abuses being committed at the highest levels of the Honduran government,” Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, said in a statement.

Emily Palmer reported from New York and Kirk Semple from Mexico City.

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