Honduras Issues Arrest Warrant for Hernández, Ex-President Pardoned by Trump

The attorney general said he had asked Interpol to detain Juan Orlando Hernández, who was freed from a U.S. prison last week.

The Honduran attorney general announced on Monday night that he had issued an international arrest warrant for the country’s former president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was recently pardoned by President Trump and released from prison in the United States.

In a social media post, Attorney General Johel Antonio Zelaya Alvarez said he had instructed the government and Interpol to execute the warrant against Mr. Hernández, citing charges of money laundering and fraud connected to a case involving his first presidential campaign more than a decade ago.

“We have been wounded by the tentacles of corruption and by the criminal networks that have deeply scarred the life of our country,” Mr. Zelaya said in announcing the warrant on X.

The charges that Mr. Hernández faces in Honduras stem from what is known as the Pandora Case. Prosecutors say that between 2010 and 2013, a corrupt network of lawmakers and others diverted public funds through private foundations, then funneled those funds into political campaigns — including Mr. Hernández’s 2013 campaign.

Mr. Zelaya noted that his announcement coincided with International Anti-Corruption Day, Dec. 9. His social media message included a document dated Nov. 28 — the day Mr. Trump first mentioned his plan to pardon Mr. Hernández — in which a Honduran Supreme Court justice asked Interpol to “carry out an immediate arrest,” including if Mr. Hernández was released by the U.S. authorities.

Mr. Hernández’s lawyer, Renato Stabile, said that announcing the warrant was “obviously a strictly political move” by the governing Libre Party, whose candidate is trailing as ballots are counted from the recent presidential election. Mr. Zelaya was nominated to his post by the Libre Party, which has long been opposed to Mr. Hernández.

Mr. Hernández’s current whereabouts is unclear. He served as president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, a period marred by corruption scandals. He was at the center of a fraught election in 2017, when he secured a second term, despite a constitutional ban on re-election. His victory then was contested, protests broke out and the military was deployed in a bloody period that left nearly two dozen people dead.

Less than a month after leaving office in 2022, Mr. Hernández was arrested and later extradited to the United States to face drug-trafficking and weapons charges. When he was sentenced to 45 years in prison, U.S. authorities said he had played a central role in “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”

Mr. Trump formally pardoned Mr. Hernández on Dec. 1, and he was released from a federal prison in West Virginia last week.

The pardon came after Mr. Hernández sent Mr. Trump a letter portraying himself as a victim of “political persecution” by the Biden administration and comparing his fate to that of Mr. Trump.

Mr. Hernández’s cause was taken up by figures like Roger Stone, the conservative political operative and Trump ally. Mr. Stone, who played a role in delivering the letter to Mr. Trump, claimed that Mr. Hernández was a victim of a conspiracy tied to the U.S. government.

Mr. Trump said that “many friends” had made the case for the pardon.

“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “And they said it was a Biden administration setup. And I looked at the facts, and I agreed with them.”

Last year, Mr. Hernández was convicted and sent to prison for conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and for possessing and conspiring to possess “destructive devices,” including machine guns.

The U.S. judge in his case, P. Kevin Castel, had called Mr. Hernández “a two-faced politician hungry for power” who masqueraded as an antidrug crusader while partnering with traffickers. U.S. prosecutors asked the judge to make sure Mr. Hernández died behind bars.

Mr. Hernández’s rumored connections to drug traffickers had escalated after his brother, a former lawmaker, was arrested in the United States on drug-trafficking charges in 2018. A lead investigator in that case was Emil Bove III, then a prosecutor for the Southern District of New York and later one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers.

During Mr. Hernández’s own trial, prosecutors asserted that he had received millions in bribes from drug traffickers, including $1 million from Joaquín Guzmán, the notorious former leader of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico known as “El Chapo,” who is imprisoned in the United States.

Mr. Hernández denied that he had trafficked narcotics, offered police protection to drug cartels or taken bribes.

As right-wing figures such as Mr. Stone pushed for Mr. Hernández’s pardon this year, Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager was among those advising a candidate in the presidential election, Nasry Asfura, who is a member of Mr. Hernández’s party, the National Party. Mr. Trump also endorsed Mr. Asfura.

The results of the closely fought election have not yet been called, but on Monday night, Mr. Asfura had inched ahead of his nearest rival, with 97 percent of the ballots counted.

Jeff Ernst contributed reporting from Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

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