Trump's Putrid Pardon

By Lydia O'Connor

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President Donald Trump ― who has used crime and the flow of narcotics into the United States to justify a brutal immigration crackdown, oversee possible war crimes and threaten military action in Venezuela ― just pardoned the former Honduran president who was sentenced to decades in prison for swamping the United States with hundreds of tons of cocaine.

Trump claimed days ago that “many of the people of Honduras” asked him to pardon former President Juan Orlando Hernández, who has maintained his innocence.

“They basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country. And they said it was a Biden administration setup. And I looked at the facts, and I agreed with them,” Trump told reporters over the weekend.

The crimes Hernández was convicted on involve the exact type of activity Trump says must be eradicated. Here’s what you should know about them.

Flooding the U.S. with 400 tons of cocaine

Last year, a U.S. court sentenced Hernández to 45 years in prison for his role in flooding the country with more than 400 tons of cocaine, an amount equal to more than 4.5 billion individual doses of the drug. The Justice Department described him as being at “the center of one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”

Pardon For Sale

Supporting the trafficking meant enabling horrifying brutalities. As he rose to power in Honduras, the DOJ said, “He provided increased support and protection for his co-conspirators, allowing them to move mountains of cocaine, commit acts of violence and murder, and help turn Honduras into one of the most dangerous countries in the world.”

Hernández, who served two terms as president, did all this while publicly promoting legislation to crack down on cartels in Honduras, prosecutors said.

A $1 million bribe from ‘El Chapo’

When Hernández’s younger brother was in court, prosecutors presented evidence that his president brother accepted a $1 million bribe from the infamous drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán during his first campaign for the presidency. That bribe, like many others he’s accused of accepting, was intended to protect drug passages into the U.S.

When Hernández stood trial, other drug traffickers testified about bribing him with more massive sums going back over a decade ago. Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, a one-time Honduran gang leader who’s confessed to playing a role in 78 deaths, testified that in 2012, he handed over $250,000 to Hernández, then-president of Honduras’ National Congress, in exchange for not being arrested and extradited to the U.S.

An accountant for Hernández also testified he’d seen the former president receive briefcases stuffed with thousands in bribe money, saying he was responsible for counting out the wads of $20 bills.

‘We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses’

According to more testimony from the accountant, Hernández was callous and unapologetic when talking about the drug trafficking prosecutors say he enabled.

“We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses, and they’re never even going to know it,” the former president once said, the accountant recalled in court.

Prosecutors also presented evidence that Hernández once told a cocaine trafficker he would be safe from punishment in the U.S., because “by the time the gringos find out, we will have eliminated extradition,” he allegedly said.

And as a result of bribes paid to Hernández, prosecutors claimed, drug traffickers received information about U.S. efforts to train Honduran Air Force pilots to conduct anti-narcotics operations.

A courtroom sketch from when Juan Orlando Hernández sat trial in 2022

A violent death by machete

The DOJ said in 2022 that during Hernández’s brother’s trial for drug trafficking, prosecutors introduced into evidence ledgers belonging to a Honduran drug trafficker with “JOH” ― Hernández’s initials ― corresponding to large payments.

A week after his brother was convicted, that drug trafficker was murdered in prison by inmates armed with machetes and a gun to prevent his “potential cooperation” with law enforcement against Hernández, prosecutors say.

Manipulating elections with drug money

The DOJ’s 2022 indictment of Hernández accused him of using money from drug trafficking to manipulate election results when he was running for president.

Prosecutors presented evidence that during the 2013 election, Hernández directed a drug trafficker to travel to areas where he had little electoral support and bribe local officials to skew the vote in his favor. He did the same thing in the 2017 election, prosecutors said.