Honduras:
Drug Trafficking President Pardoned

Dec 8, 2025

On December 2, Juan Orlando Hernández, President of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, walked out of a U.S. federal prison. Trump pardoned JOH, as he is known, after he had served less than two years of a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking. Trump also endorsed the candidate of JOH’s National Party in the election that took place November 30, threatening to cut off aid if its candidate doesn’t win.

JOH helped bring more than 500 tons of cocaine into the U.S. over 20 years. He accepted a million-dollar bribe from the famous Mexican drug kingpin “El Chapo,” and promised to “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.”

Under the excuse of fighting drug trafficking, the U.S. has built up a massive military force in the Caribbean and killed more than 80 people in recent months. Trump’s pardon of this notorious drug trafficker proves that excuse is a lie.

In fact, both the military buildup and the pardon of JOH are parts of wider U.S. moves to consolidate control of its Latin American “backyard.”

The U.S. has long dominated Honduras. “U.S.S. Honduras,” as the country became known, was the main U.S. base for a series of brutally destructive wars across Central America in the 1980s. Those dirty wars were partially funded by CIA-backed drug running. After the fighting ended, and the U.S. pulled back its huge financial aid to the Honduran military, military leaders turned even more to drug trafficking to make up the difference.

JOH himself came to power in the aftermath of a 2009 coup organized by the Honduran military. The coup was welcomed—if not planned—by President Obama himself, who called JOH an “excellent partner.”

After the coup, Honduras was overrun by drug gangs, and the violence got so bad that Honduras had the highest murder rate in the world. Politically connected cronies stole hundreds of millions of dollars from this impoverished country’s health system and sold it deadly adulterated medicine. Security forces took protestors against JOH’s “reelection” in a rigged vote in 2017 “to military installations, where they were brutally beaten, insulted and sometimes tortured,” according to the United Nations.

The hell ordinary people had to endure didn’t bother U.S. companies or the U.S. government. However corrupt it was, the government under JOH helped push peasants off the land to make room for plantations producing for export. Already low wages fell even further in the country’s garment and auto parts plants. And Honduras supported U.S. policies throughout Latin America.

But conditions in Honduras got so bad that huge numbers of people started fleeing the country. Since the coup, more than 100,000 unaccompanied children from Honduras have arrived at the U.S. southern border, many under ten years old. This from a country with about as many people as Michigan. As this mass migration became an increasing political problem for the Biden administration, U.S. support for JOH and his party began to fizzle.

In 2022, Hondurans voted out JOH’s National Party and put in the same political party that had been removed in the coup. For ordinary people, not much changed. But the new government took a few steps that U.S. investors and the U.S. government did not like, including recognizing the Venezuelan government and cancelling a few privatization projects. As small and symbolic as they were, these moves were evidently too much for the Trump administration.

U.S. policy against the population of Honduras has also hurt workers in this country. Driving down the wages and conditions of Honduran workers hurts workers everywhere, as companies will always take advantage of the most desperate workers they can find.

Workers in the U.S., Honduras, and throughout the Americas have the same interests, and the same enemies: above all, U.S. imperialism, whoever the president directing it.