U.S. pardon for Honduran defies drug war narrative

Release of ex-leader, a convicted trafficker, raises questions about Trump’s campaign.

- By Kate LINTHICUM AND MICHAEL WILNER

ORLANDO SIERRA AFP/Getty Images

ANA GARCÍA de Hernández thanked President Trump for freeing her husband.

Juan Orlando Hernandez, a convicted drug trafficker who prosecutors said “paved a cocaine superhighway” to the United States, walked out of a West Virginia prison this week a free man.

That was thanks to President Trump, who on Monday granted a full pardon to Hernandez, the former right-wing leader of Honduras who was serving a 45-year sentence for supporting what a U.S. attorney general had called “one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.”

Trump’s extraordinary reprieve outraged many in Latin America and raised critical questions about his escalating military campaign in the region, which the president insists is aimed at combating the drug trade.

On Tuesday, Trump warned of imminent “strikes on land” in Venezuela, whose leftist leader, Nicolas Maduro, has been described as a “narco-dictator” by the White House, which seems intent on forcing him from power.

“If Trump is supposedly a drug warrior, why did he pardon a convicted trafficker?” said Dana Frank, a professor emerita at UC Santa Cruz specializing in recent Honduran and Latin American history. She described the drug war narrative embraced by the White House as little more than a pretext to push U.S. economic and political interests in the region and justify “a hemispheric attack on governments that are not following what the United States wants.”

The U.S. has killed dozens of alleged low-level drug traffickers in missile attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific and has massed 15,000 troops and a fleet of warships and fighter jets off the coast of Venezuela.

Venezuela, home to the world’s largest known oil reserves, has been controlled by Maduro’s leftist authoritarian government since 2013.