COMMENTARY President Trump's pardon of a former Honduran president and convicted drug trafficker follows the South Florida exile doctrine that Latin American conservatives are never guilty.
To the many South Floridians who are ideologically programmed to believe that the clemency President Donald Trump gifted former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández this week was proper, here’s a reminder:
Hernández is the mirror image of your archenemy, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
Maybe not physically — unless you shave off Maduro’s Captain Kangaroo moustache. But morally, Maduro and Hernández were separated at birth.
Both embody every disgusting, tinpot caricature of Latin American leadership.
Both are surrealistically — and murderously — corrupt.
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Yes, Maduro’s regime has perpetrated larceny so epic it led to the worst humanitarian crisis in modern South American history — and forced almost a quarter of Venezuela’s population to emigrate.
And guess what? Hernández’s National Party once siphoned $350 million in public healthcare funds into his presidential campaign — just one example of the barefaced embezzlement that compelled hundreds of thousands of Hondurans to head for the U.S. in the 2010s.
Maduro last year stole a presidential election he’d lost in a landslide to the opposition — then jailed thousands, and had his security forces kill dozens, who protested his gobsmacking fraud.
Eight years ago, Hernández engineered his own re-election theft — he was well behind when the vote-counting system mysteriously crashed, and was suddenly well ahead when it booted up again — then directed his military to kill dozens of outraged demonstrators.
Did we mention drugs?
Maduro is under indictment in the U.S. for narco-trafficking, as is his defense minister, Gen. Vladimir Padrino.
Last year a federal jury in New York convicted Hernández — whose million-dollar bribery bromance with Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was so appalling even Honduras’ graft-friendly Supreme Court extradited him to the U.S. when his presidency ended in 2022. Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
When drug lords were greasing Hernández’s palm, few if any South Florida politicos or exile leaders stood up to even slap Hernández’s wrist.
But here’s the difference — a difference that shouldn’t make a difference, but does, especially here in South Florida, where the difference is most fiercely enforced.
Maduro is left-wing, a socialist. Hernández is right-wing.
So, according to Trump and the anti-socialista dogma he panders to in South Florida’s exile voter communities, Hernández is incapable of being guilty of anything a Marxist has done.
Shocking cognitive dissonance
That’s why Trump this week pardoned Hernández — who he ludicrously claims was “treated harshly.”
And it’s why Trump dismisses the shocking cognitive dissonance of having the U.S. military kill (unlawfully, say war experts) suspected Venezuelan drug traffickers on the Caribbean — and perhaps go after Maduro — while freeing a Honduran drug trafficker who helped Mexico’s top cartel flood America with cocaine.
Trump’s projecting the “harsh” judicial treatment he insists he’s received as a right-winger onto Hernández’s case and those of other fellow reactionaries.
They include former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, whose sedition conviction this year Trump tried unsuccessfully to block by levying crippling tariffs on Brazilian goods.
Trump believes — as he did this year when he pardoned 1,500 MAGA militants convicted for their seditious Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol after his own 2020 re-election defeat — that conservatives’ felonies can and should be erased.
Especially when those conservatives have aided Trump efforts like his anti-immigration crusade — as Hernández did when he turned Honduras into a migrant holding pen during Trump’s first administration.
And that’s a reminder that when it comes to Latin America, Trump’s hypocrisy takes its cue from South Florida’s brazen double standard.
Be it Hernández, Bolsonaro, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele or former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, corrupt and authoritarian right-wing leaders always get a pass because they wear a halo of opposition to the corrupt and authoritarian left-wing regimes so many exiles here fled.
When El Chapo was greasing Hernández’s palm, few if any South Florida politicos and community leaders stood up to even slap Hernández’s wrist.
That would have betrayed the anti-comunista code.
Yet we may finally be seeing cracks in that blind devotion.
This week Republican Miami Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar — usually a high priestess of the right-can-do-no-wrong doctrine — actually rebuked Trump and told CNN, “I would have never” pardoned Hernández. She even agreed the Honduran is a “thug.”
Meanwhile, Honduran voters this week may have ignored Trump’s threat of U.S. aid cuts and rejected the presidential candidate he endorsed, Nasry Asfura — the one from Hernández’s party.
As of Thursday morning, the ongoing vote count showed Asfura neck-and-neck with centrist Salvador Nasralla.
Poor Asfura if he loses. He'll be another right-winger treated harshly in this hemisphere.
