'Based on lies'

What pardon shows about US policy on trafficking

- Tom Phillips

He was a Latin American president accused of colluding with some of the region’s most ruthless narco bosses to flood the United States with cocaine.

"[Let’s] stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos," the double-dealing politician once allegedly bragged as he lined his pockets with millions of dollars in bribes and turned his country into what many called a narco-state.

The description might sound like a sketch of Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, whom Donald Trump’s administration has accused of being a “narco-terrorist” kingpin and is trying to topple with a $50m (£38m) bounty and a huge display of military might off the South American country’s Caribbean coast.

But it is actually a portrait - painted by US prosecutors, no less - of the former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, whom Trump last week promised to pardon, despite the fact that Hernández was last year sentenced to 45 years in prison for allegedly creating “a cocaine superhighway to the United States”.

"The people of Honduras really thought he was set up and it was a terrible thing," Trump told reporters on Sunday. "He was the president of the country and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country ... and I looked at the facts and I agreed with them."