US President Donald Trump has said that he will pardon the ex-president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of drug trafficking charges in a US court last year.
Trump made the announcement in a Truth Social post on Friday, congratulating the former president on the pardon, saying he was 'treated very harshly and unfairly.'
Hernández was found guilty in March 2024 of conspiring to import cocaine into the US and of possessing machine guns. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
In the same post, Trump also said he supported conservative candidate Tito Asfura in the upcoming general election in the Central American country on Sunday.
Hernández, a member of the National Party who served as Honduras's president from 2014 to 2022, was extradited to the United States in April 2022 to stand trial for running a violent drug trafficking conspiracy and helping to traffic hundreds of tons of cocaine to the US.
He was convicted by a New York jury two years later.
Polling suggests the Honduran election remains a toss-up between Asfura, the former mayor of Tegucigalpa and now leader of the National Party, Rixi Moncada, the former defence minister with the ruling leftist LIBRE Party, and Salvador Nasralla, a television host with the centrist Liberal Party.
Trump criticized Moncada and Nasralla in his Friday post, writing that Nasralla is 'a borderline Communist' who is only running to split the vote between Moncada and Asfura.
Trump described Asfura as 'standing up for democracy' and fighting against Venezuela's president Nicolás Maduro.
The Trump administration has accused Maduro - whose re-election last year was dismissed as rigged by many countries - of being the leader of a drugs cartel.
On Friday, President Trump also accused Maduro 'and his narcoterrorists' of taking over Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Since 2022, Honduras has been governed by President Xiomara Castro of the LIBRE Party, who has forged close ties with Cuba and Venezuela; however, Castro has maintained a cooperative relationship with the US, agreeing to preserve a long-running extradition treaty. The country also hosts a US military base involved in targeting transnational organized crime.
In August, the US launched a counternarcotics operation targeting boats accused of transporting drugs from Venezuela to America, leading to more than 80 fatalities during US strikes on suspected drug vessels. Legal experts continue to express concerns regarding the operations' legality in the absence of firm evidence linking the vessels to drug trafficking.
