Trump to pardon former Honduras leader convicted of drug trafficking

Eric Martin, Bloomberg News on Nov 28, 2025

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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said he plans to pardon a former president of Honduras who’s serving a decades-long U.S. sentence for cocaine trafficking, two days before the nation’s election.

Trump announced the pardon of Juan Orlando Hernandez in a Truth Social post on Friday.

Hernandez “has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly,” Trump said in the post.

The announcement came after his administration has conducted numerous strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean, killing more than 80 people, and after designating Venezuela’s Cartel of the Suns as a foreign terrorist organization.

Hernandez served as the president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022. While considered an American ally across multiple administrations, he was charged with drug trafficking and weapons offenses in 2022 shortly after leaving office, extradited to the U.S., and convicted by a federal jury in New York. He was sentenced in June 2024 to 45 years in prison.

Earlier this week, Trump endorsed Nasry Asfura, a former mayor of Tegucigalpa, in Sunday’s election to lead the central American country. Asfura is the candidate of the conservative National Party, which was also the party of Hernandez when he was president.

The U.S. government says Cartel of the Suns is operated by senior army officers and led by Venezuela’s socialist president, Nicolas Maduro, accusations that Venezuela rejects.

At the same time, the U.S. has assembled its largest military presence in the region in decades, which the Trump administration says is intended to confront drug traffickers. The deployment, which includes the world’s largest aircraft carrier, heightened speculation that the U.S. might be preparing to strike targets inside Venezuela, a prospect Trump himself has raised.

The New York Times reported earlier Friday that Trump spoke with Maduro last week and that they discussed a possible meeting. Trump said on Thursday that the U.S. will start stopping Venezuelan cartels by land “very soon.”

Hernandez and his co-conspirators trafficked more than 400 tons of cocaine through Honduras, a major hub for shipments from Colombia, equivalent to about 4.5 billion doses, the Justice Department said last year. From 2004 to 2022, Hernandez took millions of dollars to shield traffickers, including his brother, Juan Antonio Hernandez, according to the agency.

The former president has consistently denied the accusations.

Prosecutors said in the indictment against him that he “abused his position as the president of Honduras to operate the country as a narco-state, in order to enrich himself and corruptly gain and maintain power.”