What is the President of Honduras accused of and why did Trump pardon him?

Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, was released after President Donald Trump pardoned the man once described as a key figure in a drug trade that flooded America with more than 400 tons of cocaine.

Trump said Hernández, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison by a US court, was the victim of political persecution and had been “treated very harshly and unfairly”.

The pardon surprised some experts, given the seriousness of the crime and the administration’s promised crackdown on illegal drugs entering the United States.

Here’s a look at Hernández’s political career and crimes, and why Trump may have pardoned him.

Hernández first ran for president of Honduras, a country of 10 million people, in 2013 as a candidate for the conservative National Party. He ran again in 2017, in an election marred by allegations of fraud and violent protests.

Throughout his two terms in office, he maintained cordial relations with the United States. Former President Barack Obama called him a “great partner” in the migrant child crisis, and Trump endorsed him as the winner of the controversial 2017 vote.

But Hernández’s fortunes began to deteriorate in 2019.

U.S. federal prosecutors accused him of accepting a $1 million bribe from notorious drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán for his first presidential campaign in exchange for protecting drug 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 United States. 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 United States on drug and related weapons trafficking charges.

Hernández’s federal trial lasted three weeks in 2024.

U.S. prosecutors argued he was a central figure in a drug trafficking scheme that spanned more than 18 years and funneled more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, the equivalent of about 4.5 billion individual doses.

“The people of Honduras and the United States have borne the consequences,” said then-Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Prosecutors detailed how Hernández abused his position by protecting drug traffickers armed with machine guns and grenade launchers. In exchange, he received millions of dollars to fuel his political campaigns.

Several state agencies were involved, including the Honduran National Police, which protected cocaine shipments as they passed through Honduras to the United States for distribution, prosecutors said.

In some cases, drug traffickers associated with Hernández committed violent crimes and murders to suppress rival gangs and expand their businesses, they said.

During sentencing, Hernández insisted that he was a victim of “political persecution.”

“Prosecutors and agents failed to do their due diligence in investigating the full TRUTH,” he wrote in a letter following his conviction.

Trump announced his pardon Friday in a Truth Social article, writing that, according to “many people I greatly respect,” Hernández had been unfairly treated by prosecutors.

In the same position, he also supported Tito Asfura for president of Honduras ahead of Sunday’s elections. Asfura ran under the same National Party ticket as Hernández.

As of Tuesday, preliminary results show the election is too close to call, forcing a manual recount of ballots.

Trump’s support for Asfura did not surprise many, given the right-wing National Party’s ideological alignment with the current US administration.

Trump has also weighed in on the policies of other countries in the Western Hemisphere, such as Brazil and Argentina.

“We have seen the president’s affinity with right-wing leaders who he sees as sympathetic to certain interests of his administration,” noted Jason Marczak, vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Center for Latin America.

But the decision to pardon Hernández at the same time stunned some experts.

“It was hard for me to believe it, because there was such an overwhelming case against Hernández,” said Michael Shifter, an assistant professor at the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University.

Mr. Shifter added that what he found most confusing was the “contradiction” between the pardon and Trump’s stated policy to crack down on drug trafficking.

Trump has repeatedly pledged to curb the flow of drugs to the United States and has carried out highly controversial strikes against boats in the waters around Venezuela that his administration says are manned by drug traffickers.

More than 80 people have been killed in several strikes in the Caribbean Sea since early September.

At the White House briefing Monday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt argued that the charges against Hernández were tainted by corrupt “overreach” under President Biden.

Asked if the pardon hurts the US president’s campaign against “narcoterrorists” on the American continent, Leavitt said the goal was to “right the wrongs” of the Justice Department under Biden.

“I think President Trump has been very clear in his defense of the homeland of the United States to prevent these illegal narcotics from arriving at our borders, whether by land or sea,” Leavitt added.

US media outlet Axios later reported that Hernández wrote a four-page letter in October praising President Trump and requesting a review of his case “in the interests of justice”.

In the letter, he reportedly recalled the working relationship he had with Trump during the US president’s first term, and said his case “only moved forward because the Biden-Harris DOJ was pursuing a political agenda aimed at empowering its ideological allies in Honduras.”

The outlet also reported that longtime Trump lobbyist and adviser Roger Stone told the US president that a pardon for Hernández would boost the National Party ahead of the Honduran elections.

Trump then told reporters Sunday that he believed the prosecution of the ex-president “was a stunt by Biden.”

The Atlantic Council’s Marczak stressed that the prosecution of Hernández was the result of an independent investigation by the US Department of Justice.

But he added that the decision to pardon Hernández was consistent with the Trump administration’s “desire to question decisions made during the Biden presidency.”