Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
05-12-2025
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump, who has cast himself as a relentless foe of illegal drugs, pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, freeing him from a 45-year sentence for conspiring to import tons of cocaine into the United States.
Trump’s extraordinary move risks weakening U.S. credibility in Latin America, could embolden corrupt actors, and is likely to draw criticism that he is undercutting decades of U.S. efforts to fight transnational drug networks.
Trump told reporters at the White House that he had freed Hernandez in response to pleas from Hondurans and that he felt “very good” about the decision. He asserted without evidence that Hernandez had been the victim of a witch hunt by the administration of his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden.
Democrats rebuked the Republican president, accusing him of hypocrisy in claiming to have stepped up the fight against the flow of illicit drugs into the United States while freeing a man convicted of using his office to aid drug traffickers.
Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said evidence presented at Hernandez’s trial had established that the former president had “orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy” that raked in millions of dollars for drug cartels.
“This is not an action by a president trying to keep America safe from narcotics,” Durbin said. “It is a strange understanding of his power that he would use this and not penalize those responsible for the narcotics coming into the United States.”
Trump 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 at least 80 people.
During the Biden administration, the U.S. Justice Department asserted that Hernandez, who was president from 2014 to 2022, had run Honduras as a “narco-state”, abusing 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.
The Justice Department said he had been at the “center of one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world” and used his authority to facilitate the importation of more than 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.
“It’s not just a matter of reputation or credibility. Pardoning Juan Orlando is directly damaging to the United States’ national interests,” said Will Freeman, fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
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 2014-2022 presidency hundreds of thousands of Hondurans fled extortion and gang violence by migrating to the United States.
At his sentencing, Hernandez argued that the traffickers had testified against him because he had 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.
In prison, Hernandez wrote a letter to Trump in which he called himself a political target of the Biden administration, comparing himself to the current U.S. president. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
