The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal; Trump’s Pardon for Cocaine Juan: A jury found Honduras’s former President guilty. Why set him free?
"President Trump, like other politicians, sometimes does something unpopular to please his base. But what is the audience for Mr. Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández?"
William K. Rashbaum, Maggie Haberman, Kenneth P. Vogel and Jonah E. Bromwich, The New York Times; Former President of Honduras Is Freed From Prison After Trump Pardon
"President Trump formally pardoned former President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras on Monday evening, fulfilling a vow he had made days before to free an ex-president who was at the center of what the authorities had characterized as “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”"
Santul NerkarAnnie Correal and Colin Moynihan , The New York Times; The Ex-President Whom Trump Plans to Pardon Flooded America With Cocaine
[Kip Currier: For any wondering how and why this individual could or would be pardoned by Donald Trump right now, read the full New York Times article and especially the excerpts below...
Corruption, Conspiracy Theories, and Self-Projection.]
[Excerpt]
"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 pardonMr. 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...
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...
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.”"
Tom Phillips, The Guardian ; Trump’s pardon of Honduras’s ex-president shows counter-drug effort is ‘based on lies and hypocrisy’
"He was a Latin American president accused of colluding with some of the region’s most ruthless narco bosses to flood the United States with cocaine.
“[Let’s] stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos,” the double-dealing politician once allegedly bragged as he lined his pockets with millions of dollars in bribes and turned his country into what many called a narco-state.
The description might sound like a sketch of Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, who Donald Trump’s administration has accused of being a “narco-terrorist” kingpin and is trying to topple with a $50m bounty and a huge display of military might off the South American country’s Caribbean coast.
But it is actually a portrait – painted by US prosecutors, no less – of the former Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who Trump last week pledged to pardon, despite the fact that Hernández was sentenced last year to 45 years in prison for allegedly creating “a cocaine superhighway to the United States”."
