Juan Orlando Hernández has been promised a pardon for drug trafficking. Trump is threatening to oust Nicolás Maduro over similar allegations. The post Hondurans Called Right-Wing Ex-President a “Narco-Dictator.” Trump Plans to Pardon Him — but Threatens War on Venezuela appeared first on The Intercept.
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 — though 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 a “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.”
“They basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country.”
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.”
The State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
While Hernández awaits his freedom, the U.S. has taken to extrajudicially executing civilians accused vaguely of being low-level drug runners leaving Venezuela — including, as first reported by The Intercept, striking the same boat twice in September in an apparent war crime known as a “double tap.” Beyond killing at least 80 people this fall, the U.S. is positioning military equipment around Venezuela ostensibly, according to the Trump administration, to dismantle Maduro’s “narco-state.” In a November 16 statement designating the “Cártel de los Soles” — which doesn’t appear to formally exist — as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, Rubio alleged that the cartel “is headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary.”
The language could have come from the mouth of U.S. prosecutors as they condemned Hernández. In fact, as Hernández’s 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.
When Hernández took the stand last year, he cited his ties to U.S. officials so frequently, the prosecution objected at least 43 times. “We get it,” the judge said at one point, exasperated. “The defendant has visited the White House and met several Presidents.”
Making sense of Hernández’s journey from the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa to a prison cell in Manhattan alongside Sam Bankman-Fried requires going back 16 years, to June 28, 2009, when a military coup ousted center-left President Manuel ‘Mel’ Zelaya under the passive watch of U.S. officials and turned the already violent Central American country into the bloodiest on the planet.
As wars between gangs, drug traffickers, and corrupt security forces set fire to a crisis of undocumented migration, Hernández, known by his initials “JOH,” presented himself as a savior. Before El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele rose to power and incarcerated nearly 2 percent of his country’s population, Hernández promised iron-fist ruthlessness and made a constellation of military–police 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.
Corruption and violence flourished in Hernández’s 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, Hernández claimed a second presidential “reelection” — which the Organization of American States denounced for widespread irregularities — sparking protests that were squashed with murderous crackdown as dozens were killed by security forces. Human rights abuses abounded. Land and water defenders organizing their villages against mining, agribusiness, and tourism megaprojects were assassinated, disappeared, and incarcerated on trumped up charges. 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 in the U.S. (He was convicted on drug trafficking charges and sentenced to life in prison in 2021.) Many Hondurans, now fleeing in caravans, took to referring to his government as a “narco-dictatorship.”
According to allegations first presented in the trial of the drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes, Hernández promised to “shove drugs right up the noses of the gringos.”
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, “depraved people” and “psychopaths” who wanted to punish Hernández for “working with the US to take down cartels.”
The U.S. government countered that the meticulous detail of their workings with Hernández and his brother was itself indicative they had participated in the president’s racket, one that “directed heavily-armed members of the Honduran National Police and Honduran military to protect drug shipments as they transited Honduras.” It was implausible, they argued, to believe that Hernández was oblivious to the conspicuous criminality of his younger brother Tony, already in jail for drug trafficking charges.
The Biden administration celebrated Hernández’s conviction as a triumph — and Robinson, the former assistant secretary of state, pointed to declining opioid deaths in recent years as the fruit of the administration’s efforts to attack root causes of the drug trade, including limiting traffickers’ abilities to move money.
“If these networks can’t access their money, it makes it a lot harder for them to control municipalities, and to suborn justice systems.”
“We 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,” he said. “If these networks can’t 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.”
Over the course of the trial, which reached a fever pitch 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 “15 to 20 times.” His administration organized U.S. training and funding for the TIGRES, an elite police force later accused of hunting down anti-election fraud protesters at the beginning Hernández’s second term; the Maya Chorti Interagency Task Force, a binational group of soldiers and police charged with stemming drug and migrant flows between Honduras and Guatemala; and the FNAMP, an FBI-trained military unit that was later accused of extrajudicial killings.
“We’re stopping drugs like never before,” Trump said with Hernández at a gala in Miami in 2019. In October 2020, publicity emails show U.S. Southern Command Adm. Craig Faller meeting Hernández and underscoring that U.S. and Honduran drug war efforts were “successful because of the trust of both of us working together.”
In 2019, when 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 to a lobbying firm to wipe his cocaine-tarnished image in Washington. The lobbyists, known as BGR Group, set off on an aggressive publicity campaign to assure journalists and congressional staffers of Hernández’s anti-drug record. The firm had also hosted campaign fundraisers and contributed $34,000 to then-Sen. Marco Rubio.
It’s not hard to find traces on the internet of Rubio, already one of the most powerful forces of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, meeting with Hernández 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 Hernández.
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, have been implicated in widespread crimes against humanity. Though it’s 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 Hernández. (The statement designating Cártel de los Soles as an FTO, coincidentally, accused it of being tied to the Sinaloa Cartel, another designated FTO accused of funneling money to Hernández’s 2013 presidential campaign).
The 2020 indictment of the Honduran drug trafficker Geovanny Fuentes asserts he had “received support from the highest levels of the Honduran military,” an institution long trained by the Pentagon, whose officials provided the drug lord with weapons, uniforms, intelligence and protection. Testimonies in the trial against Hernández 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 the Grillos, one of the many paramilitary gangs roving Honduras. A top cop and U.S. ally, Juan Carlos Bonilla — who was denounced for orchestrating a system of social cleansing death squads in the 2000s and 2010s — was indicted by U.S. prosecutors in Manhattan in 2020 for “conspiracy to import cocaine” while also being named in the Hernández trial.
Critics have argued that the idea of “cartels” offers an insufficient framework for understanding complex criminal networks, and the “Cartel of the Suns” is little different: an agglomeration of interconnected drug networks, systematic though disperse, working outside and through state institutions.
“This is a case about power, corruption, and massive cocaine trafficking,” the prosecutors said in their 2024 opening arguments against Hernández, “and one man who stood at the center of it all.” Yet the person at the “center” doesn’t always get the worst treatment. The lowest members of the trade — or unaffiliated fishermen whom the U.S. deems criminal — 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. Hernández is awaiting a ticket to freedom.
The post Hondurans Called Right-Wing Ex-President a “Narco-Dictator.” Trump Plans to Pardon Him — but Threatens War on Venezuela appeared first on The Intercept.
