On Sunday, Hondurans went to the polls in an election marked by low turnout, widespread apathy, and a last-minute intervention from Donald Trump. Just days before the vote, the US president urged the country’s citizens to vote neither for the left-wing ruling-party candidate Rixi Moncada nor the centrist Salvador Nasralla, and instead endorsed Nasry Asfura of the right-wing National Party. Having upended a close race, the president also pledged to pardon former Honduran president and Asfura ally Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), who is currently serving 45 years in a US prison for trafficking over 500 tons of cocaine while in office.
With Asfura and Nasralla currently neck-and-neck in the country’s slow-moving vote count, it’s unclear whether the White House’s actions helped or hurt Trump’s favored candidate. What is certain is that Trump’s pardon of an ideologically aligned drug kingpin both undermines the administration’s case in favor of bombing alleged traffickers in international waters and undercuts its claim that regime change in Venezuela is justified by President Nicolás Maduro’s supposed involvement in drug trafficking.