Part 2: The Case

Part 1 made the geopolitical argument. President Juan Orlando Hernández was an ally of the United States.

The Biden DOJ indicted him the day a Chinese-aligned Honduran government took his place. Trump’s pardon was part of a multi-pronged intervention in the November 2025 Honduran election — the endorsement, the threat to cut aid, and the pardon itself.

Nasry Asfura won by 0.74 percent. By the admission of supporters and critics alike, that intervention changed the result.

Asfura took office and is pulling Honduras back toward the United States and away from China. Whatever else it was, Trump’s pardon was a strategic act in the United States’ interests.

Two Questions, Separately Asked

Geopolitics is one question. The US Attorney for the Southern District of NY’s conviction of Hernandez is another.

The pardoning of a man can be useful to American foreign policy and that man can still be guilty of what a jury said he was guilty of. A pardon can serve American interests and still let a criminal walk. The two questions are separate and must be answered separately.

This installment looks at the case the Biden DOJ actually prosecuted in their conviction of Hernandez, the former president of Honduras.

A Conspiracy Measured in Tons

The Biden DOJ said Hernández was a bad man whose alliance with America did not change what he was. They placed him at the center of a cocaine conspiracy.

Federal prosecutors said the conspiracy Hernandez was a part of moved more than 400 tons of cocaine through Honduras to the United States between 2004 and 2022. Spread out over 18 years, that comes to about 22 tons a year.

According to US government estimates, the conspiracy Hernandez was accused of being part of accounted for roughly 10 percent of all cocaine Americans consume annually.

The prosecutors said that Hernandez was a part of a larger system that moved drugs and money. A network, they said, that passed through Honduras.

El Chapo

The prosecutors charged him with using machine guns in furtherance of the conspiracy and with conspiring to use them. Those charges carried a 30-year mandatory minimum.

The machine guns were never used in the United States. They were never in the United States. The prosecution’s theory was that they were used by Hondurans in Honduras. The connection to the United States was that the cocaine they allegedly protected was bound for American consumers.

Two of the three charges prosecutors convicted Hernandez of were based on machine guns and a single alleged event in 2013.

At that time, Hernández was a candidate. He was not yet president.

The prosecution alleged that Hernández’s brother and an associate, armed with machine guns, collected a million-dollar bribe from Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán — payment in advance for favors not yet rendered.

A Question of Distance

The complication was geography.

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, El Chapo — the man allegedly handing over the million in cash — was at that same moment 1200 miles away, in the mountains of Sinaloa.

The DEA agent who led the operation that captured him, Andrew Hogan, has documented in a published book and in court records that Chapo was under continuous BlackBerry surveillance during that period. The agency was reading his texts in real time.

They could see a single text message.

They would have seen him cross two international borders with a million dollars in cash.

Hogan was not called as a witness at Hernández’s trial. The man with the most detailed knowledge of Chapo’s whereabouts at the time— who would know whether the meeting could have happened at all — never took the stand.

What the Chapo Trial Did Not Say

There was also the matter of the El Chapo trial itself.

Hernandez was never mentioned in the trial of El Chapo.

Fifty-six prosecution witnesses testified, including 14 of Chapo’s close associates and cooperators from the Colombian and Mexican cartels. No one mentioned Hernandez during the three months of the El Chapo trial.

It was in the Eastern District of New York. 2018 to 2019. The most thoroughly documented prosecution of a drug trafficker in modern American history. Cooperator after cooperator, bribe after bribe, name after name. Mexican governors. Police chiefs. The former public security minister of Mexico. A public ledger of Sinaloa Cartel corruption.

Juan Orlando Hernández’s name does not appear in it.

The Department of Justice tried Chapo for everything. They did not mention – not even once – Hernandez, the man they would, three years later, prosecute as one of his most important political allies.

The Witness From Copán

How did the government prove El Chapo bribed Hernandez? The government called Alexander Ardón.

Ardón had been the mayor of El Paraíso, Copán, a Honduran border town on the Guatemala line. While serving as mayor, he ran a cocaine trafficking organization. Under oath, Ardón said he was responsible for 56 murders.

Murder can pay in the SDNY if you testify the right way. Alexander Ardón killed 56 people and testified against Hernandez. He got six years.

Because of his cooperation in testifying against Hernandez, Ardón’s sentence for 56 murders was less than six years.

Ardón named three eyewitnesses to the El Chapo meeting — the Salguero cousins and Mauricio Hernández Pineda. All three were in U.S. custody. All three had pleaded guilty.

The prosecution called none of them.

Two Tellings of the Same Bribe

Ardón had also told a different jury a different story.

