Both men have been accused of helping smuggle drugs from Venezuela into America, and their American indictments bolster mostly the same charges with the same talk of go-fast vessels, clandestine airstrips, bribery, machineguns, and cocaine by the tonne. Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, is alleged to have “participated in a corrupt and violent narco-terrorism conspiracy”, and Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, to have “participated in a corrupt and violent drug-trafficking conspiracy”.
But there are big differences. Mr Maduro has not stood trial, whereas Mr Hernández, having been extradited by Honduras, was convicted last year by an American jury and sentenced by an American judge, to 45 years in prison. Further, on December 2nd, Mr Hernández walked out of a high-security prison in West Virginia as a free man thanks to a pardon from Donald Trump, even as the president massed American forces in the Caribbean to drive Mr Maduro from power.
It gets stranger. Part of Mr Trump’s stated concern for Mr Hernández is that he is a former president, and so his successful prosecution means “you could do this to any president”—a sensitivity one might expect to be even more acute with regard to a sitting president, such as Mr Maduro. Mr Trump further said he believed the conviction of Mr Hernández was a “set-up” by the administration of his predecessor, Joe Biden. But much of the investigation of Mr Hernández took place during Mr Trump’s first term with the help of the same man who helped secure the indictment of Mr Maduro—Emil Bove III, subsequently a defence lawyer for Mr Trump. During a related trial, Mr Bove called a machinegun inscribed with Mr Hernández’s name “an embodiment of what state-sponsored drug-trafficking looks like”.
How can Mr Trump be so tough on drugs as to authorise the killing of suspected drug-runners at sea without producing any evidence, yet also so lenient as to absolve Mr Hernández, when America’s justice system amassed so much evidence against him? This is the latest episode in Mr Trump’s perplexing application of the Monroe Doctrine, the policy dating to the 19th century by which America laid claim to influence over the Western hemisphere. During the administration of Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry declared the Monroe Doctrine defunct, saying the days were over when America would intervene in the affairs of its neighbours rather than treat them as equals. But, despite his own declared disdain for interventionism, Mr Trump revived the doctrine during his first term, for reasons that make sense for his foreign policy. If a goal of the “America First” agenda is to husband resources by withdrawing from much of the world, then an “Americas First” strategy that maximises America’s influence in its home region, while securing its borders against undocumented migrants and illegal drugs, is logical.
What makes less sense is how Mr Trump is going about it, slashing aid to the region, taxing imports from it and erratically invoking the rule of law. Threatening to annex Canada or the Panama Canal and imposing tariffs on Brazil over its prosecution of a friend of his are measures better calculated, over the long term, to improve China’s relations with America’s neighbours than its own. Mr Trump’s tactics for interdicting drugs are shaping up as equally puzzling, if not self-sabotaging.
Mr Trump recently reversed one of his sillier regional penalties, tariffs on products, such as coffee and bananas, for which America cannot hope to meet its own demand. Though he has created real diplomatic leverage, he seems uninterested in using it to develop the sorts of regional supply chains that would serve America and affirm its primacy while also benefiting the Americas as a whole. “There’s been plenty of stick,” says Ricardo Zuñiga, a former principal deputy assistant secretary of state for the Western hemisphere. “What’s the carrot?” In the region, he adds, countries “have not seen a clarity and a defined economic plan from the United States. But they’re all looking and hoping for one.”
Like much of his approach to the region, Mr Trump’s pardon of Mr Hernández, which shocked even people supportive of the president’s aggressive approach to clemency, appears more impulsive than strategic. Mr Trump presented no evidence that American justice had failed, saying just that “many friends” or “many people that I greatly respect” or “many of the people of Honduras” felt a pardon was warranted. He announced his plan just before Honduras held presidential elections on November 30th, apparently thinking the pardon would boost his choice, Nasry Asfura, a conservative. But Mr Hernández is so unpopular that even Mr Asfura was quick to emphasise they have “no ties”.
Mr Trump also warned he would cut off assistance to Honduras if Mr Asfura did not win. With most of the vote counted as of December 3rd, he was trailing Salvador Nasralla of the centre-right Liberal Party, a stoutly pro-American candidate whom Mr Trump has nevertheless called a “borderline Communist”. Mr Trump threatened on social media as Mr Asfura fell behind in the count that there would be “hell to pay” if he lost, claiming Honduras was falsifying the result, without supplying any proof.
Still, Hondurans anxious that the American president has no principled attachment to justice or evidence can take heart from his fierce commitment to the rule of law in another case. Immigration agents recently tracked down Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a 19-year-old freshman studying business at Babson College, when she tried to fly home from Boston to Texas to surprise her family for Thanksgiving. They deported her to Honduras, which she had fled, with her family, at the age of seven. ■
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