US President Donald Trump pardons convicted Honduran ex-leader Juan Orlando Hernandez and threatens to cut aid if his preferred candidate loses Sunday’s vote.
PALM BEACH: US President Donald Trump has pardoned convicted former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez just days before the country’s presidential election.
Trump also threatened to cut US support if his preferred candidate loses Sunday’s vote in a major intervention into Honduran politics.
The former president was convicted last year in a US court on drug trafficking charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison.
Hernandez led the Central American nation from 2014 to 2022 before being extradited to the United States weeks after leaving office.
US prosecutors had accused him of facilitating the import of some 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.
Trump made the announcement in a social media post proclaiming support for Nasry Asfura, the candidate of Hernandez’s right-wing party.
“If he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad, because a wrong Leader can only bring catastrophic results to a country, no matter which country it is,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform.
The US president had made a similar threat before Argentina’s election last month.
Asfura, a 67-year-old construction magnate and former mayor of Tegucigalpa, faces a tight three-way race against leftist lawyer Rixi Moncada and fellow right-wing TV host Salvador Nasralla.
Trump accused Nasralla of running as a spoiler candidate to draw votes away from Asfura.
Noting that Nasralla served as current President Xiomara Castro’s vice president before resigning, Trump said he “is now pretending to be an anti-Communist only for the purposes of splitting Asfura’s vote.”
Trump also described Moncada, the political heir to Castro, as a “communist” and said her victory would benefit Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro.
A jury in New York convicted Hernandez in March 2024 of facilitating cocaine smuggling from Colombia and Venezuela via Honduras since 2004.
Former US attorney general Merrick Garland said after Hernandez’s sentencing that he had “abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.”
Trump claimed Hernandez “has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly” without providing specifics. – AFP
