The Honduran attorney general announced Monday night that he had issued an international arrest warrant for the country’s former president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was recently pardoned by President Trump and released from a federal prison in the United States.
In a social media post, Attorney General Johel Antonio Zelaya Alvarez said that he had instructed government agencies and Interpol to execute the warrant against Mr. Hernández on charges of money laundering and fraud connected to a case involving his first presidential campaign more than a decade ago.
“We have been wounded by the tentacles of corruption and by the criminal networks that have deeply scarred the life of our country,” Mr. Zelaya said in announcing the warrant on X.
The charges that Mr. Hernández faces in Honduras stem from what is known as the Pandora Case. Prosecutors say that between 2010 and 2013, a corrupt network of lawmakers and others diverted public funds through private foundations, then funneled those funds into political campaigns — including Mr. Hernández’s 2013 campaign.
Mr. Hernández’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday night and Mr. Hernández’s whereabouts is unclear.
Mr. Zelaya noted that his announcement coincided with International Anti-Corruption Day, Dec. 9. His social media message included a document dated Nov. 28 — the day Mr. Trump first announced his plan to pardon Mr. Hernández — in which a Honduran Supreme Court justice asked Interpol to “carry out an immediate arrest,” including if Mr. Hernández was released by the U.S. authorities.
In Honduras, Mr. Hernández is a broadly disliked figure whose time in office was marred by corruption scandals that prompted protests. He was at the center of a fraught election in 2017, when he secured a second term, despite a constitutional ban on re-election. His victory was contested, protests broke out and the military was deployed in a bloody period that left nearly two dozen people dead.
Less than a month after leaving office in 2022, Mr. Hernández was arrested and later extradited to the United States to face drug-trafficking and weapons charges. The U.S. authorities said upon his sentencing to 45 years in prison that he had played a central role in “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”
Mr. Trump formally pardoned the former president on Dec. 1 and he was released from a federal prison in West Virginia last week.
The pardon came after Mr. Hernández sent Mr. Trump a letter portraying himself as a victim of “political persecution” by the Biden administration and comparing his fate to that of Mr. Trump.
Mr. Hernández’s cause was taken up by figures like Roger Stone, the conservative political operative and Trump ally. Mr. Stone, who played a role in delivering the letter to Mr. Trump, claimed that Mr. Hernández was a victim of a conspiracy tied to the U.S. government.
Mr. Trump said that “many friends” had made the case for the pardon.
“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “And they said it was a Biden administration setup. And I looked at the facts, and I agreed with them.”
Last year, Mr. Hernández was convicted and sent to prison for conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and for possessing and conspiring to possess “destructive devices,” including machine guns.
The U.S. judge in his case, P. Kevin Castel, had called Mr. Hernández “a two-faced politician hungry for power” who masqueraded as an antidrug crusader while partnering with traffickers. U.S. prosecutors asked the judge to make sure Mr. Hernández died behind bars.
A major figure in Honduras’s National Party, Mr. Hernández served as president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022. When he won, he was seen as a willing, albeit flawed, ally by the United States.
Mr. Hernández’s rumored connections to drug traffickers escalated after his brother, a former lawmaker, was arrested in the United States on drug-trafficking charges in 2018. A lead investigator in that case was Emil Bove III, then a prosecutor for the Southern District of New York and later one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers.
During the trial of Mr. Hernández, the former president, prosecutors asserted that he had received millions in bribes from drug traffickers, including $1 million from Joaquín Guzmán, the notorious former leader of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico known as “El Chapo,” who is imprisoned in the United States.
Mr. Hernández denied that he had trafficked narcotics, offered police protection to drug cartels or taken bribes. While right-wing figures such as Mr. Stone were pushing for Mr. Hernández’s pardon, figures including Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager were advising a candidate in this year’s presidential election in Honduras, who is a member of Mr. Hernández’s party, the National Party. Mr. Trump also endorsed that candidate, Nasry Asfura.
The results of the closely-fought election have not yet been called but, on Monday night, Mr. Trump’s favored candidate had inched ahead of his rival, with 97 percent of the ballots counted.
Jeff Ernst contributed reporting from Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
Annie Correal is a Times reporter covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
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