Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández celebrating his return to Honduras on July 26, 2026, after receiving a pardon from U.S. Regime Leader Donald Trump. Photo: Fredy Rodriguez/Reuters.
By Dana Frank – Jul 29, 2026
Juan Orlando Hernandez came home with a skip in his step after receiving a pardon despite moving 400 tons of cocaine
Former President Juan Orlando Hernández, the convicted drug trafficker pardoned by President Donald Trump last December, flew triumphantly home to Honduras on Sunday in full, ambitious glory. He stepped off a private plane wearing a crisp white shirt, looking clean as the driven snow, a far cry from the handcuffs he wore the last time he stood on Honduran soil.
Hernández’s return, both astonishing and chilling, underscores Trump’s ability to use his pardon power to undermine the rule of law both at home and abroad — intervening in a sovereign nation to push it further to the right and land yet another blow in the long arc of destructive U.S. intervention in Honduras. Trump’s use of a presidential pardon to empower the forces of greed and repression in Honduras is entirely unprecedented. But it’s just a new tool in the imperial toolbox.
U.S. domination of Honduras goes way back, from the long decades of support for the banana companies through its use as a military base during the Contra War of the 1980s, when the country was known as the “USS Honduras.” In 2009, Washington supported a military coup that deposed democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya. The post-coup regime, with U.S. backing, then wreaked havoc on the Honduran economy and its judicial system, ushering in unbridled corruption by the country’s two traditional ruling parties, drug traffickers, organized crime, and ever-more powerful gangs, all interwoven with the police and military.
Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH, as he is known) is not just a documented drug trafficker. His criminal history is far broader. He supported the 2009 coup while a member of Congress; while President of Congress, he led the 2012 “Technical Coup” that ousted the majority of the Supreme Court. He and his party stole as much as $300 million from the national health service, bankrupting it, in order to pay for his first election as president in 2013. Four years later, he ran for reelection in violation of the constitution, stole the election when he lost, then turned the police and military on peaceful protesters and bystanders, killing at least 20 of them.
Through all these years Presidents Obama, Biden, and Trump supported the post-coup regime and Hernández, despite powerful congressional and grassroots pressure to suspend security aid in the face of human rights atrocities. Meanwhile, however, behind the scenes, independent federal prosecutors with the Southern District of New York built a powerful case against the Honduran president.
In January 2022, Xiomara Castro, Zelaya’s wife, took office as president, in a landslide triumph for the center-left opposition party, LIBRE, that emerged out of the opposition to the 2009 coup. A little over two weeks later, the U.S. extradited Hernández to New York.
During Hernández’s spectacular trial in March, 2024, I listened as witness after witness testified that he had worked with top cartel leaders, accepted millions in bribes in exchange for the free movement of drugs and arms, and even ordered an assassination. He famously promised to “shove the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” Hernández was convicted of moving more than 400 tons of cocaine and arms trafficking and sentenced to 45 years in prison.
But shockingly, on December 1, 2025, two days before the next Honduran elections, President Trump pardoned Hernández, reportedly at the behest of Trump’s longtime friend Roger Stone. Trump made clear that he was doing so in part to sway the elections toward Nasry Asfura, the far-right candidate of Hernández’s discredited National Party. Claiming that authorities were trying to steal the elections, Trump threatened there would be “hell to pay” if Asfura didn’t win. Terrified that Trump would cut off the remittances that make up as much as a third of the country’s economy, thousands of Hondurans reportedly switched their votes to Asfura.
Return of Narco-President Juan Orlando Hernández Reignites Debate on Impunity in Honduras
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President Asfura is a weak leader; he’s not friends with Hernández. But JOH, it turns out, has been running the National Party show ever since he was first incarcerated, according to a former senior Honduran official. His top henchman, Tomás Zambrano, is now president of Congress, and, once installed, immediately used his powers to depose the country’s independent attorney general and the president of the Supreme Court, in order to pave the way for JOH to escape domestic corruption charges. The Court, under its new president, has already ruled that the arrest warrant in place will not be observed. Hernández says he will appear in court to defend his innocence on August 3.
Hernández carefully orchestrated his return, with a bit of help from the Trump administration. As ProPublica has documented, when he was pardoned, an ICE detainment order was still in place. Orders from on high swiftly lifted it, and he was then driven from his prison in West Virginia by a U.S. government-funded special tactical team to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan, a flagrant violation of precedent, and much to the horror of top officials of the Bureau of Prisons.
Hernández spent the months after his release evidently lurking somewhere in Florida. He posted constant heartfelt photos and charming videos (sometimes on the beach), declaring his innocence, his love for God and his family, and his determination to return to his beloved country. He commented on public affairs as if he were an august elder statesman, not a convicted felon. Roger Stone, meanwhile, tweeted out elaborate defenses, insisting that Biden had framed JOH, the witnesses were lying, and the SDNY judge and prosecutors were biased.
Hernández is now flipping the script further to cast his upcoming hearing on corruption charges as a test of the rule of law, in which he is a victim of corruption, not the perpetrator. The head of the armed forces has already announced that Hernández will be protected by a special elite unit of the military and police.
It’s widely understood in Honduras that Hernández is gunning to be president again. Whatever happens next, the destructive impact of Trump’s pardon is already clear and will only escalate. The rule of law has been further torn apart, and Hernández’s, National Party, which had been almost completely discredited because of the drug charges, now rules unchecked, in alliance with the Liberal Party, which has caved in to it.
Meanwhile, the opposition coalition that emerged so powerfully out of resistance to the 2009 coup, and even secured the presidency for four years, is weak and in disarray. Journalists are at risk every time they speak out; LIBRE has lost much of its base; and grassroots movements of Indigenous people and campesinos continue to be repressed, as newly enacted laws now criminalize land defenders as “terrorists” and legalize the eviction of campesinos. On May 26, 20 campesinos in the Aguan Valley were massacred by assassins allegedly acting on behalf of big landowners, drug traffickers, and other elites.
In Washington, meanwhile, powerful congressional voices continue to push back against the pardon, especially the vast contradiction between it and Trump’s use of drug war rhetoric to illegally attack dozens of vessels in the Pacific and Caribbean, invade Venezuela and abduct its president for alleged drug trafficking, and, increasingly, threaten armed intervention against Cuba and Mexico. “Why would the President of the United States pardon someone that you had convicted and described as being involved in violent activities and allowing tons of cocaine to enter the United States?” asked Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) at the July 15 confirmation hearing of Jay Clayton for Director of National Intelligence.
On Sunday, thousands of Hondurans showed up at a rally to cheer for Hernández upon his return, as he danced on the stage with his wife in her own white shirt. But if past patterns apply, the celebrants were shuttled in in exchange for two dollars and a sandwich — you could even see the buses lined up behind the crowd. Under all that clean, happy imagery, Hernández and his party remain rotten to the core, propped up, as ever, by the United States, and the arms, intelligence sharing, training and legitimacy it supplies.
