President Trump says he will pardon Honduras’s former president, who was sentenced by a U.S. court last year to 45 years in prison for directing a massive cocaine trafficking operation. Prosecutors showed how Juan Orlando Hernández, who was president from 2014 to 2022, ran Honduras as a “narco-state,” accepting millions of dollars in bribes from cocaine traffickers in exchange for protection, including deploying the Honduran National Police to safeguard cocaine loads as they were transported through Honduras. News of Trump’s looming pardon came just days ahead of Sunday’s presidential elections in Honduras, where a right-wing candidate from Juan Orlando Hernández’s party had taken a narrow lead with just under half the votes counted. Nasry Asfura is the former mayor of Tegucigalpa. He received a boost when Trump endorsed him and threatened to cut off aid to Honduras if voters elected one of his rivals, whom Trump assailed as “communists.”