What’s the real reason for the Venezuela thing? A man tied to flooding the country with cocaine just walks free with a signature. That tells you some crimes expire when they become inconvenient to punish. Power decides who justice remembers and who it lets go.
Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, has walked free after President Donald Trump pardoned him – a man once characterised as the key figure in a drug trafficking scheme that flooded America with over 400 tonnes of cocaine.
Trump has said that Hernández, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison by a US court, is a victim of political persecution and has been “treated very harshly and unfairly”.
The pardon has surprised some experts, given the seriousness of the crime and the administration’s promised crackdown on illegal drugs flowing into the US.
Here is a look at Hernández’s political career and crimes, and why Trump may have pardoned him.
400 tonnes of cocaine and a $1m bribe from El Chapo
Hernández first ran for president of Honduras, a country of 10 million people, in 2013 as the candidate for the conservative National Party. He ran again in 2017, in an election marred by fraud allegations and violent protests.Throughout his two terms, he maintained a cordial relationship with the US. Former President Barack Obama called him one of the “excellent partners” on the migrant-children crisis, and Trump backed him as the winner of the disputed 2017 vote.
But Hernández’s fortunes began to unravel in 2019.
US federal prosecutors accused him of accepting a $1m bribe from notorious drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán for his first presidential campaign in exchange for protecting narcotics routes through Honduras.
The allegations surfaced in a separate case involving his brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, who was arrested in Miami in 2018 on charges of smuggling cocaine into the US. At the time, the then-president denied any involvement in his brother’s crimes.
Tony Hernández was convicted in 2019 and sentenced to life in prison.
But the end of his brother’s trial marked only the beginning of the ex-president’s legal troubles.
Shortly after leaving office in 2022, he was arrested and extradited to the US on drug-trafficking and related weapons charges.