{"id":309220,"date":"2025-12-08T12:01:06","date_gmt":"2025-12-08T12:01:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=309220"},"modified":"2025-12-06T05:49:28","modified_gmt":"2025-12-06T05:49:28","slug":"trump-frees-ex-president-of-honduras-right-wing-narco-dictator-convicted-of-drug-trafficking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/12\/trump-frees-ex-president-of-honduras-right-wing-narco-dictator-convicted-of-drug-trafficking\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Frees Ex-President of Honduras, Right-Wing \u201cNarco-Dictator\u201d Convicted of Drug Trafficking"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Honduran opponents of former President Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez protest outside the federal court in Manhattan, N.Y., on 22 Apr 2022.\u00a0 Photo: Angela Weiss\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez received a pardon for drug trafficking. Trump is threatening to oust Nicol\u00e1s Maduro over similar allegations. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

1 Dec 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0In a 26th floor<\/span> courtroom overlooking Manhattan\u2019s frigid winter skyline, dozens of immigrants sat in <\/a>on the trial of their former president, the once untouchable symbol of a \u201cnarco-dictatorship\u201d that reorganized of the government\u2019s judicial, police, and military leadership to collude with drug traffickers.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t Nicol\u00e1s Maduro \u2014 though the Venezuelan president had likewise been indicted in the Southern District of New York. It was Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez, the former Honduran president who, as U.S. prosecutors said<\/a> in their closing arguments in 2024, \u201cpaved a cocaine superhighway\u201d to the United States. In a monthlong trial<\/a> we covered from New York that winter<\/a>, Hern\u00e1ndez was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons charges, earning him a 45-year prison sentence.<\/p>\n

Now, as B-52s plow the skies<\/a> near Caracas and U.S. President Donald Trump announces the closure of Venezuelan airspace<\/a> via social media, Hern\u00e1ndez 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, Hern\u00e1ndez spent years promoting Washington\u2019s goals of militarization and migrant crackdowns as a friend of Barack Obama, Marco Rubio, and Trump.<\/p>\n

Trump announced <\/a>on Truth Social on Friday that he would grant a \u201cfull and complete pardon\u201d to Hern\u00e1ndez, \u201cwho has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.\u201d The message doubled as an endorsement of Honduran presidential candidate Nasry \u201cTito\u201d Asfura, a member of Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s conservative National Party, who as of Monday afternoon was effectively tied with another conservative candidate after Sunday\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,\u201d Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday. He claimed to have spoken to Hondurans, who \u201csaid it was a Biden administration setup, and I looked at the facts and I agreed with them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hern\u00e1ndez was released from a federal prison in West Virginia on Monday, according to Bureau of Prisons records.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThey basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

Hern\u00e1ndez was first directly named as a potential co-conspirator during the drug trafficking trial of his brother, Juan Antonio \u201cTony\u201d Hern\u00e1ndez, in 2019. Emil Bove<\/a>, a deputy attorney general for the Trump administration until September<\/a>, worked on both their prosecutions in the Southern District.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a lot of reasons this administration might want to curry favor with Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez and people close to him, but none of them point to the fight against drugs,\u201d 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 Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s case, Robinson said. But with Trump, he added, \u201cif you get in his ear and there\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Hern\u00e1ndez walks free, the U.S. has taken to extrajudicially executing civilians<\/a> accused vaguely of being low-level<\/a> drug runners leaving Venezuela \u2014 including, as first reported<\/a> by The Intercept, striking the same boat twice in September in an apparent war crime known as a \u201cdouble tap.\u201d Beyond killing at least 80 people<\/a> this fall, the U.S. is positioning military equipment around Venezuela ostensibly, according to the Trump administration, to dismantle Maduro\u2019s \u201cnarco-state.\u201d In a November 16 statement<\/a> designating the \u201cC\u00e1rtel de los Soles\u201d \u2014 which doesn\u2019t appear to formally exist<\/a> \u2014 as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, Rubio alleged that the cartel \u201cis headed by Nicol\u00e1s Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela\u2019s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary.\u201d<\/p>\n

The language could have come from the mouth of U.S. prosecutors as they condemned Hern\u00e1ndez. In fact, as Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s trial revealed, the same institutionalized collusion between state forces and criminals that Rubio attributes with exclusive ideological fervor to Maduro has been well documented by U.S. investigators among U.S.-tied government officials in Honduras.<\/p>\n

When Hern\u00e1ndez took the stand last year, he cited his ties to U.S. officials so frequently, the prosecution objected at least 43 times. \u201cWe get it,\u201d the judge said at one point, exasperated. \u201cThe defendant has visited the White House and met several Presidents.\u201d<\/p>\n

Making sense of<\/span> Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s journey from the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa to a prison cell in Manhattan<\/a> alongside Sam Bankman-Fried requires going back 16 years, to June 28, 2009, when a military coup ousted center-left President Manuel \u2018Mel\u2019 Zelaya under the passive watch of U.S. officials<\/a> and turned the already violent Central American country into the bloodiest<\/a> on the planet.<\/p>\n