In 2019, testifying against Juan Orlando’s brother Tony, Ardón told the Manhattan jury that El Chapo delivered his bribe at El Espíritu, Copán, at a property owned by the Valle Valle brothers.

In 2024, testifying against Juan Orlando Hernandez, Ardón changed the location. He told a different Manhattan jury — in the same courthouse, with the same prosecutors — that El Chapo delivered the $1 million bribe at Ardón’s mother’s house.

The same bribe, the same witness said occurred at two different locations, both under oath.

He had to change the location. The Valle Valle organization had been dismantled by the Hernández administration in 2014, immediately after the alleged “protection pact” was supposedly made at one of their properties. If Hernandez took a bribe from El Chapo at the Valle Valles property, a jury might wonder why he extradited them within months of taking office.

Ardon’s original story had a risk. Ardón’s memory was “refreshed.”

The new story was that El Chapo came to his mother’s house.

Alexander Ardón, with 56 murders, was the witness for two of the three charges – that Hernandez took a bribe from El Chapo, with guns involved.

A man who would switch the locale of the bribe from one address to another to fit the second trial had a motive to move it. He also had a motive to invent it. He was facing life in prison. The prosecutors who decided whether he would walk were the same prosecutors who needed him to place El Chapo in Honduras.

Ardón gave them what they needed.

The Question Beyond the Bribe

Even if the El Chapo meeting was a fiction, the larger question remained. Was Hernández actually a major player in moving cocaine into the United States?

On that question, the case was thin on physical evidence.

The prosecutors had no wiretaps, no recorded phone call of Hernández talking about cocaine — even though the DEA was recording the phones of El Chapo, the Cachiros, and the traffickers who claimed to have bribed him.

There was nothing on paper: no ledger, no receipt, no written record whatsoever connecting him to the conspiracy – even though the same investigation produced ledgers, receipts, and written records in other cases.

No surveillance photo. No drug shipment tied to him by physical evidence.

It had one thing for evidence: cooperators. Three of them.

The Cooperating Witnesses

Three men were the case. Ardón, the former mayor who admitted to 56 murders.

Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga — “El Cachiro”racked up 78 murders.

Another equally motivated witness: Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga — “El Cachiro” — who admitted to 78 murders.

And Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez, a convicted trafficker serving life. He was a distant third in murders with only five under his belt.

While Fuentes Ramírez only chalked up five murders compared to the other three witnesses that constituted the evidence against Hernandez, he distinguished himself by his hands-on killing of a police officer whom he kidnapped, tied up, tortured, and then stabbed him to death.

Fuentes Ramírez was the one who told the jury the most memorable line. He told the jury that Hernández said: “we’re going to shove the drugs right up the gringos’ noses.”

Three men with 139 murders between them.

All three were cooperators. All three had signed cooperation agreements with the same prosecutors who were trying Hernández — written contracts in which the cooperators agreed to testify, and the prosecutors agreed, in exchange, to ask the judge for a reduced sentence if they were satisfied with the testimony.

The prosecutors were evidently satisfied.

Ardón, who confessed to 56 murders, served less than six years before being sent back to Honduras. Fuentes Ramírez is serving a life sentence with the door open to reduction.

Maradiaga admitted to orchestrating 78 murders. He surrendered to the DEA in January 2015. He has been a cooperating witness in five major SDNY prosecutions over the past eleven years. His final sentence has not been imposed. His current custody status is not in the public record.

Three witnesses. A structure of incentives in which what happened to them next depended on what they said about Juan Orlando Hernández.

That was the case.

The Sentence and the Reaction

Judge Kevin Castel conducted what some might call a “show” trial.

Judge Kevin Castel handed down the sentence in June 2024: 45 years in federal prison plus an $8 million fine.

Trump pardoned Hernandez at the end of 2025.

The reaction was immediate. Democrats and Republicans condemned the pardon. Editorial pages said Trump had freed a drug lord. They asked how any American president could pardon him.

Nobody asked these questions.

Whether the trial was political. Whether the witnesses lied. Whether the prosecution hid evidence. Whether Judge Castel allowed Hernández an adequate defense.

Whatever the prosecutors thought they were doing, the result was this. The man who kept Honduras with the United States went to prison. The country went to China. The Biden administration produced both outcomes and prevented neither.

This series will examine the trial. The cooperating witnesses who admitted to ordering the deaths of 139 people. The State Department cables that praised Hernández as the most effective drug-fighting partner in Honduran history, until the moment he stopped being politically useful.

Whether the story the jury decided was the whole story. You can decide. But you should know what the jury heard — and what it didn’t.

A lot of effort went into the latter.

Part 3 coming next