Former president of Honduras is freed from prison after Trump pardon
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 14 hours ago
- 4 min read
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM, MAGGIE HABERMAN, KENNETH P. VOGEL and JONAH E. BROMWICH
President Donald Trump formally pardoned former President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras earlier this week, fulfilling a vow he had made days before to free an ex-president who was at the center of what authorities had characterized as “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”
Trump pledged to issue the pardon last week, after Hernández sent him a four-page letter casting himself as a victim of “political persecution” by the Biden-Harris administration and comparing his fate to that of the U.S. president.
Trump discussed the planned pardon with reporters over the weekend in terms similar to those Hernández had used in his letter, saying that “the people of Honduras really thought he was set up, and it was a terrible thing.”
“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 said. “And they said it was a Biden administration setup. And I looked at the facts, and I agreed with them.”
Hernández’s lawyer said Tuesday that his client had been released from a federal prison in West Virginia. The White House confirmed the pardon had been issued.
Trump defended the pardon when asked about it Tuesday by a reporter.
“That was a Biden — horrible witch hunt which was, you know, a lot of people in Honduras asked me to do that and I did it,” he said. “I feel very good about it. If you have some drug dealers in your country and you’re the president, you don’t necessarily put the president in jail for 45 years.”
Monday’s pardon had caused an uproar before it was carried out, given the serious narcotics crimes of which Hernández was convicted and Trump’s stated ambition of curbing the flow of drugs into the United States, and, in particular, his monthslong push against Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader.
The Trump administration has engaged in a highly controversial and potentially illegal practice of bombing boats in the waters around Venezuela that officials insist are piloted by drug traffickers bringing their wares into the United States. In fact, a separate social media post from the one that promised a pardon for Hernández argued, shortly before elections in Honduras, that the next president should not give Maduro greater regional control.
Hernández’s letter contained all the ingredients that, over time, foreign leaders, lobbyists and others who interact with Trump have found effective: flattery, a sense of shared persecution and an appeal to Trump’s perception of himself as the final arbiter of justice.
Addressing Trump as “your Excellency,” Hernández, who last year was sentenced to 45 years in prison for flooding the United States with cocaine, wrote, “I have found strength from you, Sir.”
“Your resilience to get back in that great office notwithstanding the persecution and prosecution you faced, all for what, because you wished to make your country Great Again,” Hernández wrote. “What you accomplished is unprecedented and truly historic.”
Hernández was convicted last year, but the investigation that led to his imprisonment began years earlier, before Trump was elected the first time. Investigators with the Drug Enforcement Administration and Manhattan federal prosecutors worked their way up a chain of cooperators involved in what they said — and multiple juries agreed — was a conspiracy to traffic enormous amounts of cocaine through Honduras and into the United States.
In his letter, though, Hernández characterized the case as a fly-by-night affair run by unscrupulous prosecutors in an office Trump has long resented — the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York — and directed by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. The description was reminiscent of how Trump often refers to the four separate criminal cases against him.
“The politicization and selective application of justice in my case is undeniable,” Hernández wrote in his letter, adding, “I was prosecuted without solid evidence, based on the testimonies of violent traffickers and professional liars motivated by revenge and by get-out-of-jail deals.”
He also worked to remind Trump of their personal relationship, reminiscing about remarks Trump had made at the 2018 Israeli American Council National Summit, in which he had spoken about halting the flow of drug trafficking at the Southern border.
“We’re winning after years and years of losing,” Trump said then. “We’re stopping drugs at a level that has never happened.”
Hernández, reflecting on the remarks from prison, informed the president that “those words meant a great deal to me, my family and the Honduran people.”
The pardon of Hernández is a stark contrast to his administration’s treatment of his co-conspirator, who has been credited with helping to secure the former Honduran president’s conviction.
The co-conspirator, Amilcar Alexander Ardon Soriano, testified at Hernández’s trial that he had served as the mayor of the municipality of El Paraíso while running drugs, participated in torture and murdered two people, and that he was responsible for the deaths of more than 50 others.
Ardon said he had asked lawmakers whom he had bribed to vote for Hernández as the president of the Honduran Congress. In return, Ardon said, Hernández promised to protect him from prosecutors.
Ardon was sentenced in January to time served. But he was immediately taken to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. His lawyer, Jeffrey Cohn, petitioned ICE and the Justice Department to defer Ardon’s deportation, arguing that his life would be at risk if he were sent to Honduras.
“Typically, a cooperator like that will be protected from deportation because the threats of violence and reprisal against him for that kind of cooperation are self-evident,” Cohn said in an interview Monday.
Ardon was deported in April. He was immediately taken into custody by Honduran authorities, charged with crimes related to the accusations brought in the United States. He is in prison in Honduras awaiting trial.
“If I were Alex, and I were sitting in a Honduran jail, the last thing I would want to hear is Juan Orlando is coming home when I was the one who put him in jail for 45 years,” Cohn said.