Trump destroys his tough-on-drugs cred
With one hand, he blows up supposed drug traffickers from Venezuela. With the other, he frees one of the world’s biggest cocaine kingpins.
By Stephen Kinzer – Boston Globe - December 4, 2025,
Every modern American president has pledged to crack down on drug traffickers. These days, the policy of choice is to attack and destroy small boats in the Caribbean that may be carrying drugs. President Trump, however, has just lost whatever antidrug credibility he might have claimed. He has pardoned one of the most powerful drug kingpins of the 21st century.
The beneficiary of Trump’s generosity is the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández. He was convicted in a New York court last year and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Before pronouncing the sentence, Judge P. Kevin Castel called him “a two-faced politician hungry for power” who caused “unfathomable destruction” to communities in the United States.
Prosecutors asserted that during his political career, which stretched over two decades and culminated in eight years as president, Hernández oversaw the smuggling of more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States while running “one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.” One of his coconspirators testified that Hernández told him, “We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses, and they’re never even going to know it.”
Hernández turned Honduras into a quintessential narco-state. In exchange for periodic bribes of up to $1 million, according to prosecutors, he allowed high-level traffickers “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.” They asserted that he deserved to die in jail.
That seemed to be Hernández’s likely fate until, to the astonishment of Hondurans — not to mention American prosecutors — President Trump pardoned him. He walked out of jail on Tuesday and is expected to return to his homeland.
Trump’s decision to free one of the hemisphere’s most notorious drug lords was especially bizarre when contrasted with his efforts to portray himself as opposed to drug trafficking. His pardon for Hernández came as he is bombing Venezuelan boats and threatening to invade that country because of its leaders’ alleged involvement in the drug trade. Even assuming that those killed in the bombings are guilty — the White House has released no evidence — they are the smallest of small fries. While Trump is ordering them to be killed, he pardons one of the legendary monarchs of the Caribbean drug trade.
That mirrors his broader law enforcement strategy: Crush the little guys while embracing their criminal bosses.
When Hernández was extradited from Honduras in 2022, just weeks after he left the presidency, Hondurans exploded in a paroxysm of joy, complete with street celebrations and fireworks. The jubilation was repeated when he was convicted two years later. Hondurans were painfully aware of Hernández’s involvement in drug trafficking and hoped that his imprisonment would set their country on the road to better times. It has continued to struggle with poverty and violence, but in recent years life has seemed to be improving. Now, with the drug-dealing former president coming home, few Hondurans dare to predict what might come next.
For more than a century, Honduras has suffered the fate of being a small country located near a big power. The American writer O. Henry, who turned up there in 1896, coined the term “banana republic” to describe it. In 1911 the US government, in cooperation with an American banana grower, deposed President Miguel Dávila, who was seeking to limit foreign influence over his country. In the decades that followed, the Boston-based United Fruit Company and its rival, Standard Fruit, became the effective rulers of Honduras, controlling presidents while enriching generations of stockholders.
During the 1980s, the Reagan administration turned Honduras into a base for contra rebels fighting to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government in neighboring Nicaragua. Death squads and torture centers emerged for the first time in Honduran history, while the Honduran military received tens of millions of dollars in American aid. In 2014 Hernandez ascended to the presidency. He was reelected in 2017 after his handpicked Supreme Court ruled him eligible despite a constitutional ban on reelection.
American leaders turned a blind eye to Hernández’s well-known involvement in the drug trade. Presidents Obama and Biden praised him as a valued partner because he claimed to be limiting the flow of Honduran refugees toward the United States. In fact, his corrupt and brutal rule intensified the poverty and violence that led many to flee.
A phalanx of Washington lobbyists, including the onetime Trump fixer Roger Stone, worked quietly to secure the pardon for Hernández. They arranged for him to write a four-page letter to Trump that pushed all the right buttons. He claimed that he was “targeted by the Biden-Harris administration” and proceeded to pile onto Trump the lavish praise in which he revels: “I have found strength from you, Sir, your resilience to get back in that great office notwithstanding the persecution and prosecution you faced.…What you accomplished is unprecedented and truly historic.…Your resilience in the face of relentless political persecution has inspired me deeply.…Like you, I was recklessly attacked by radical leftist forces.”
Amazingly — or perhaps not, given Trump’s unique approach to criminal justice — that did the trick. As Trump bombs Venezuelan boats in order to fight what he calls “narco-terrorists,” he has just freed one of the biggest of them all.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.