He once boasted that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” He accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him.
At the federal trial of Juan Orlando Hernández in New York, testimony and evidence showed how the former president maintained Honduras as a bastion of the global drug trade. He orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy that prosecutors said raked in millions for cartels while keeping Honduras one of Central America’s poorest, most violent and most corrupt countries.
Last year, Mr. Hernández was convicted on drug trafficking and weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison. It was one of the most sweeping drug-trafficking cases to come before a U.S. court since the trial of the Panamanian strongman Gen. Manuel Noriega three decades before.
But on Friday, President Trump announced that he would pardon Mr. Hernandez, 57, who he said was a victim of political persecution, though Mr. Trump offered no evidence to support that claim. It would be a head-spinning resolution to a case that for prosecutors was a pinnacle, striking at the heart of a narcostate.
The president’s two-week trial in Manhattan, and those of his associates before it, offered a glimpse into a world of corruption and drug running spanning several countries. Bags of cash, a machine gun with Mr. Hernández’s name emblazoned on it, and bribes from the drug lord Joaquín Guzmán, the Mexican kingpin known as El Chapo, featured heavily.
Prosecutors said Mr. Hernández was key to a scheme that lasted more than 20 years and brought more than 500 tons of cocaine into the United States.
“The people of Honduras and the United States bore the consequences,” Merrick Garland, then the attorney general, said in 2024, after Mr. Hernández was sentenced.
Honduras, a country of around 10 million people, has long been linked to the United States — first as the home of sprawling banana plantations owned by the United Fruit Company, then as the location of a key base used for U.S.-backed counterinsurgency efforts and later as a military post for counternarcotics.
When drug-trafficking routes began shifting toward Central America in the 2000s, Honduras came to play a role in transshipment, moving cocaine from South America toward Mexico and the U.S. border. Over that decade, trafficking rose, along with the murder rate, and drug planes arrived with regularity. The June 2009 coup that ousted Manuel Zelaya, the country’s left-wing president, ushered in a golden age of drug corruption.
Mr. Hernández, unlike many Latin American politicians, rose from humble roots. One of more than a dozen siblings raised in a rural, coffee-growing region, he became a lawyer and entered congress. As president, Mr. Hernández told U.S. officials that he was doing his utmost to stamp out drug trafficking.
