Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, has been released from a US prison, according to online records of federal inmates, after receiving 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 into 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.
Hernández, a member of the 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.
His 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.
