‘It’s a terrible message’: Doubts raised by Trump’s pardon of Juan Orlando Hernandez as US accuses Maduro of drug trafficking

Many analysts, and even members of Trump’s Republican Party, see a contradiction between these harsh measures and a pardon for someone who helped bring more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, according to the country’s prosecutors.

“This really creates a contradiction: we see lethal force being used against alleged low- and mid-level traffickers at sea” and “a head of state convicted of enabling the same (drug) routes is treated very differently,” says Rebecca Bell Chavez, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a regional think tank in Washington.

“This makes the counter-narcotics mission, or at least the narrative of it, seem more selective and motivated by political reasons,” the former US Under-Secretary of Defense for the Western Hemisphere between 2013 and 2016 told BBC News Mundo.

The evidence presented against Hernandez in federal court in New York last year was enough for the jury to unanimously convict him.

In fact, the trial of “Goh” (as he is also called by his initials) was an x-ray of what prosecutors described as a 21st-century Latin American “narco state.”

Although Hernandez was president of Honduras between 2014 and 2022, he presented himself as an ally of Washington, and secretly talked about “putting drugs under their noses,” according to one of the witnesses in the case.

The same witness, a former Honduran accountant who presented himself under a fictitious name and was protected by the United States government, reported that he saw Hernandez receiving bags of money from drug trafficker Jovanni Fuentes Ramírez.

Alexandre Ardon, another Honduran who was imprisoned for drug trafficking, testified that he financed Hernandez’s campaigns and that with the help of Honduran authority he transported tons of cocaine in partnership with criminals such as Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the Sinaloa Cartel leader sentenced to life in prison in the United States.

According to Ardon, “El Chapo” provided $1 million to the former president’s presidential campaign in 2013 through Tony Hernandez, the former deputy of Juan Orlando’s brother who is also serving a life sentence in the United States for drug trafficking.

Drugs were crossing Honduras by land, air, and sea toward the United States, with government-paved roads in remote areas to facilitate their movement, strategic landing strips and ports controlled by drug traffickers, and state security forces that were already protecting the illicit shipments.

At the trial, there were also indications of how violence in Honduras had escalated until it had the world’s highest homicide rate in the past decade, according to UN data.

Davis Leonel Rivera, the former leader of the Los Cachiros criminal group in Honduras who is also imprisoned in the United States, testified that Hernandez was bribed and committed 78 murders as charged.

Hernandez has pleaded not guilty since he was indicted by the United States and extradited to New York in 2022 until now.

In a letter he sent to Trump in October, he confirmed that he was a victim of “political persecution” by the former US government of Joe Biden.

The letter from the former Honduran president, published by American media, said: “Like you, I was recklessly attacked by extreme leftist forces that could not tolerate change, who conspired with drug traffickers and resorted to false accusations.”

After the pardon, Trump said he felt “very good” about his decision and referred to the operation against Hernandez as a “horrible witch hunt” by the Biden government.

Trump said in press statements on Tuesday that Hernandez “was the president, and there were some drugs sold in his country, and since he was the president, they went after him.”

However, former Biden administration officials such as his national security adviser for Latin America, Juan Gonzalez, have pointed out that much of the US tax investigation into Hernandez occurred during Trump’s first term (2017-2021).

The announcement of Hernandez’s pardon raised questions from the Democratic opposition and within the Republican Party itself.

He asked, “Why do we pardon this man and then pursue Maduro on charges of drug smuggling in the United States?” Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy asked Sunday.

Another Republican senator, Thom Tillis, said pardoning Hernandez was a “horrible message.”

“It’s confusing to say, on the one hand, that we should be thinking about invading Venezuela to traffic drugs, and on the other hand, that we should release someone,” Tillis told reporters on Tuesday.

Trump accuses Maduro of leading one of the drug trafficking groups in Latin America that he described as “terrorist,” the Sun Cartel, which the Venezuelan socialist leader rejects and considers it an excuse to attempt to overthrow him.

Washington considers Maduro an illegitimate president, and during a recent phone conversation with him, Trump gave him an ultimatum to leave Venezuela before last Friday, according to American media.

Since military attacks against suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean began in September, many experts have been warning that the most dangerous illicit drug reaching the United States is fentanyl, which has never been produced in large quantities in South America.

Christopher Sabatini, a senior researcher on Latin America at Chatham House, an influential British think tank, believes that for Trump it is “not really about the war on drugs.”

“If that were the case, he would direct his forces elsewhere, and obviously he would not pardon a former president who was convicted of facilitating the delivery of up to 400 tons of cocaine to the United States,” Sabatini told BBC Mundo.

“It’s about partisanship. It’s about allies. And most importantly, it’s about forcing other governments in the region to support you,” he adds.

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