Trump pardons Honduran ex-president convicted in drug case

BRITTAINY NEWMAN / NEW YORK TIMES / SEPT. 25, 2019

President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras addresses the UN General Assembly in 2019. President Donald Trump announced on Friday his intention to grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to Hernandez, who was found guilty by an American jury last year of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.

MEXICO CITY >> Federal prosecutors said last year that when Juan Orlando Hernandez was president of Honduras, he received millions of dollars from drug traffickers including Joaquin Guzman Loera, known as El Chapo, the Mexican drug lord.

In return, prosecutors alleged, Hernandez allowed vast amounts of cocaine to pass through Honduras on its way to the United States. They said he once boasted that he would “stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.”

He was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison.

On Friday, President Donald Trump said he was setting him free.

He announced that he would grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to Hernandez, news that came as a shock not only to Hondurans but also to authorities in the United States who had built a major case and won the conviction against Hernandez for conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, where Hernandez, 57, was tried, declined to comment.

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A Drug Enforcement Administration agent who worked on the investigation into Hernandez and spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter, called the pardon “lunacy.”

Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations at the same agency, also reacted with disbelief to the news of the pardon. Vigil said the move imperiled the reputation of the United States and its international investigations into drug trafficking.

“This action would be nothing short of catastrophic and would destroy the credibility of the U.S. in the international community,” Vigil said Friday.

Trump’s vow to pardon such a high-profile convicted drug trafficker appeared to contradict the president’s campaign to unleash the might of the U.S. military on small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that his administration says, without evidence, are involved in drug trafficking. That campaign has killed more than 80 people since it began in September.

The president has also put intense pressure on Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, deploying troops and warships to the region. Trump has accused him of being the boss of a drug organization called Cartel de los Soles, though specialists in Latin American criminal and narcotics issues say it is not a literal organization. Trump has also authorized covert CIA action in Venezuela. The end goal, U.S. officials say privately, is to drive Maduro from power.

The pardon announcement came in a social media post Friday evening by Trump. “CONGRATULATIONS TO JUAN ORLANDO Hernandez ON YOUR UPCOMING PARDON,” he wrote, minutes after he returned to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where he is spending the holiday weekend and took time out to visit his nearby golf club. “MAKE HONDURAS GREAT AGAIN!”

Hernandez’s lawyer, Renato Stabile, said that he had not known about the pardon until his client’s wife called him Friday afternoon, in tears, and read Trump’s social media message. Hernandez was supposed to have his appeal heard the week of Dec. 8.

As of this afternoon, there was no official confirmation that Trump had signed the promised pardon. But in a statement to The New York Times, he defended letting Hernandez go: “Many friends from South America, especially Honduras, asked me to do this. This was clearly a Biden over-prosecution. They gave him 45 years because he was the president of the country — you could do this to any president on any country!”

Trump has also weighed in on Honduras’ upcoming election, set for Sunday. He has endorsed a candidate, a former mayor named Nasry “Tito” Asfura from the conservative National Party, the same one that Hernandez belongs to. Asfura had spent much of a highly contested race courting leaders in Washington, including members of Trump’s inner circle.

This past week, Trump wrote: “Tito and I can work together to fight the Narcocommunists, and bring needed aid to the people of Honduras.” Asfura did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hernandez, a major figure in Honduras’ National Party, served as president from 2014-22. When he won, he was seen as a willing, albeit flawed, ally by the United States. But his first term was plagued by corruption scandals that led to widespread protests.

His tenure was also defined by the contentious election of 2017, when he secured a second term despite a constitutional ban on reelection. Widespread accusations of fraud set off demonstrations and postelectoral violence involving the military, and nearly two dozen people were killed.

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

Less than a month after leaving office, in 2022, Hernandez was arrested and later extradited to the United States to face drug trafficking and weapons charges. During the trial, prosecutors asserted that Hernandez had received millions in bribes from drug traffickers, including $1 million from Guzmán, the former Sinaloa cartel leader who is imprisoned in the United States.

Hernandez denied that he had trafficked narcotics, offered police protection to drug cartels or taken bribes. But in the end, he was convicted in March 2024 of the drug charges and of possessing and conspiring to possess “destructive devices,” including machine guns.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said at the time, “As president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world, and the people of Honduras and the United States bore the consequences.”

Since Trump took office this year, Hernandez’s family has attempted to portray his conviction as political persecution by the Biden administration. But the investigation into his ties with drug traffickers took place primarily during Trump’s first term.

His cause was taken up by figures like Roger Stone, a conservative political operative and Trump ally. Stone claimed that Hernandez had been “trapped” and was a victim of a conspiracy tied to the U.S. government.

Honduras is now governed by a left-wing party, Libre, which was formed by another former president, Manuel Zelaya, after he was ousted in a coup in 2009. His wife, Xiomara Castro, is the current president. The Zelaya-Castro family has itself faced allegations of drug trafficking ties and was painted by the opposition in this year’s election as pro-Venezuela. Trump, in one of his recent posts, called the family “the Communists.”

As word spread Friday about Hernandez’s pardon, Todd Robinson, who served as the U.S. assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs at the State Department, said online: “We blow up ‘alleged’ drug boats in the Caribbean but pardon actually convicted drug traffickers in the U.S. Someone help me make sense of this.”

Zelaya wrote on social media, “@POTUS, by absolving JOH, protects the looter of the state and now orders people to vote for Asfura: the direct heir of the narco-regime.”

On Friday, Asfura posted an image of himself, Trump and Javier Milei, Argentina’s president, on social media.

Opponents of Asfura in the upcoming election denounced the pardon, with Libre’s candidate, Rixi Moncada, linking it to the string-pulling of Honduran “elites” in Washington. Another top candidate, Salvador Nasralla, proclaimed in a post that, unlike his rivals, he had “clean hands.”

It is unclear what would happen to Hernandez upon his release from prison. He is not a U.S. citizen, and at the moment, he faces an arrest warrant in Honduras.

Many in Honduras wondered how Trump’s pardon would affect the elections this weekend.

“It will, obviously, stir up the same powerful negative sentiment seen in the 2021 elections that pushed Juan Orlando out of power,” said Leonardo Pineda, a Honduran analyst.

He added that, by linking Asfura to Hernandez, Trump could actually hurt Asfura’s chances of winning.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2025 The New York Times Company

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