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.
But prosecutors said his political career had been fueled by drug money as early as 2009, when he was still a lawmaker and vying to lead the Honduran legislature. At the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, Mr. Hernández was photographed smiling and giving a thumbs up alongside a known Honduran cartel chief.
Mr. Hernández ran for president on the ticket of the conservative National Party and was elected in 2013. Prosecutors said Mr. Hernández relied on his connections to the world’s most powerful cartels to fund his campaign, including a $1 million bribe from El Chapo.
He used the weapons and power of the state for his own ends, according to prosecutors, jurors and the Hondurans who came to despise him. The threat of being extradited to the United States made drug traffickers eager to bribe anyone who could protect them, prosecutors said, and they came to know they could rely on Mr. Hernández.
Mr. Hernández directed the police and military to protect smugglers who paid him off, and he promised to shield them from extradition to the United States. Mr. Hernández once reassured a Honduran cocaine trafficker that “by the time the gringos find out, we will have eliminated extradition,” according to prosecutors.
Mr. Hernández even boasted, “We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses, and they’re never even going to know it,” according to a witness who testified at the 2021 trial of a drug trafficker.
Investigators said that Mr. Hernández went to pitiless lengths to cover his tracks. One accused co-conspirator was killed in a Honduran prison to protect the president, according to court documents. He used drug money to manipulate the vote in two elections, the documents said.
In 2017, Mr. Hernández again became president after an election so laced with allegations of fraud that days of violence ensued and about two dozen people were killed as the military cracked down.
Hondurans, long divided on political lines, united in disgust. The chant “Fuera J.O.H.” — “Out with J.O.H.” — could be heard not just at protests, but among huge migrant caravans marching north, filled with people fed up with poverty and rampant corruption.
Publicly, Mr. Hernández denied any involvement in drug trafficking. And his connections to the U.S. remained strong.
President Barack Obama called him one of the “excellent partners” helping to discourage children from coming to the United States. Mr. Trump recognized him as the winner of the disputed 2017 vote, counting on him to help curb the flow of people and drugs. The Biden administration regarded him as a key ally in Central America as it sought to control migration.
But the rot became evident when Mr. Hernández’s brother, Tony, was arrested in Miami in 2018 after being linked to a trafficking organization.
During the younger brother’s trial in 2019, a former Honduran mayor and major drug trafficker described how an associate of El Chapo had delivered the $1 million bribe — cash wrapped in plastic bundles of $50,000 and $100,000.
Prosecutors displayed the machine gun with Mr. Hernández’s name engraved on it.
In February 2022, weeks after he left office, Mr. Hernández was detained at the request of the United States; he was escorted onto a plane in handcuffs and extradited two months later.
Fireworks erupted in celebration in the country he once ruled.
His own trial showed in grisly detail how Mr. Hernández had promised to crack down on drug gangs, all the while partnering with them instead, according to statements by prosecutors and witnesses.
Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, a former leader of a gang called Los Cachiros, who admitted to being involved in the deaths of 78 people, testified that he had bribed Mr. Hernández with $250,000 delivered to the president’s sister, Hilda, in exchange for protection.
Another trafficker testified that he had personally delivered a payoff, saying: “I paid $250,000 as a bribe to Juan Orlando Hernández.”
Mr. Hernández was convicted of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy in a room packed with Hondurans eager to see his downfall.
When he was sentenced in 2024, Mr. Hernández spoke for almost an hour in court, airing conspiracy theories and grievances as he portrayed himself as the victim of “political persecution.” In a lengthy letter, Mr. Hernández quoted Edmund Burke, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Bible.
“The investigation and trial against me is full of mistakes, of injustices that have become a lynching through the U.S. judicial system,” Mr. Hernández wrote. “The prosecutors and agents did not do the due diligence in the investigation to know the whole TRUTH.”
For many Hondurans, his conviction was a rare taste of justice. A woman in a crowd outside the courthouse celebrating his punishment had held a sign that read “No clemency for narcopolitics.”
But on Saturday, Mr. Trump said in a statement to The New York Times that “many friends” had asked him to pardon Mr. Hernández: “They gave him 45 years because he was the President of the Country — you could do this to any President.”
Jeff Ernst contributed reporting from Tegucigalpa and David C. Adams contributed reporting from Miami.
Santul Nerkar is a Times reporter covering federal courts in Brooklyn.
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