Trump is trying to rewrite history in Honduras
In 2018, while living and working in Honduras, I chartered a flight to visit the ruins of Copan.
With two young kids who travelled horribly and the prospect of a 10-hour ride by car, the only viable option to visit the historic archeological site was going by plane.
As luck would have it, Copan was serviced by one of about 10 small regional airports – airstrips really – that had been built under the auspices of a plan championed by then-Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernandez (known as “JOH”, pronounced “ho”), ostensibly to encourage local tourism.
After approaching a domestic airline, I canvassed a handful of expats to fill the 22-person plane and booked the private jet.
It dawned on me to ask our pilot how often the Copan airport was used. He told me our flight was only the second (and likely last) registered plane to land there that year.
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What many Hondurans sensed intuitively was that this and other similar strips had been built for their president to smuggle cocaine through to the United States. It was all too obvious.
Hondurans in fact commonly referred to JOH as their narco presidente.
His brother was a narco as well. Arrested in Miami in 2018, Tony Hernandez would eventually be found guilty of smuggling 185 tonnes of cocaine into the United States and was duly sentenced to life in prison. Incidentally, he was also found to have accepted $1-million for his brother’s presidential campaign from none other than the Sinaloa Cartel, which was listed as a terrorist organization by the Trump administration earlier this year.
After his brother’s arrest, JOH famously declared that no one, including members of his immediate family, was above the law (Nadie está por encima de la ley!).
History would seem to vindicate his words.
In 2022, it was JOH’s turn to face charges in the United States, where he was extradited after his constitutionally dubious second term as president. He was convicted last year of facilitating the trafficking of an astonishing 400 tonnes of cocaine into the U.S. and received a 45-year sentence.
News reports from Honduras suggest that narcotics smugglers have used the very airstrip where we landed in Copan for their operations.
Hondurans were right all along.
And, seemingly out of nowhere, this week, JOH was pardoned by the President of the United States.
The obvious question is why Donald Trump would undermine his own tough-on-drugs policy – a policy that has featured extrajudicial strikes of alleged Venezuelan drug-smugglers and an aggressive approach with historic trade partners to stem the flow of fentanyl into the United States.
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I’ve been trying to square the circle and here is my best shot at it.
Mr. Trump’s musings of a pardon occurred last week in the context of Honduras’ presidential elections. Mr. Trump endorsed JOH’s National Party of Honduras (PNH) successor Nasry (Tito) Asfura, while characterizing opposition candidates as communists, supporters of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and, indeed, narcoterrorists.
The irony could not be any richer, given JOH’s and his brother’s convictions, not to mention drug-smuggling ties to JOH’s predecessor, former president Porfirio Lobo, whose son Fabio was convicted, you guessed it, of drug smuggling as well. (Mr. Lobo’s wife, for the record, was convicted in Honduras of misappropriation of public funds and fraud.)
For Mr. Asfura to be such a great guy, and not of the party of the narcos, Mr. Trump needed to rewrite history – thus the necessity to absolve JOH of his criminal past.
Mr. Trump’s pardon of JOH is also part and parcel of a broader strategy to reframe the narrative around former heads of state convicted of crimes, of the likes of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, and of course, Mr. Trump himself.
From this perspective, pardoning JOH is a twisted way of delegitimizing the entire justice system and reframing Mr. Trump’s own wrongdoing as mere lawfare and political score-settling.
Regardless of the motivation, what is most alarming in this tragedy is that JOH was wrong about one thing:
Nadie está por encima de la ley!
I have to say, though, that the Copan Ruins are absolutely worth the visit.
Stéphane Allard (Stéphane Allard is a former Canadian diplomat stationed in Honduras from 2016-19.)
Gifted article theglobeandmail.com |
