Tag: honduras

Is President Trump really so concerned about the flow of drugs ‘poisoning Americans,’ when he just pardoned a notorious drug trafficker and warp speeds harmful pharmaceuticals?

Anyone who still believes the Trump administration’s newly scheduled wars in Latin America are in any way related to stopping drugs from killing Americans is not paying attention to the full spectrum of policies coming out of this administration.

Instead of listening to Trump’s many bombastic public statements in a vacuum, let’s examine the record of his actions.

This administration has an obsession with drugs. Even known harmful drugs have been embraced and promoted by President Trump in his first and second terms.

There is now plenty of evidence that Trump’s Operation Warp Speed project, which he placed under the direction of former pharma executive General Gustav Perna and the U.S. military, led to mega-deaths in the United States and the world. Speed came at the cost of any valid clinical trials, with needles entering arms under Emergency Use Authorization with only two months of safety data on the FDA’s books. When it comes to experimental new medicines or treatments, you don’t gamble with people’s lives. There are reasons why it takes 10-15 years to get a vaccine through the approval process, but Trump was willing to make that gamble. And it paid off in the form of record profits for Pfizer and Moderna.

The latest evidence of that was just last week when Trump’s own FDA finally fessed up and told us the Covid shots led to the deaths of at least 10 children during trials (this is based on VAERS data which has been proven to be underreported by a factor of at least 10). This was kept hidden from the American public, along with all the other reams of evidence showing that the shots killed people of all ages and continues to do so.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of Americans report suffering vaccine injuries, as even The New York Times is reporting.

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Trump’s Pardon of Convicted Drug Trafficker and Former President of Honduras Undermines His Own Reasoning for War on Venezuela

Trump’s recent pardon of convicted drug trafficker and former President of Honduras undermines his own reasoning for the escalation with Venezuela.

President Trump has stated previously that the justification for the escalation in tensions with President Maduro and Venezuela is a hard stance against drug trafficking into the U.S. from Latin American countries. If this was the case, then the recent pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández – a man convicted of working with drug traffickers to smuggle drugs into the U.S. – directly undercuts his own reasoning.

Convicted in February of 2024, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in a United States federal prison. During the 57-year-old’s two terms in office, he allowed over 400 tons of cocaine to flow through Honduras and into the United States in exchange for millions of dollars from cartel drug lords like Joaquín Guzmán, AKA “El Chapo.”

According to the Associated Press, Hernández was even caught on video boasting to drug traffickers during his trial that “together they were going to shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.” Trump’s justification for pardoning Hernández is that people he respects told him Hernández was “treated very harshly and unfairly.”

The problem is that pardoning a man who helped turn his country into a narco-state – while taking bribes from convicted cartel bosses – undermines the exact reasoning Trump and the United States have used to escalate pressure on Venezuela. Tensions first began in 2017 when the U.S. sanctioned Venezuelan Vice President Tareck El Aissami for drug-trafficking activity. Fast forward to 2019, and the Trump administration formally indicted President Nicolás Maduro and senior Venezuelan officials on narco-terrorism charges, arguing that they were responsible for trafficking cocaine into the United States.

These actions were presented as necessary steps to confront foreign leaders who enable cartels, threaten regional stability, and push drugs into American communities. The message from the Trump administration was simple: the U.S. will not tolerate narco-traffickers.

This is exactly why the pardon of Hernández undercuts Trump’s own argument. You cannot escalate against Venezuela because of its alleged operation of a criminal enterprise, then turn around and pardon a man who was proven – through evidence, witnesses, and beyond a reasonable doubt in a U.S. court of law – to have done the very same thing. In Hernández’s case, he did it while presenting himself as a U.S. ally to the public, all while taking cartel money behind the scenes.

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Trump pardons convicted narco-trafficking pol amid plot to rig Honduran election

Donald Trump is threatening to destroy the Honduran economy unless the country elects the oligarch-run National Party. Now, he’s even pardoned the last party member to rule the country, who was convicted in 2024 of smuggling hundreds of tons of drugs into the US.

On November 28, US President Donald Trump Trump declared he will be pardoning former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was sentenced to 45 years in a New York prison in 2024 for his role in helping smuggle 400 tons of cocaine into the US in a drug-running scheme linked to the Sinaloa cartel. Hernandez, Trump wrote, had been “treated very harshly and unfairly.”

While Hernandez was President of Honduras, he initiated contracts worth over half a million dollars with Republican lobbying firm BGR Group, after his brother, Tony, was sentenced to life in prison for cocaine smuggling. In the time since, BGR has donated tens of thousands of dollars to the campaign of Marco Rubio, the Cuban American former senator who now serves as Trump’s Secretary of State.

As The Grayzone reported, the US Department of Justice indictment of Hernandez contained explicit and often shocking details of his role in transforming his country into the Western hemisphere’s premier narco-state. The US-backed president “wielded incredible influence and partnered with some of the most notorious narcotics traffickers in Honduras, allowing them to flourish under their control,” a DOJ prosecutor stated.

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Honduras President Threatens to Shut Down U.S. Military Base Over Trump’s Plan to Deport Illegal Honduran Immigrants

Honduran President Xiomara Castro has threatened to terminate military cooperation with the United States if President-elect Donald Trump proceeds with his plan for mass deportations of illegal immigrants, including those from Honduras.

This ultimatum underscores the glaring hypocrisy of a leader who has failed to address the root causes driving her own citizens to flee her country in the first place.

A primary objective of Trump’s mass deportation plan is to remove individuals with criminal records who are residing in the country illegally.

By focusing on these individuals, Trump’s administration aims to reduce crime rates and enhance public safety.

Tom Homan, designated as Trump’s “border czar,” has emphasized that the deportation efforts will prioritize those posing threats to public safety and national security.

However, Castro is far from pleased with this development.

“Faced with a hostile attitude of mass expulsion of our brothers, we would have to consider a change in our policies of cooperation with the United States, especially in the military arena, where, without paying a cent for decades, they maintain military bases in our territory, which in this case would lose all reason to exist in Honduras,” Xiomara Castro said in a statement on New Year’s Day.

“We hope that the new U.S. administration of democratically elected President Donald Trump will be open to dialogue, constructive and friendly, and will not take unnecessary reprisals against our migrants, who normally make a great contribution to the U.S. economy,” she added.

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