The anti-drug trafficking rhetoric announced by US President Donald Trump collapsed like a house of cards when he announced this Friday the pardon for Juan Orlando HernándezThe former president of Honduras was sentenced to 45 years in prison in a US jail for trafficking drugs into the North American country.
Trump said he will grant “a full and complete pardon to former President Juan Orlando Hernández, who has been treated, according to many people whom I greatly respect, very severely and very unfairly.”
This measure could have a justification that goes beyond automatic solidarity with far-right colleagues, since Hernández, convicted of drug trafficking, was also found responsible for buying favors from several Republican senators to lobby him in Washington, including current Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Once accused of drug trafficking, the former Honduran president sought the help of several of Rubio’s friends through a Washington lobbying firm called BGR Group to bolster his image as a loyal ally and implacable enemy of organized crime.
The firm’s current team includes prominent Republicans, such as former Representative Sean Duffy, a Republican from Wisconsin, and Trump Administration State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, who serves on the firm’s advisory board.
Rubio is one of the main beneficiaries of BGR’s generosity, and has benefited from the company’s generosity throughout his career, including fundraising events organized by BGR during his 2010 and 2016 Senate campaigns, as well as during his brief presidential run.
Marco Rubio himself praised Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH) in 2018, while posing for a photograph with him and expressing his gratitude for the fight against drug traffickers, something that was later proven to be false.
How Juan Orlando Hernández fell despite Republican support
Although Rubio staunchly defended the Honduran ex-president’s fight against drug trafficking, there was one drug trafficker that JOH never pursued: his own brother, Juan Antonio Hernández, who was sentenced to life imprisonment on March 30 in New York for trafficking tons of cocaine to the United States for 14 years.
Testimony during the 2019 trial suggested that the president did more than simply ignore his brother’s criminal activity. In January, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a motion in the trial against one of Juan Antonio Hernández’s alleged accomplices, detailing information that further implicated him.
The president allegedly stated that he wanted to “shove drugs up the Americans’ noses” and that he intended to deceive U.S. authorities about Honduras’s anti-narcotics initiatives while seeking to “eliminate extradition,” according to the documents. The prosecution stated that the Honduran president even offered to connect traffickers with the Honduran military and the country’s attorney general to facilitate the transport of cocaine north.
Despite mounting evidence against the Honduran president, Republican lawmakers have yet to withdraw their support for Hernández.
Money in Rubio’s pocket
Rubio’s favors to the former Honduran president earned him approximately $660.000 last year through contributions received as a result of BGR’s actions. According to mandatory disclosures, BGR Group contacted 11 congressional staffers. Three of them worked or had worked for Rubio.
BGR pressured the Development Finance Corporation, a US government agency that connects developing countries with private investors. And throughout the year, the company tried to improve the president’s image by circulating press releases to journalists at dozens of different media outlets.
BGR sent out three different press releases in October about Hernández: two about a trip he made to the United States and one about joint US-Honduras counternarcotics operations.
The results of these favors could have a direct relationship with President Trump’s decision to pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, in another of the erratic policies recommended by Marco Rubio, who would be seeking personal political gain at the expense of the current president’s image.
