Former president of Honduras from the right-wing National Party. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison in the United States in 2024 for conspiring with drug gangs—turning Honduras into a narco-state and fuelling the cocaine trade. The American investigation which put him behind bars took place during Donald Trump's first term.
On December 2nd 2025 Trump pardoned him, apparently rooted in a sense of shared victimhood: Mr Hernández has said he and Trump were both targets of persecution by "radical leftist forces". The pardon was the product of intense lobbying. An official at the US Drug Enforcement Administration called it "lunacy"; Enrique Roig, a former State Department official, said Mr Hernández is "right up there with the narco-bosses you'd see on Netflix's Narcos". The move undermined the coherence of Trump's war on drugs: he threatens Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, whose alleged ties with drug gangs are unproven, while freeing a man convicted in open court.
Both Hernández and Maduro face remarkably similar American indictments—talk of go-fast vessels, clandestine airstrips, bribery, machineguns and cocaine by the tonne. Much of the investigation of Hernández took place during Trump's first term with the help of Emil Bove III, who also helped secure the indictment of Maduro. Mr Bove subsequently became a defence lawyer for Trump. During a related trial he called a machinegun inscribed with Hernández's name "an embodiment of what state-sponsored drug-trafficking looks like."
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.