By Jeff Mason and Diego Oré
WASHINGTON, Dec 2 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump, who has painted himself as a fearsome warrior against illegal drugs, pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was serving a 45-year sentence after being convicted of conspiring to import tons of cocaine into the United States.
Trump’s extraordinary move could strain U.S. credibility in Latin America, embolden corrupt actors and open the Republican president to accusations from critics that he is undermining decades of U.S. efforts to combat transnational drug networks. Trump has said that he believes Hernandez was treated unfairly by the administration of his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden.
Trump signed the pardon for Hernandez on Monday night, a White House official said. The Federal Bureau of Prisons released him from prison in Hazelton, West Virginia, on Monday.
The U.S. president has cited the dangers of illicit drug flows from Latin America as justification for a series of deadly U.S. attacks on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and a military buildup near Venezuela. Democrats and legal scholars have criticized the attacks and questioned their legal justification, noting that they have killed scores.
During the Biden administration, the U.S. Justice Department asserted that Hernandez had abused his power by accepting millions of dollars in bribes from traffickers to protect their U.S.-bound cocaine shipments and to fuel his rise in Honduran politics. A Manhattan jury found Hernandez guilty in March 2024. He was sentenced in June last year.
Hernandez’s wife, Ana Garcia de Hernandez, praised Trump in a social media post on Monday.
“After nearly four years of pain, waiting, and difficult trials, my husband Juan Orlando Hernandez RETURNED to being a free man, thanks to the presidential pardon granted by President Donald Trump,” Garcia wrote.
At his sentencing, Hernandez said he was the victim of drug dealers who testified against him after he helped extradite them from Honduras to the United States. “This was a political persecution by drug traffickers and politicians,” Hernandez said then, according to the court transcript.
Instead, he portrayed himself as a scourge of drug traffickers.
“I had a policy against all those people because I could not stand them,” Hernandez said. “They did a lot of damage in the country.”
HERNANDEZ CLAIMS PERSECUTION
Hernandez wrote a long letter to Trump in which he called himself a political target of the Biden-Harris administration, comparing himself to Trump, who faced multiple prosecutions during Biden’s presidency and claimed the charges were politically motivated.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday that Hernandez had been the victim of a “setup.”
“This was a clear Biden over-prosecution. He was the president of this country. He was in the opposition party. He was opposed to the values of the previous administration, and they charged him because he was president of Honduras,” she said.
The Justice Department said in a statement after his sentencing in June 2024 that he helped to facilitate the importation into the U.S. “of an almost unfathomable 400 tons of cocaine” and was “at the center of one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”
STONE INTERVENES
Roger Stone, a South Florida-based conservative commentator and longtime Trump adviser, had for months vocally advocated for Hernandez’s release. He said on his radio show on Sunday that he had given Trump Hernandez’s letter. On the show, Hernandez’s wife, García de Hernández, said Stone’s advocacy for her husband had made a “huge difference” in the president’s decision.
The White House official said Trump had not seen the letter before announcing his intent to pardon Hernandez on Friday.
Stone did not respond to requests for comment.
The letter from Hernandez appeared designed to appeal to Trump’s sense of injustice and infused the letter with flattery, calling the president “Your Excellency” and referring to their shared “conservative values.”
“Your resilience to get back in that great office notwithstanding the persecution and prosecution you faced, all for what, because you wanted to make your country great again,” wrote Hernandez, according to a copy of the letter published by the New York Times.
U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s top Democrat, blasted Trump’s decision in remarks on the chamber’s floor on Tuesday, calling it “egregious, shameful and dangerous.”
“It would be bad enough on its own for Donald Trump to pardon this horrible drug trafficker, but for him to pardon this drug lord while putting a quarter of our military in the Caribbean, right nearby Honduras, to fight drug trafficking, makes an utter mockery of Donald Trump’s supposed desire to root out all drug trafficking,” Schumer said.
HONDURAN ELECTIONS
Hernandez’s release came a day after a presidential election in Honduras, in which Trump has backed presidential candidate Nasry Asfura of the conservative National Party, who is facing off with liberal Salvador Nasralla. The latest vote count showed both candidates practically tied, with each holding just under 40% of the vote.
Asfura’s party forged a close partnership with Washington under Hernandez, who governed from 2014 to 2022 and was arrested shortly after leaving office.
Honduras became a global hub for cocaine exports after a 2009 coup created political instability and allowed drug cartels to gain influence. The poverty-stricken country of around 11 million became one of the most violent places on earth as rival groups fought to control trafficking routes.
During Hernandez’s presidency, hundreds of thousands of Hondurans fled extortion and gang violence by migrating to the United States.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Diego Ore; additional reporting by Aida Pelaez-Fernandez, Nathan Layne, Katharine Jackson, Patricia Zengerle and Andrew Hay; Writing by James Oliphant; Editing by Daina Beth Solomon, Ross Colvin and Nick Zieminski)
Disclaimer: This report is auto generated from the Reuters news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.