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”.
“The people of Honduras really thought he was set up and it was a terrible thing,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. “He was the president of the country and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country … and I looked at the facts and I agreed with them.”
Trump’s astonishing intervention in favour of Hernández, who is known by his initials JOH, has baffled many observers, with one Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent calling the move “lunacy”.
Why would the US president use his “war on drugs” as a justification for overthrowing Maduro – despite what many see as flimsy evidence that the Venezuelan leader really is a narco boss – while simultaneously offering a Get Out of Jail Free card to a man already found guilty of such crimes in a Manhattan federal court?
Why had Trump spent recent weeks blowing up alleged narco boats in the Caribbean – with negligible impact on flow of drugs to the US – and at the same time decided to let a big time trafficker convicted of smuggling far larger quantities of drugs off the hook?
“It just shows that the entire counter-drug effort of Donald Trump is a charade – it’s based on lies, it’s based on hypocrisy,” said Mike Vigil, the former DEA chief for international operations. “He is giving a pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández and then going after Nicolás Maduro … It’s all hypocritical.”
Contrary to Trump’s claim that Hernández, 57, had been the victim of a “Biden set up”, Vigil said there was overwhelming evidence that the Central American politician was “a big fish in the narco world”. Not only had Hernández helped turn Honduras into a major transit point for South American cocaine heading to the US, but Vigil said he had also transformed it into a cocaine producing hub which was now home to coca plantations and makeshift labs for processing coca leaves.
“When you take a look at Pablo Escobar and [Joaquín] ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, they were big drug traffickers – but they were never presidents of a country,” Vigil added.
“So if Donald Trump is giving this guy a pardon, why is he not giving [the also incarcerated Mexican cartel boss] Chapo Guzmán a pardon? El Chapo Guzmán is less of a figure in the drug world than Juan Orlando Hernández was.”
Ioan Grillo, the author of a trio of books on Latin America’s narco underworld, was also puzzled by Trump’s “jaw-dropping” offer. “It’s crazy … it really undermines his hard-line ‘war on drugs’ position,” Grillo said, wondering if Trump might rethink his move given the outcry.
US prosecutors alleged that even before taking power Hernández had started conspiring with Latin American narco bosses who have long used the Central American country as a trampoline to smuggle drugs into the US. Jurors agreed and, in July 2024, Hernández was sentenced to more than four decades in prison “for cocaine importation and related weapons offenses”. His younger brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, was sentenced to life in prison in 2021. Among his crimes was accepting $1m from El Chapo “to support Juan Orlando Hernández’s presidential campaign”.
Vigil believed Hernández was responsible for helping move billions of dollars worth of cocaine into the US – far more than the fast boats Trump’s “kinetic strikes” have destroyed in the Caribbean and Pacific since September.
“He’s killed approximately 80 people, destroyed approximately 20 boats, and he has not provided any concrete evidence that they were carrying drugs,” said Vigil, who believed many of those killed on the fast boats were impoverished fishers who, in some cases, might have earned $200-a-month for transporting drugs.
Meanwhile, despite Trump’s claims that Maduro is the leader of a narco organization called the “Cartel of the Suns”, many experts doubt such a group even exists.
“Maduro is not a saint,” said Vigil, noting how he and several allies were indicted for trafficking cocaine in the US in 2020. “[But] they’re not a cartel, they don’t have an infrastructure,” he added, calling such allegations a “nonsense”.
Orlando Pérez, a Latin America expert from the University of North Texas at Dallas, said Trump’s double standards on which drug smuggling presidents to pursue revealed there was no consistent strategy to fight the region’s drug traffickers. “It’s all ad hoc and based on political considerations,” he said.
“One [Hernández] is a right-wing supporter of the US – and the other [Maduro] is not,” Pérez added. “It is ideological. It is political. It is self-interested in terms of advancing an ideological agenda – and it has nothing to do with effective anti-drug policies.”
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