Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, has been released from a US prison, according to online records of federal inmates, after he received a pardon from US President Donald Trump for drug charges.

The records show Hernández was released from the high security facility of USP Hazelton in West Virginia on Monday.

Hernández was found guilty in March 2024 of conspiring to import cocaine to the US, and of possessing machine guns. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison.

The US president said Hernández had been “treated very harshly and unfairly” in a social media post announcing the move on Friday.

Writing on her social media on Tuesday, Hernández’s wife, Ana García de Hernández, thanked Trump for the pardon, and said her husband was now a free man.

Hernández, a member of Honduras’s National Party who served as the country’s president from 2014 to 2022, was extradited to the US in April 2022 to stand trial for running a violent drug trafficking conspiracy and helping to smuggle hundreds of tonnes of cocaine to the US.

During his trial, prosecutors in New York said Hernández ran the Central American country like a “narco-state” and accepted millions of dollars in bribes from drug traffickers to shield them from the law.

He was also ordered to pay a fine of $8m (£6m) as part of his sentence.

Trump explained his reasoning for the pardon while talking to reporters on Air Force One on Sunday.

He claimed the investigation into Hernández was a “Biden administration set up”, referring to his predecessor in the White House.

“They basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” Trump said.

Hernández’s release comes as Honduras is locked in a “technical tie” for the election of a new president.

As of Monday afternoon, there were just 515 votes separating right-wing candidate Nasry Asfura from his nearest challenger, Salvador Nasralla, a former TV host standing for the country’s centrist party.

Trump criticised Nasralla on Friday, writing that he was “a borderline Communist”.

He characterised Asfura as “standing up for democracy” and praised him for campaigning against Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, with whom Trump has engaged in a war of words in recent months.

For his part, Nasralla has pledged to cut ties with Venezuela if he wins.

The Trump administration has accused the left-wing Maduro – whose re-election last year was dismissed as illegitimate by many countries – of being the leader of a drugs cartel.

It has said its efforts to counter drug trafficking are a justification for a military build-up in the Caribbean. The administration has also conducted strikes on vessels it says have been used for smuggling – though some analysts have described these moves as a means of pressurising Latin American leaders.

Honduras has been governed since 2022 by President Xiomara Castro, who has forged close ties with Cuba and Venezuela. (BBC)

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