As wars between gangs, drug traffickers, and corrupt security forces set fire to a crisis of undocumented migration, Hern\u00e1ndez, known by his initials \u201cJOH,\u201d presented himself as a savior. Before El Salvador\u2019s Nayib Bukele rose to power and incarcerated<\/a> nearly 2 percent<\/a> of his country\u2019s population<\/a>, Hern\u00e1ndez promised iron-fist ruthlessness and made a constellation of military\u2013police special forces units with the help of the FBI while granting ever more power to the Honduran military. The U.S. welcomed him as an ally not just for his collaboration in drug war militarization, but for his willingness to help crack down on migrants as well as business-friendly neoliberal policies.<\/p>\n

Corruption<\/a> and violence<\/a> flourished in Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s Honduras, where political and economic elites in the shadow of one of the largest U.S. military bases in Latin America, for decades, have systematically weaponized the state to protect both criminal networks and transnational corporate interests. In 2017, Hern\u00e1ndez claimed a second presidential \u201creelection\u201d \u2014 which the Organization of American States denounced<\/a> for widespread irregularities \u2014 sparking protests that were squashed with murderous crackdown as dozens were killed by security forces. Human rights abuses abounded<\/a>. Land and water defenders <\/a>organizing their villages against mining, agribusiness, and tourism megaprojects were assassinated<\/a>, disappeared<\/a>, and incarcerated on trumped up charges<\/a>. The same military police units he created were implicated in widespread accusations of torture and extrajudicial killings as well as collusion with organized crime. A year later, his brother Tony, a congressional deputy for the conservative National Party, was arrested<\/a> in the U.S. (He was convicted on drug trafficking charges and sentenced to life in prison<\/a> in 2021.) Many Hondurans, now fleeing in caravans, took to referring to his government as a \u201cnarco-dictatorship.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to allegations first presented in the trial of the drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes, Hern\u00e1ndez promised to<\/a> \u201cshove drugs right up the noses of the gringos.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was arrested at his home in Tegucigalpa in February 2022, less than a month after he left office from his contested second term, leaving the reins of the violence-plagued state to left-leaning Xiomara Castro. Two months later, the former drug war hawk was escorted to a plane in shackles and extradited to the U.S., where his defense team argued that convicted criminals tied to the drug trade were unreliable witnesses, \u201cdepraved people\u201d and \u201cpsychopaths\u201d who wanted to punish Hern\u00e1ndez for \u201cworking with the US to take down cartels.\u201d<\/p>\n

The U.S. government countered that the meticulous detail of their workings with Hern\u00e1ndez and his brother was itself indicative they had participated in the president\u2019s racket, one that \u201cdirected heavily-armed members<\/a> of the Honduran National Police and Honduran military to protect drug shipments as they transited Honduras.\u201d It was implausible, they argued, to believe that Hern\u00e1ndez was oblivious to the conspicuous criminality of his younger brother Tony, already in jail for drug trafficking charges.<\/p>\n

The Biden administration celebrated Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s conviction as a triumph \u2014 and Robinson, the former assistant secretary of state, pointed to declining opioid deaths in recent years as the fruit of the administration\u2019s efforts to attack root causes of the drug trade, including limiting traffickers\u2019 abilities to move money.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIf these networks can\u2019t access their money, it makes it a lot harder for them to control municipalities, and to suborn justice systems.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

\u201cWe started to move the needle on synthetic opioid deaths in those four years and it was precisely because we worked with countries on a global level,\u201d he said. \u201cIf these networks can\u2019t access their money, it makes it a lot harder for them to control municipalities, and to suborn justice systems. We were doing the diplomatic spadework to get those people sanctioned by international financial networks.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a statement to The Intercept sent after publication, a State Department official mounted a pointed attack on the prosecution\u2019s case against Hern\u00e1ndez. Quoting at times from defense filings<\/a>, the spokesperson argued that witnesses against Hern\u00e1ndez were not credible and that Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s court-appointed attorney, Renato C. Stabile, had not been given adequate time to mount a defense.<\/p>\n

\u201cJOH has highlighted that there was \u2018virtually no independent evidence\u2019 presented \u2013 \u2018no video, no audio, no financial records\u2026no dates of meetings, bribes, or assistance, no text messages or phone records\u2026\u2019 Instead, the jury heard from \u2018cooperating witnesses and notoriously violent drug cartel leaders,\u2019\u201d the spokesperson wrote.<\/p>\n

The quotations were lifted directly from a document Stabile filed on June 21, 2024, ahead of his client\u2019s sentencing hearing \u2014 and after Judge P. Kevin Castel denied a motion for a new trial. Castel dismissed many of the points Stabile raised at the time, which the State Department spokesperson repeated in the email to The Intercept.<\/p>\n

