Trump's pardon of Honduras's ex-president shows counter-drug effort is 'based on lies and hypocrisy'

Source: The Guardian

Trump’s pardon of Honduras’s ex-president shows counter-drug effort is ‘based on lies and hypocrisy’

Why has Trump blown up alleged narco boats in the Caribbean and at the same time decided to let a big time trafficker off the hook?

Tom Phillips
Latin America correspondent
Mon 1 Dec 2025 18.03 GMT
Last modified on Mon 1 Dec 2025 22.04 GMT

He was a Latin American president accused of colluding with some of the region’s most ruthless narco bosses to flood the United States with cocaine.

“[Let’s] stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos,” the double-dealing politician once allegedly bragged as he lined his pockets with millions of dollars in bribes and turned his country into what many called a narco-state.

The description might sound like a sketch of Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, who Donald Trump’s administration has accused of being a “narco-terrorist” kingpin and is trying to topple with a $50m bounty and a huge display of military might off the South American country’s Caribbean coast.

But it is actually a portrait – painted by US prosecutors, no less – of the former Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who Trump last week pledged to pardon, despite the fact that Hernández was sentenced last year to 45 years in prison for allegedly creating “a cocaine superhighway to the United States”.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/01/trump-pardon-juan-orlando-hernandez-honduras-former-president