The Trump pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández wipes out a major U.S. drug-trafficking conviction and reshapes Honduras’s political future.
In a 26th floor courtroom overlooking Manhattan’s frigid winter skyline, dozens of immigrants sat in on the trial of their former president, the once untouchable symbol of a “narco-dictatorship” that reorganized of the government’s judicial, police, and military leadership to collude with drug traffickers.
It wasn’t Nicolás Maduro — although the Venezuelan president had likewise been indicted in the Southern District of New York. It was Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president who, as U.S. Prosecutors said in their closing arguments in 2024, “paved a cocaine superhighway” to the United States. In a monthlong trial we covered from New York that winter, Hernández was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons charges, earning him a 45-year prison sentence.
Now, as B-52s plow the skies near Caracas and U.S. President Donald Trump announces the closure of Venezuelan airspace via social media, Hernández is poised to have his conviction erased. A key asset likely working in his favor is something Maduro pointedly lacks: a long-running allyship with the United States. Before his prosecution, Hernández spent years promoting Washington’s goals of militarization and migrant crackdowns as a friend of Barack Obama, Marco Rubio, and Trump.
Trump announced on Truth Social on Friday that he would grant “full and complete pardon” to Hernández, “who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.” The message doubled as an endorsement of Honduran presidential candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura, a member of Hernández’s conservative National Party, who as of Monday afternoon was effectively tied with another conservative candidate after Sunday’s election. (In his endorsement-and-pardon announcement, Trump threw in a threat to cut off aid to the country if Hondurans elected a rival candidate.)
“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday. He claimed to have spoken to Hondurans, who “said it was a Biden administration setup, and I looked at the facts and I agreed with them.”
Hernández was released from a federal prison in West Virginia on Monday, according to Bureau of Prisons records.
Hernández was first directly named as a potential co-conspirator during the drug trafficking trial of his brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, in 2019. Emil Bove, a deputy attorney general for the Trump administration until September, worked on both their prosecutions in the Southern District.
“There are a lot of reasons this administration might want to curry favor with Juan Orlando Hernández and people close to him, but none of them point to the fight against drugs,” said Todd Robinson, a retired diplomat who served most recently as assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs under former President Joe Biden. News of the impending pardon came as a shock to civil servants with knowledge of Hernández’s case, Robinson said. But with Trump, he added, “if you get in his ear and there’s some kind of benefit to him or someone close to him, then your case will be heard. It is not hard to put two and two together and get four.”
