Donald Trump has said that he will pardon the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of drug trafficking charges in a US court last year.
The US president said Hernández had been “treated very harshly and unfairly” in a social media post announcing the move on Friday.
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.
Trump also threw his support behind conservative presidential candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura in the Central American nation’s general election, due to be held on Sunday.
Hernández, a member of the National Party, who served as Honduras’s president from 2014 to 2022, was extradited to the US in April 2022 to stand trial for running a violent drug trafficking conspiracy and helping to smuggle hundreds of tons of cocaine to the US.
During his trial, prosecutors in New York said Hernández ran the Central American country like a “narco-state” and accepted millions of dollars in bribes from drug traffickers to shield them from the law.
He was also ordered to pay a fine of $8m (£6m) as part of his sentence.
Polls indicate this year’s Honduran election remains a toss-up between three candidates including Asfura, the former mayor of Tegucigalpa and leader of the conservative National Party.
Also in the running is Rixi Moncada, a former defence minister standing for the ruling left-wing Libre Party, and Salvador Nasralla, a television host with the centrist Liberal Party.
Trump criticised Moncada and Nasralla on Friday, writing that the latter was “a boderline Communist” who was only running to split the vote between Moncada and Asfura.
He characterised Asfura as “standing up for democracy” and praised him for campaigning against Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, with whom Trump has engaged in a war of words in recent months.
Nasralla has pledged to cut ties with Venezuela if he wins.
At a press conference on Saturday, Moncada accused Trump of “interventionist” meddling after his endorsement of Asfura and his plans to pardon Hernández.
The Trump administration has accused the left-wing Maduro – whose re-election last year was dismissed as illegitimate by many countries – of being the leader of a drugs cartel.
It used countering drug trafficking as a justification for a military build-up in the Caribbean and has conducted strikes on vessels it says have been used for smuggling – though some analysts have described these moves as a means of pressuring Latin American leaders.
Honduras has been governed since 2022 by President Xiomara Castro, who has forged close ties with Cuba and Venezuela.
But Castro has maintained a co-operative relationship with the US, agreeing to preserve a long-running extradition treaty with it. Her country also hosts a US military base involved in targeting transnational organised crime in the region.
More than 80 people have been killed in the US strikes on vessels suspected of being involved in the transport of narcotics since they began in August.
US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has said the aim of “Operation Southern Spear” was to eliminate “narcoterrorists”.
But legal experts have questioned the legality of the strikes, pointing out that the US has provided no evidence that the boats it has targeted were carrying drugs.
