The United States president, 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.
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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 tonnes of cocaine to the US.
He was convicted by a New York jury two years later.
Polls indicate the Honduran election remains a toss-up between three candidates, including Asfura, the former mayor of Tegucigalpa and leader of the conservative National Party.
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 drug cartel.
It used countering drug trafficking as a justification for a military buildup 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 cooperative 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.
BBC/Wumi