Stabile did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Intercept.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the trial, which reached a fever pitch<\/a> during his testimony, the former president had been eager to underscore his anti-drug collaboration with Obama and Trump, as well as officials like John Kelly, then head of U.S. Southern Command and later adviser to Trump, who he claimed to have met with \u201c15 to 20 times.\u201d His administration organized U.S. training and funding for the TIGRES, an elite police force later accused of hunting down anti-election fraud protesters<\/a> at the beginning Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s second term; the Maya Chorti Interagency Task Force, a binational group<\/a> of soldiers and police charged with stemming drug and migrant flows between Honduras and Guatemala; and the FNAMP, an FBI-trained<\/a> military unit that was later accused of extrajudicial killings<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re stopping drugs like never before,\u201d Trump said with Hern\u00e1ndez at a gala in Miami in 2019. In October 2020, publicity emails<\/a> show U.S. Southern Command Adm. Craig Faller meeting Hern\u00e1ndez and underscoring that U.S. and Honduran drug war efforts were \u201csuccessful because of the trust of both of us working together.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2019, when<\/span> damning revelations emerged in the trial of his brother implicating JOH as a probable co-conspirator in the drug trade, the then-president paid over half a million dollars<\/a> to a lobbying firm to wipe his cocaine-tarnished image in Washington. The lobbyists, known as BGR Group<\/a>, set off on an aggressive publicity campaign to assure journalists and congressional staffers of Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s anti-drug record. The firm had also hosted campaign fundraisers and contributed $34,000 to then-Sen. Marco Rubio.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not hard to find traces<\/a> on the internet of Rubio, already one of the most powerful forces of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, meeting with Hern\u00e1ndez<\/a> in the years during which he was accused of organizing a high-level drug ring. From his influential position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rubio advocated for weapons shipments to Hern\u00e1ndez.<\/p>\n

Corruption, undoubtedly, is rampant in Venezuela, where the military has selectively colluded with drug traffickers since the 1990s and where security forces under Maduro, whose last election was denounced as fraudulent<\/a>, have been implicated in widespread crimes against humanity. Though it\u2019s a myth that fentanyl comes from Venezuela, cocaine is flown from the Caribbean nation to clandestine landing strips in Honduras, where they have been received by drug clans operating under protection from Hern\u00e1ndez. (The statement designating C\u00e1rtel de los Soles as an FTO, coincidentally, accused it of being tied to the Sinaloa Cartel, another designated FTO<\/a> accused of funneling money to Hern\u00e1ndez\u2019s 2013 presidential campaign).<\/p>\n

The 2020 indictment of the Honduran drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes asserts he had<\/a> \u201creceived support from the highest levels of the Honduran military,\u201d an institution long trained by<\/a> the Pentagon, whose officials provided the drug lord with weapons, uniforms, intelligence and protection. Testimonies in the trial against Hern\u00e1ndez made frequent mention of military forces deployed to grease the skids of cocaine smuggling operations, providing security for drug shipments, and murdering traffickers who had fallen afoul of the president. Police corruption was no less damning: The 2016 testimony of Ludwig Criss Zelaya Romero, a former member of the Honduran National Police who turned himself in to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, indicated systematic pacts between police officials and drug traffickers, including the claim that a U.S. trained police special forces unit worked with<\/a> the Grillos, one of the many paramilitary gangs roving Honduras. A top cop and U.S. ally, Juan Carlos Bonilla \u2014 who was denounced for orchestrating a system of social cleansing death squads<\/a> in the 2000s and 2010s \u2014 was indicted by U.S. prosecutors<\/a> in Manhattan in 2020 for \u201cconspiracy to import cocaine\u201d while also being named in the Hern\u00e1ndez trial.<\/p>\n

Critics have argued that the idea of \u201ccartels\u201d offers an insufficient framework for understanding complex criminal networks, and the \u201cCartel of the Suns\u201d is little different: an agglomeration of interconnected drug networks, systematic though disperse, working outside and through state institutions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a case about power, corruption, and massive cocaine trafficking,\u201d the prosecutors said in their 2024 opening arguments against Hern\u00e1ndez, \u201cand one man who stood at the center of it all.\u201d Yet the person at the \u201ccenter\u201d doesn\u2019t always get the worst treatment. The lowest members of the trade \u2014 or unaffiliated fishermen<\/a> whom the U.S. deems criminal \u2014 are obliterated, burned alive, or left to drown. Maduro could face assassination or exile, while the people of Venezuela are left to fear a U.S. invasion. Hern\u00e1ndez is free.<\/p>\n

Update: 2 Dec 2025<\/strong><\/p>\n

This story has been updated with news that Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez was released from prison<\/em> and with a statement from a State Department spokesperson sent after publication.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Go to Original – theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1 Dec 2025\u00a0–\u00a0Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez received a pardon for drug trafficking. Trump is threatening to oust Nicol\u00e1s Maduro over similar allegations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":309221,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,417,393,1126,1635,1050,541,559,2669,3743,3324,2571,1190,1639,2159,2137,249,70,557],"class_list":["post-309220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-bullying","tag-coup","tag-hegemony","tag-honduras","tag-imperialism","tag-latin-america-caribbean","tag-maduro","tag-narco-state","tag-narcotraffic","tag-north-america","tag-official-lies-and-narratives","tag-regime-change","tag-right-politics","tag-rogue-states","tag-south-america","tag-trump","tag-usa","tag-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309220"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309223,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309220\/revisions\/309223"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}