Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, has walked free after President Donald Trump pardoned him – a man once characterised as the key figure in a drug trafficking scheme that flooded America with over 400 tonnes of cocaine.

Trump has said that Hernández, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison by a US court, is a victim of political persecution and has been “treated very harshly and unfairly”.

The pardon has surprised some experts, given the seriousness of the crime and the administration’s promised crackdown on illegal drugs flowing into the US.

Here is a look at Hernández’s political career and crimes, and why Trump may have pardoned him.

Hernández first ran for president of Honduras, a country of 10 million people, in 2013 as the candidate for the conservative National Party. He ran again in 2017, in an election marred by fraud allegations and violent protests.

Throughout his two terms, he maintained a cordial relationship with the US. Former President Barack Obama called him one of the “excellent partners” on the migrant-children crisis, and Trump backed him as the winner of the disputed 2017 vote.

But Hernández’s fortunes began to unravel in 2019.

US federal prosecutors accused him of accepting a $1m bribe from notorious drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán for his first presidential campaign in exchange for protecting narcotics routes through Honduras.

The allegations surfaced in a separate case involving his brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, who was arrested in Miami in 2018 on charges of smuggling cocaine into the US. At the time, the then-president denied any involvement in his brother’s crimes.

Tony Hernández was convicted in 2019 and sentenced to life in prison.

But the end of his brother’s trial marked only the beginning of the ex-president’s legal troubles.

Shortly after leaving office in 2022, he was arrested and extradited to the US on drug-trafficking and related weapons charges.

Hernández’s federal trial lasted three weeks in 2024.

US prosecutors argued that he was a central figure in a more than 18-year-long drug-trafficking scheme that funnelled over 400 tonnes of cocaine into the US – equivalent to roughly 4.5 billion individual doses.

“The people of Honduras and the United States bore the consequences,” said then-attorney general Merrick Garland.

Prosecutors detailed how Hernández abused office by shielding drug traffickers armed with machine guns and grenade launchers. In exchange, he received millions of dollars to fuel his political campaigns.

Multiple branches of the state were involved, including the Honduran National Police, who protected cocaine shipments as they moved through Honduras to the US for distribution, prosecutors said.

In some cases, the drug traffickers associated with Hernández committed violent crimes and murders to quell rival gangs and grow their enterprise, they said.

During sentencing, Hernández insisted he was the victim of “political persecution”.

“The prosecutors and agents did not do the due diligence in the investigation to know the whole TRUTH,” he wrote in a letter following his conviction.

Trump announced the pardon on 28 November in a Truth Social post, writing that, according to “many people that I greatly respect”, Hernández had been unfairly treated by prosecutors.

In the same post, he also endorsed Tito Asfura for president of Honduras ahead of Sunday’s election. Asfura ran under the same National Party ticket as Hernández.

As of Tuesday, preliminary results show the election is too close to call, forcing a hand recount of ballots.

Trump’s endorsement of Asfura wasn’t surprising to many, given the right-leaning National Party’s ideological alignment with the current US administration.

Trump has also weighed in on the politics of other countries in the Western Hemisphere, like Brazil and Argentina.

“We’ve seen the president’s affinity with leaders on the right that he sees as being favourable to some of interests of his administration,” noted Jason Marczak, vice-president and senior director at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.

But the decision to pardon Hernández simultaneously stunned some experts.

“It was hard for me to believe, because there was such an overwhelming case against Hernández,” said Michael Shifter, an adjunct professor at the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University.

Mr Shifter added that what he found more puzzling was the “contradiction” between the pardon and Trump’s declared policy of clamping down on drug trafficking.

Trump has repeatedly pledged to curb the flow of drugs into the US, and carried out highly controversial strikes on boats in the waters around Venezuela that his administration says are piloted by drug traffickers.

More than 80 people have been killed in a number of strikes in the Caribbean Sea since early September.

At the White House briefing on 1 December, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt argued that charges against Hernández were tainted by corrupt “over-prosecution” under President Biden.

Asked if the pardon undermined the US president’s campaign against “narco-terrorists” on the American continent, Leavitt said the aim was to “correct the wrongs” of the justice department under Biden.

“I think President Trump has been quite clear in his defence of the United States homeland to stop these illegal narcotics from coming to our borders whether that is by land or by sea,” Leavitt added.

US media outlet Axios later reported that Hernández penned a four-page letter in October praising President Trump, and requesting a review of his case “in the interest of justice”.

In the letter, he reportedly recalled the working relationship he and Trump had during the US president’s first term, and said his case “advanced only because the Biden-Harris DOJ pursued a political agenda to empower its ideological allies in Honduras”.

The outlet also reported that Roger Stone, a lobbyist and long-time Trump advisor, had told the US president that a pardon for Hernández would energise the National Party ahead of the Honduran election.

Trump subsequently told reporters on Sunday that he believed the ex-president’s prosecution “was a Biden setup”.

Mr Marczak of the Atlantic Council noted that the prosecution of Hernández was the result of an independent investigation by the US justice department.

But he added that the decision to pardon Hernández was in line with the Trump administration’s “willingness to question decisions made during the Biden presidency”.