For weeks, the Trump administration has demonstrated its zeal in taking on supposed “narcoterrorists” in the Western hemisphere. The United States bombed numerous boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that Trump officials claimed were transporting drugs to U.S. shores, while also rattling the saber at the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom the White House has cast as both an illegitimate tyrant and a thuggish cartel boss. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump held a Cabinet meeting on potential U.S. plans for Venezuela, during which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth hailed Trump for “taking the gloves off” and declared that “we’ve only just begun” sending drug traffickers to “the bottom of the ocean.”
Developments not far from Washington told a rather different story. On Monday, former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández walked free from U.S. Penitentiary Hazelton in West Virginia after receiving a full and unconditional pardon from Trump over the weekend. Hernández, who was in office between 2014 and 2022, was sentenced by a U.S. judge in New York last year to 45 years in prison for trafficking drugs to the United States — including the facilitation of at least 400 tons of cocaine into the country.
But Trump appears to see Hernández — not unlike himself — as a victim of the previous administration’s political agendas, an argument Hernández seemed to make directly in a letter apparently sent to Trump via intermediaries. In a social media post, Trump suggested that the Honduran leader had been “treated very harshly and unfairly.” On Monday, former Honduras first lady Ana García de Hernández, speaking outside her home in Tegucigalpa, described her husband in Trumpian terms, saying he was the subject of a “witch hunt,” and accused U.S. prosecutors of building a political case against him.
At the same time, Trump also conspicuously put his thumb on the scales of Honduras’s election, which took place Sunday, even threatening to cut off aid to the country if his preferred right-wing candidate, Nasry Asfura, did not win. The country’s electoral body said Monday that there was a “technical tie” between the Trump-endorsed businessman and his closest challenger, Salvador Nasralla, a center-right reformer who Trump labeled a “borderline Communist” on social media.
Honduras is no stranger to electoral controversy. Ahead of Sunday’s vote, candidates from all sides, including the ruling left that finished a distant third, warned against possible chicanery. Hernández’s victory in 2017 over Nasralla was marred by widespread allegations of voter fraud. As the vote-counting proceeds this week, Trump has made clear that he expects a victory for Asfura and Honduras’s right-wing National Party — which is also the party of Hernández. The White House has actively worked to boost the political prospects of right-wing governments or candidates across Latin America, and it would tout Asfura’s victory as another domino falling in the region, which has seen recent wins for the right (or defeats for the left) in Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina.
“Hernández’s tenure is remembered for scandals involving state-sponsored drug trafficking and violence against civilians, as well as expanded privileges for traditional elites,” explained Honduran human rights lawyer Joaquín Mejía to Americas Quarterly. “An Asfura win would likely result in greater U.S. influence and close alignment of Honduran policy with U.S. geopolitical interests. This would raise questions around sovereignty and respect for international law.”
Set against Trump’s posturing over the threat of supposed drug boats in the Caribbean Sea, Hernández’s release triggered an immediate backlash. “Trump says he wants to get drugs off the streets,” wrote Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colorado) on social media. “Then he pardons a convicted cocaine trafficker. The American people aren’t stupid. They can see right through the President’s hypocrisy.”
According to Justice Department documents, Hernández once allegedly bragged to a drug kingpin that he was going to “stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.” He caused “untold damage” and “unimaginable suffering” in the United States, U.S. prosecutors wrote in the government’s sentencing memo, recommending life in prison plus 30 years. “The defendant engaged in this egregious conduct while publicly posing as an ally of the United States in its efforts to combat the importation of narcotics that destroy countless lives in this country. But behind closed doors, the defendant protected the very traffickers he vowed to pursue.”
“It just shows that the entire counter-drug effort of Donald Trump is a charade — it’s based on lies, it’s based on hypocrisy,” Mike Vigil, the former Drug Enforcement Administration chief of international operations, told the Guardian. “He is giving a pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández and then going after Nicolás Maduro. … It’s all hypocritical.”
“It’s an abomination,” a former DEA agent, who worked on the Hernández case and spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk freely about a sensitive case, told my colleague Samantha Schmidt. “Ludicrous to even consider, much less actually go through with.”
All the while, scrutiny mounts over the nature of U.S. forces deployed near Venezuela and U.S. strikes on small boats. The Washington Post reported Friday that Hegseth gave a spoken order to kill the entire crew of a vessel thought to be ferrying narcotics in the Caribbean, the first of some 20 such strikes directed by the administration since early September. The Trump administration has furnished little evidence to explain the culpability of those in the boats, nor to prove that it’s actually saving Americans from countless tons of narcotics infiltrating the country.
Critics have dismissed the Trump administration’s awkward legal argument justifying the strikes as part of a “non-international armed conflict.”
“We are not at war with drug traffickers. The ‘war on drugs’ is a metaphor, not a legal term of art that authorizes killing the enemy,” noted Georgetown University law professor David Cole. “The human beings on these boats were civilians, and even if there were an actual war going on, the laws of war prohibit targeting civilians unless they are directly engaged in hostilities.”
Cole added pointedly: “In the absence of any conceivable military justification for these acts, it is difficult to view them as anything but premeditated murder, pure and simple.”
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