The Narco President Walks Free and With His Head Held High

In short, for US President Donald Trump, Juan Orlando Hernandez “may be an SOB… but he’s one of ours.”

By Jorge Vargas Cullell (Confidencial)

HAVANA TIMES – And so, as of December 2, 2025, Juan Orlando Hernandez, former president of Honduras, would-be dictator, and convicted drug trafficker, is officially a free man. He walks free thanks to President Trump’s pardon, who argued that Hernandez had been the victim of a scheme concocted by the Biden administration—a scheme that, apparently, even managed to fool the US justice system.

If I believe this movie, then justice was asleep at the wheel: the evidence proving, beyond all doubt, that Juan Orlando enriched himself by facilitating cocaine trafficking into the United States was pure invention. The judge should have known this. In sum, the man is, according to Trump, a victim deserving our sympathy.

His brother, Tony Hernandez, on the other hand, was not pardoned. He remains in prison for the same crimes. He must have been the real bad guy, I suppose—the one responsible for the confusion that unfairly harmed the “good” Hernandez: two brothers, same last name, talking to the same criminals, but the judge failed to understand that one of them did so out of goodness (Juan Orlando) and the other out of greed (Tony). By not noticing this, the judge made an innocent pay for a sinner.

So, case closed, no problem… and yet I am going to make a fuss, because there are several inconsistencies. The wildly different fates of Tony and Juan Orlando is one such inconsistency, but not the only one. More fundamental is this: for several weeks now, Trump has been threatening to blow the head off dictator Maduro, whom he accuses of flooding the United States with drugs. He is supposedly furious with anyone who, in his view, poisons Americans. He even says he would bomb Mexico. But Juan Orlando walks free and will undoubtedly return to Honduras to weave his not-so-angelic networks of power. So… what gives?

I’m counting the days until Maduro goes to hell. He should have left of his own accord long ago and spared so much suffering. But why stroll around Honduras? The obvious answer is that Trump doesn’t care about that small, battered country, still in the grip of narco-power and corruption. Or perhaps he does care—as a war trophy: in addition to freeing Juan Orlando, Trump plunged into that country’s electoral campaign, urging voters to support the candidate from Hernandez’s party. In short, JOH “may be an SOB… but he’s one of ours.” Given all this, I’m worried that some little bird will whisper to him to start meddling with Costa Rica.

Published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.