Honduras’s attorney general said his country had issued an international arrest warrant for former president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving a 45-year prison sentence in the United States for drug trafficking charges until he was released last week after a full pardon from President Donald Trump.
Hernández, 57, is wanted for money laundering and fraud, in connection with allegations that his 2013 political campaign used stolen public funds.
“We have been lacerated by the tentacles of corruption and by the criminal networks that have deeply marked the life of our country,” Honduran attorney general Johel Antonio Zelaya Alvarez wrote in a post on social media. Alvarez said he had instructed law enforcement to arrest Hernández and had alerted Interpol for assistance.
Hernández was released Dec. 1 from U.S. Penitentiary Hazelton in West Virginia, The Washington Post previously reported. The former Honduran president, who was in office from 2014 to 2022, was convicted last year of helping move at least 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, while protecting traffickers from extradition and prosecution.
U.S. prosecutors have said that he built his political career on millions of dollars in bribes from traffickers in Honduras and Mexico.
Honduras recently held presidential elections in which two conservative candidates appeared to be ahead of the leftist government party candidate, Rixi Moncada, who trailed in a distant third place. Hernández is a conservative.
His attorney, Renato Stabile, said the charges were “completely baseless” and politically motivated, in an emailed statement.
Hernández’s whereabouts are unknown. Hernández’s wife and daughters were still in Honduras, The Post reported last week.
His wife has said that Hernández was in a “safe place” in the United States for his security following his release, but was “very eager to get in touch with the Honduran people.”
Trump said he had issued the pardon after he agreed with advisers who told him that Hernández’s conviction had been a “Biden setup.”
“I looked at the facts and I agreed with them,” Trump told reporters on the day before the pardon.
Federal prosecutors during Trump’s first administration initially accused Hernández of trafficking drugs and weapons in their successful indictments of former Honduran National Police chief Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla and congressman Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, the president’s brother. Bonilla pleaded guilty in 2019 to conspiracy to import cocaine and was sentenced to 19 years in prison. Tony Hernández was found guilty that year of conspiracy to import cocaine and weapons charges and sentenced to life. Both remain in prison.
Samantha Schmidt, Tobi Raji, Shayna Jacobs and Derek Hawkins contributed to this report.
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