Trump to pardon ex-Honduras leader serving drug trafficking sentence in US

Donald Trump has said he will grant a pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who is serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US on drug trafficking and weapons charges.“I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly,” Trump said on Friday in a post on Truth Social.In March of last year, Hernández was convicted in US courts of accepting millions of dollars in bribes to protect US-bound cocaine shipments belonging to traffickers he once publicly proclaimed to combat. Speaking during closing arguments at the trial, assistant US attorney Jacob Gutwillig said Hernández had “paved a cocaine superhighway to the United States”.Hernández was sentenced last June and called his conviction wrongful. He had served two terms as the leader of the country of roughly 10 million people, and was considered a top US ally in Central America, particularly by the Trump administration.Trump’s announcement to pardon Hernández comes even as the Republican leader casts himself as being tough on combating drug problems.Trump’s administration designated multiple drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations” and used claims of a “war on drugs” to justify deadly airstrikes on vessels across the Caribbean and Pacific. These strikes have prompted the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations to condemn the operations as extrajudicial executions.Juan Orlando Hernández in Manhattan federal court. Photograph: Jane Rosenberg/ReutersThe post was part of a broader message from Trump that backed Tito Asfura for Honduras’s presidency in upcoming elections, with Trump saying the US would be supportive of the country if he wins. But if Asfura loses the election this Sunday, Trump posted that “the United States will not be throwing good money after bad, because a wrong Leader can only bring catastrophic results to a country, no matter which country it is.”Asfura’s party forged a close partnership with Washington under Hernández, who governed from 2014 to 2022 and was arrested shortly after leaving office.Honduras has been governed since 2021 by Xiomara Castro, who has forged close ties with Cuba and Venezuela, two countries mired in deep economic and human rights crises whose governments the Trump administration sees as dictatorships and has repeatedly criticized.Castro has leaned into a leftist stance, but she has kept a pragmatic and even cooperative attitude in dealing with the Trump administrations, and has received a visit from the US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. The president has even backed off his threats to end Honduras’s extradition treaty and military cooperation with the US. Under Castro, Honduras has also received its citizens deported from the US and acted as a bridge for deported Venezuelans who were then picked up by Venezuela in Honduras.Hondurans go to the polls on Sunday to vote in an election that remains a toss-up, with polls showing Asfura, the former mayor of the capital, Tegucigalpa, virtually tied with former defense minister Rixi Moncada of the ruling leftist Libre party, and television host Salvador Nasralla of the centrist Liberal party.Whichever candidate wins a simple majority on Sunday will govern Honduras between 2026 and 2030. Some political analysts fear more than one candidate could claim victory.The Organization of American States and Washington have raised concerns about Honduras’s electoral process and said they are monitoring the election closely.