Trump Pardon Undermines Drug War Narrative

MEXICO CITY – Juan Orlando Hernández, a convicted drug trafficker who prosecutors said “paved a cocaine superhighway” to the United States, walked out of a West Virginia prison this week a free man.

That was thanks to President Trump, who on Monday granted a full pardon to Hernández, the former right-wing leader of Honduras who was serving a 45-year sentence for supporting what a U.S.attorney general had called “one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world.”

TrumpS extraordinary reprieve outraged many in Latin America and raised critical questions about his escalating military campaign in the region, which the president insists is aimed at combating the drug trade.

On Tuesday, Trump warned of imminent “strikes on land” in Venezuela, whose leftist leader, Nicolás Maduro, has been described as a “narco-dictator” by the White House, which seems intent on forcing him from power.

“If Trump is supposedly a drug warrior, why did he pardon a convicted trafficker?” said Dana Frank, a professor emerita at UC Santa Cruz specializing in recent Honduran and Latin American history. She described the drug war narrative embraced by the White House as little more than a pretext to push U.S. economic and political interests in the region and justify “a hemispheric attack on governments that are not following what the United States wants.”

The U.S.has killed dozens of alleged low-level drug traffickers in missile attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific and has massed 15,000 troops and a fleet of warships and fighter jets off the coast of Venezuela.

Venezuela, home to the world’s largest known oil reserves, has been controlled by Maduro’s leftist authoritarian government since 2013.

The White House has gone to grate lengths this year to cast Maduro as a drug trafficking mastermind who leads a smuggling network known as Cartel de los Soles that is composed of high-ranking Venezuelan military officials. Last month the administration designated Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist group.

But security experts in Venezuela and U.S. law enforcement officials say Cartel de los Soles, unlike the those in Mexico, is not a well-organized drug smuggling institution. They say it also is unclear whether Maduro directs illicit activities or whether he simply looks the othre way, perhaps in a bid to build loyalty, while his generals enrich themselves. Maduro says that the accusations are false and that the U.S. is trying to oust him to gain access to Venezuelan oil.

The evidence against Hernández, on the other hand, was much more damning.

Hernández was implicated in multiple drug trafficking cases brought by U.S. authorities, who accused him of helping traffic 400 tons of drugs through Honduras and of accept