Former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving a 45-year sentence for funneling hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States, walked out of a U.S. federal prison on Monday, days after President Donald Trump granted him a shocking pardon. If you needed proof that Trump’s bellicose and possibly illegal war on drugs in the Caribbean is disingenuous, his pardon of Hernández is as clear as it gets.
Hernández is exactly the kind of Latin American drug trafficker who, if he were still in power, Trump could legitimately say was pushing drugs into the U.S. Instead, Trump overrode an American jury working in the U.S. criminal justice system and freed him.
Here’s The New York Times’ summary of the activities that led to his conviction in federal court:
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.
Trump has nonsensically argued that Hernández was “treated very harshly and unfairly,” and called his sentence a “Biden administration setup.” He has also suggested he was motivated by compassion: “If somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesn’t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of his life.”
Trump’s pretext for his attacks near Venezuela was never believable, given the tiny amount of drugs that flow through Venezuela into the States. But now that pretext is an obvious farce.
Trump is an authoritarian who relishes tough-on-crime rhetoric and has deployed troops into U.S. cities on the false pretext that crime is skyrocketing. His administration has killed scores of people on suspected drug boats he claims are trafficking drugs from Venezuela — without providing evidence and possibly violating U.S. and international law.
He has parked huge military assets off the coast of Venezuela and says he has authorized the CIA to take covert action within the country, all in an attempt to depose Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whom he claims is at the heart of a massive inter-American drug trafficking operation. In this context, it’s an outrage to hear Trump express concern that Hernández, by being sentenced to prison, was treated too harshly.
It’s unclear what motivated Trump to grant the pardon, although it could be a bid to give a boost to the Honduran right while the country goes through a tight presidential election. What we do know is that it undermines Trump’s claims to care about the trafficking of drugs into the States and the extraordinarily destructive steps he’s taken toward that purported goal.
Trump’s pretext for his attacks near Venezuela was never believable, given the tiny amount of drugs that flow through Venezuela into the States. But now that pretext is an obvious farce. Even as he claims Hernández deserves mercy, Trump is extrajudicially killing people in the Caribbean — and apparently trying to inspire a coup in a sovereign nation — on unproven or unconvincing claims of drug trafficking. The only consistent threads here are Trump’s feelings and geopolitical motives.
Trump’s incoherence on cracking down on drugs will only embolden corrupt political leaders who use drug trafficking in Latin America to line their pockets and win power. And it helps illuminate how Trump’s real goal is geopolitical domination through militarism in the Western hemisphere. Whenever Trump says his goal in the Caribbean is to stop the flow of drugs, we’ll cite his freeing Hernández as proof that he’s lying.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Politico.