Trump Announces Pardon for Honduran Ex-President Convicted in Drug Case
Juan Orlando Hernández was accused of receiving millions in bribes and partnering with cocaine traffickers. He was convicted in Manhattan in 2024 and sentenced to 45 years in prison.
President Trump announced on Friday afternoon that he would grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who, as the center of a sweeping drug case, was found guilty by an American jury last year of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.
The news came as a shock not only to Hondurans, but also to the authorities in the United States who had built a major case and won a conviction against Mr. Hernández. They had accused him of taking bribes during his campaign from Joaquín Guzmán, the notorious former leader of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico known as “El Chapo,” and of running his Central American country like a narco state.
The 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. And prosecutors had asked the judge to make sure Mr. Hernández would die behind bars, citing his abuse of power, connections to violent traffickers and “the unfathomable destruction” caused by cocaine.
The prosecution stretched across Mr. Trump’s first term and concluded during Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s time as president. In the end, Mr. Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison in Federal District Court in Manhattan, capping what prosecutors had presented as a sprawling conspiracy.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, where Mr. Hernández was tried, declined to comment. A Drug Enforcement Administration agent, who worked on the investigation into Mr. Hernández 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. Mr. 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,” Mr. Vigil said on Friday.
Mr. 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 American military on small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that his administration says, without evidence, are involved in drug trafficking. That campaign has so far killed more than 80 people since it began in September.
The president has also put intense pressure on Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, deploying troops and warships to the region. Mr. 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. Mr. Trump has also authorized covert C.I.A. action in Venezuela. The end goal, American officials say privately, is to drive Mr. Maduro from power.
The pardon announcement came in a social media post on Friday evening by Mr. 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!”
Mr. Hernández’s lawyer, Renato Stabile, said that he had not known about the pardon until his client’s wife called him on Friday afternoon, in tears, and read Mr. Trump’s social media message. Mr. Hernández was supposed to have his appeal heard the week of Dec. 8.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Trump has also weighed in on Honduras’s 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 Mr. Hernández belongs to. Mr. Asfura had spent much of a highly contested race courting leaders in Washington, including members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle.
This week, Mr. Trump wrote: “Tito and I can work together to fight the Narcocommunists, and bring needed aid to the people of Honduras.” Mr. Asfura did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Hernández, a major figure in Honduras’s National Party, served as president from 2014 to 2022. 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 re-election. Widespread accusations of fraud set off demonstrations and post-electoral violence involving the military, and nearly two dozen people were killed.
During his second term, Mr. Hernández’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 Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers.
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. During the trial, prosecutors asserted that Mr. Hernández had received millions in bribes from drug traffickers, including $1 million from Mr. Guzmán, the former Sinaloa cartel leader who is imprisoned in the United States.
Mr. Hernández 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 B. Garland said at the time, “As president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández 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 Mr. Trump took office this year, Mr. Hernández’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 Mr. Trump’s first term.
His cause was taken up by figures like Roger Stone, the conservative political operative and Trump ally. Mr. Stone claimed that Mr. Hernández 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. Mr. Trump, in one of his recent posts, called the family “the Communists.”
As word spread on Friday about Mr. Hernández’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.”
Mr. Zelaya, the progressive former Honduran president, 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, Mr. Asfura posted an image of himself, Mr. Trump and Javier Milei, Argentina’s president, on social media.
Opponents of Mr. 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.”
Many in Honduras wondered how Mr. 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 Mr. Asfura to Mr. Hernández, Mr. Trump could actually hurt Mr. Asfura’s chances of winning.
Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting.
Annie Correal is a Times reporter covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.