The former president of Honduras thanked President Trump on Wednesday in his first message since being pardoned and released just one year into his 45-year prison term for enabling drug traffickers to flood the U.S. with 400 tons of cocaine.
“THANK GOD! All glory be to Him. I’m a free man,” Juan Orlando Hernández wrote on social media Wednesday evening. “I said it as I left my home, I said it as I was wrongfully convicted, and I will say it again now that I have my liberty. I am innocent.”
The two-term Honduran president went on to express “profound gratitude” to Trump “for having the courage to defend justice at a moment when a weaponized system refused to acknowledge the truth. You reviewed the facts, recognized the injustice and acted with conviction. You changed my life, sir, and I will never forget it.”
Jorge Cabrera/Getty Images
Former President of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernandez is escorted by police to be extradited to the US on April 21, 2022 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. (Photo by Jorge Cabrera/Getty Images)
Hernández served as president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022 and was indicted upon leaving office. He exited U.S. Penitentiary Hazelton in West Virginia on Monday a free man, despite his conviction last year for protecting traffickers in return for bribes. Among the vast array of evidence presented at Hernández’s trial was his alleged brag that he wanted to “shove drugs up the nose of gringos.”
On Wednesday, Hernández claimed his trial was “rigged” by the “deep state” of the Biden administration.
“There was no real evidence, only the accusations of criminals who sought revenge. Yet the truth of my innocence prevailed,” he said, thanking Trump for setting the “injustice” right.
Trump announced his decision to pardon Hernández on social media last week, contending the former president had been “treated very harshly and unfairly.” Some speculated that a fawning letter Hernández wrote to Trump on Oct. 28, the former leader’s own birthday, influenced Trump’s decision, as did intense lobbying by Trump’s longtime adviser Roger Stone.
The retracted punishment contrasted markedly with Trump’s current Caribbean bombardment of boats sailing from Venezuela on the mere suspicion of transporting drugs to the U.S. The Pentagon said Monday it had killed 82 “narco-terrorists” in 21 strikes within the past three months, as administration officials defended allegedly shooting survivors of a Sept. 2 attack while they clung defenseless to boat wreckage in the open water.
Venezuela is not even the source of most drugs coming from the south, according to The New York Times. Though some cocaine passes through, none of the fentanyl causing an overdose scourge in the U.S. does. That reportedly gets transported via the Pacific Ocean.
With News Wire Services
