By Vera Bergengruen, Alex Leary, José de Córdoba and Josh Dawsey
President Trump's pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was the result of something extraordinary for a Central American leader and convicted cocaine trafficker -- a web of powerful advocates stretching from Washington to Mar-a-Lago.
Trump's announcement stunned the president's allies and some members of his administration, including officials who spent years building the landmark case against Hernández, according to people familiar with the matter. The decision allowed Hernández, who had been serving a 45-year prison sentence for conspiring with cartels to ship 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S., to walk free this week as the Trump administration escalates its war on narco-traffickers by launching airstrikes on low-level smugglers at sea.
The move wiped out Hernández's conviction with little explanation and sparked outrage from Democrats and some Republicans in Washington.
The pardon, which Trump announced in the run-up to elections in Honduras, was the result of a lobbying campaign months in the making. Hernández's appeal had quietly circulated since January through a tight orbit of Trump confidants and conservative media personalities.
Trump has privately told advisers in recent days that he decided to grant the pardon after his allies in Florida, including longtime confidant Roger Stone and members of his Mar-a-Lago club, pushed for it, according to a person who spoke to him. Trump told reporters this week that "the people of Honduras" had asked him to pardon Hernández, blaming then-President Joe Biden for targeting the former Honduran leader. The White House declined to detail Trump's conversations with Hondurans and defended the pardon, pointing to the president's public comments.
Hernández, a savvy political operator from a coffee-growing family in Honduras's highlands who was president from 2014 to 2022, spent a decade building powerful allies in the U.S. During Trump's first term, he made inroads with Republicans in Washington, attending evangelical events and pitching himself as a staunch ally on migration and security. In 2019, Trump praised him for "stopping drugs at a level that has never happened."
Hernández also cultivated relationships with American business leaders. He courted Silicon Valley investors by offering semiautonomous "charter city" zones on the country's Caribbean coast.
U.S. prosecutors began building a case against Hernández during the Obama administration and the investigation continued into Trump's first term. Last year, he was convicted of being "at the center of one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world," Damian Williams, who was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at the time. Hernández was accused of taking millions of dollars in bribes and using Honduras's police and military to protect drug shipments and crush rivals.
Hernández has denied the charges. On Wednesday, he wrote on social media that "the truth of my innocence prevailed" and thanked Trump for "responding when it mattered most."
As Trump prepared to return to the Oval Office in January, Stone and former Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz began to highlight his case. The two men worked with Hernández's family to cast him as a victim of Biden-era "lawfare" and a crucial conservative ally in the region.
Gaetz told The Wall Street Journal this week that Hernández's wife, Ana García de Hernández, approached him to review her husband's case. Gaetz, who said he wasn't compensated to publicize the case, said that he came to believe that Hernández "may not be a Boy Scout," but his conviction was unfair.
Both Stone and Gaetz gave Hernández's wife airtime on their radio and television shows to make her case to Trump. "Just like President Trump was a victim of lawfare, my husband is a victim of the DOJ's Biden lawfare agenda against him," she said on Gaetz's TV show in January.
The push to free Hernández offered a way to boost his party ahead of this year's presidential election and undercut Honduras's leftist president, Xiomara Castro, according to people involved in the effort.
Stone, who said he wasn't compensated for his advocacy, urged Trump to issue a "well-timed" pardon that would deal a "final death blow" to Castro's government. He also argued that it was a matter of national security for the Western Hemisphere, one of the Trump administration's emerging priorities, and would be "a massive strategic victory for U.S. interests in the region."
Talking points prepared by Hernández's allies reviewed by the Journal describe him as "the victim of the deep state" and a "strong-on-crime conservative leader." It framed Castro's government as a "communist" regime colluding with Venezuelan drug traffickers.
In the lead-up to Honduras's Nov. 30 election, senior Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers launched a broader campaign to criticize Castro's party, warning that the party was aligned with Maduro and undermining Trump's antidrug agenda.
At a hearing on Capitol Hill late last month, Trump's former ambassador to the Organization of American States, Carlos Trujillo, who lobbies for conservative Honduran interests, testified about Castro's "affinity for Nicolás Maduro and Chavismo." Rep. Maria Salazar (R., Fla.) accused Castro of pushing a "toxic ideology" and "filling the country with Cuban spies." On Nov. 25, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau raised concerns about the legitimacy of the coming Honduran elections. On Friday, Trump threatened to cut off aid to the country should voters fail to elect the candidate of Hernández's conservative National Party.
As of Wednesday, the race remained too close to call
After receiving what he called an "extraordinarily compelling letter" written from Hernández to Trump, Stone said he forwarded it to Trump. "Just as you, President Trump, I have suffered political persecution," Hernández wrote in a flattering letter dated Oct. 28 that quoted from Trump's inauguration speech.
Hours after Stone forwarded the letter to the president, Trump announced the pardon, saying he had come to the decision after hearing from "many people that I greatly respect" that Hernández had been "treated very harshly and unfairly." A White House official said the president hadn't read the letter when he made the announcement.
Trump's announcement was met with anger by Honduran officials and confusion from some lawmakers in his own party, who say it complicates the president's antidrug campaign. "It's horrible optics," Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) told reporters. "We're sending a mixed message."
Hernández, who fostered a friendly environment for foreign investors, built ties with prominent U.S. business leaders while he was in office. He forged a partnership with Kelcy Warren, a Texas energy billionaire and major Trump donor who owns a utility company in the country, working on a string of energy and infrastructure projects together. In a 2016 ceremony, Hernández presented him with a framed certificate of thanks for his investment in the community.
After Castro took office, projects with links to Trump allies and donors, as well as Silicon Valley investors, were canceled or audited. Those included Warren's utility on the tourist island of Roatán, which came under scrutiny by Castro's government, and Próspera, a libertarian "startup city" backed by Silicon Valley investors including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.
Hernández had made special zones known as ZEDEs -- where investors could set their own tax, labor and regulatory rules under long-term legal guarantees -- a hallmark of his presidency. Foreign backers embraced the idea, selling Próspera as a "Hong Kong of the Caribbean." After Castro came into office and rolled back the ZEDE framework, its developers hired Washington lobbyists to pursue an $11 billion arbitration claim against Honduras -- amounting to roughly two-thirds of the country's annual budget.
A Thiel spokesman said Thiel wasn't involved in the pardon. Representatives for Andreessen and Warren's companies didn't respond to requests for comment.
In a blog post on the week of Trump's inauguration in January, Stone argued that the new president could "crush socialism and save a freedom city in Honduras" by pardoning Hernández, branding Próspera as a utopian project with "major implications for U.S. policy and the future of freedom throughout the world."
Democrats alleged that the Trump administration and its allies had pardoned Hernández as part of an effort to influence the outcome of the election in favor of the conservative party linked to the business interests of Trump allies. "I've never seen such brazen election interference by an American president," said Rep. Joaquin Castro (D., Texas).
Hernández' wife said in an interview with the Journal that Trump-aligned investors had no involvement in obtaining his pardon. "It's part of a disinformation campaign we have had to deal with for the last few years," she said. "My husband's case was one of lawfare, it was a completely manipulated trial, it was, as they say, a witch hunt."
Write to Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@wsj.com, Alex Leary at alex.leary@wsj.com, José de Córdoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com and Josh Dawsey at Joshua.Dawsey@WSJ.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 03, 2025 21:14 ET (02:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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