Cocaine, bribery and murder: within the accusations against the recently pardoned drug trafficker Trump
President Donald Trump, who has used crime and the flow of narcotics into the United States to justify a brutal immigration crackdown, oversee possible war crimes and threaten military action in Venezuela, just pardoned the former Honduran president who was sentenced to decades in prison for flooding the United States with hundreds of tons of cocaine.
Trump stated days ago that “many of the people of Honduras” asked him to forgive former President Juan Orlando Hernández, who has maintained his innocence.
“They basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country. And they said it was a setup by the Biden administration. And I looked at the facts and I agreed with them,” Trump told reporters over the weekend.
The crimes for which Hernández was convicted involve the exact type of activity that Trump says must be eradicated. Here’s what you should know about them.
Flooding the United States with 400 tons of cocaine
Last year, a US court sentenced Hernández to 45 years in prison for his role in flooding the country with more than 400 tons of cocaine, an amount equivalent to more than 4.5 billion individual doses of the drug. The Justice Department described him as “the center of one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.”
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Supporting trafficking meant allowing horrible brutalities. When he came to power in Honduras, the Justice Department said: “He provided greater support and protection to his accomplices, allowing them to move mountains of cocaine, commit acts of violence and murder, and help turn Honduras into one of the most dangerous countries in the world.”
Hernández, who served two terms as president, did all this while publicly promoting legislation to crack down on cartels in Honduras, prosecutors said.
One million dollars bribe from ‘El Chapo’
When Hernández’s younger brother was in court, prosecutors presented evidence that his president brother accepted a $1 million bribe from infamous drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán during his first campaign for the presidency. That bribe, like many others that he is accused of accepting, was intended to protect the passage of drugs to the United States.
When Hernández was tried, other drug traffickers testified about bribing him with larger sums more than a decade ago. Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, a former Honduran gang leader who confessed to participating in 78 deaths, testified that in 2012 he gave more than $250,000 to Hernández, then president of the Honduran National Congress, in exchange for not being arrested and extradited to the United States.
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An accountant for Hernández also testified that he had seen the former president receive briefcases filled with thousands of dollars in bribe money, saying he was responsible for counting the wads of $20 bills.
‘We are going to shove drugs up the faces of the gringos’
According to further testimony from the accountant, Hernandez was callous and unapologetic when discussing the drug trafficking that prosecutors say he enabled.
“We are going to shove drugs under the faces of the gringos, and they are not even going to find out,” the former president once said, the accountant recalled in court.
Prosecutors also presented evidence that Hernández once told a cocaine trafficker that he would be safe from punishment in the United States, because “by the time the gringos find out, we will have eliminated extradition,” he allegedly said.
And as a result of bribes paid to Hernández, prosecutors claimed, drug traffickers received information about U.S. efforts to train Honduran Air Force pilots to carry out counternarcotics operations.
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A violent death by machete
The Justice Department said in 2022 that during the trial of Hernández’s brother for drug trafficking, prosecutors introduced as evidence accounting books belonging to a Honduran drug trafficker with “JOH” (Hernández’s initials) corresponding to large payments.
A week after his brother was convicted, that drug trafficker was murdered in prison by inmates armed with machetes and a gun to prevent his “potential cooperation” with authorities against Hernández, prosecutors say.
Election manipulation with drug money
The 2022 indictment against Hernández by the Justice Department accused him of using drug money to manipulate election results when he was running for president.
Prosecutors presented evidence that during the 2013 election, Hernández ordered a drug trafficker to travel to areas where he had little electoral support and bribed local officials to skew the vote in his favor. He did the same in the 2017 election, prosecutors said.