The camera crews assembled at the Justice Department in March 2024 to capture what prosecutors described as a landmark conviction. Juan Orlando Hernández, who had served as Honduras’s president from 2014 to 2022, stood convicted of conspiring to import over four hundred tons of cocaine into the United States. Federal prosecutors had proven he accepted a $1million bribe from Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and used the Honduran National Police and military to protect cocaine shipments. Judge Kevin Castel sentenced him to forty-five years in prison and an $8 million fine.
The conviction seemed to validate decades of American rhetoric about fighting drug trafficking at the highest levels. Here was a sitting head of state, a close Washington ally who had received substantial United States assistance for counter narcotics, exposed as running what prosecutors called “state sponsored drug trafficking” on a massive scale.
Then came December 2025. President Donald Trump issued a full pardon, declaring Hernández the victim of “political persecution” and “harsh and unfair” treatment. The convicted drug trafficker who had flooded American streets with hundreds of tons of cocaine walked free, his sentence erased by the same government that had prosecuted him.
The pardon crystallized a pattern that has defined United States relations with Latin America for decades. Washington’s moral pronouncements about combating drug trafficking collapse when confronted with geopolitical convenience. The officials America partners with to wage the War on Drugs are often the very people facilitating the traffic. The prosecutions come only after these allies cease to be useful, and sometimes not even then.
Manuel Noriega’s trajectory from valued intelligence asset to convicted drug trafficker represents the template. As Panama’s de facto ruler from 1983 to 1989, Noriega worked with multiple United States intelligence agencies including the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, providing information on guerrilla activities, money laundering, and drug trafficking while simultaneously amassing a personal fortune through those same illegal operations.
Declassified documents reveal United States officials were fully aware of his dual role. A 1986 CIA report noted the agency had considered indicting Noriega for drug trafficking “but did not do so because of his ties to senior U.S. officials who valued him.” The Ronald Reagan administration prioritized Noriega’s assistance with the Iran Contra operation, including his offer to assassinate Nicaragua’s Sandinista leadership and his willingness to train Contra fighters, over concerns about his narcotics activities.
Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive explained the calculation bluntly. “Everybody who worked with him became convinced that he was more of a liability than an asset because he was corrupt and deeply involved in drug smuggling himself,” Kornbluh said. “[Reagan’s team] didn’t really care as much about drug smuggling as they did about seeing if they could overthrow the Sandinista government.”
The relationship collapsed only when Noriega’s usefulness waned. Federal grand juries indicted him in 1988, and following the December 1989 United States invasion of Panama, he was captured, tried, and convicted in 1992 on eight counts, receiving a forty-year sentence later reduced. His conviction marked the first time a foreign leader faced drug trafficking charges in United States courts, yet it came only after his strategic value expired.
The same pattern played out in Peru. Vladimiro Montesinos served as Peru’s intelligence chief and the de facto power behind President Alberto Fujimori from 1990 to 2000. The CIA paid Montesinos’s intelligence organization $1 million per year for ten years to fight drug trafficking. Yet declassified 1991 cables from the United States Embassy in Lima warned there was “substantial circumstantial evidence linking Montesinos to past narcotics activity.”
Montesinos was widely known as a lawyer for major drug traffickers before entering government. During the Fujimori regime, he operated an extensive protection racket. Peruvian drug kingpin Demetrio Chávez Peñaherrera testified that Montesinos received $50,000 per month during 1991 and 1992 to allow free operation in coca growing regions.
Despite mounting evidence, United States agencies continued funding Montesinos because they deemed him “key to Washington’s drug war in the Andes.” When the regime finally collapsed in 2000, investigations revealed Montesinos had amassed over $264 million in foreign accounts. He was eventually convicted in 2006 and sentenced to twenty-years for arms trafficking to the FARC, with additional convictions for death squad activities, corruption, and drug trafficking.
Álvaro Uribe served as Colombia’s president from 2002 to 2010 while maintaining the closest relationship with Washington of any Latin American leader, receiving billions in Plan Colombia assistance. Yet declassified documents reveal United States intelligence identified him as a drug trafficker years before his presidency.
A 1991 Defense Intelligence Agency report listed Uribe among Colombia’s “more important Colombian narco traffickers contracted by the Colombian narcotics cartels,” stating he was “dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín Cartel at high government levels” and was “a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar” who had “worked for the Medellín Cartel.”
This intelligence was circulated at the highest levels. A 2004 Pentagon memo to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stated that “Uribe almost certainly had dealings with the paramilitaries (AUC)” during his time as governor of Antioquia, relationships inherently linked to drug trafficking.
United States embassy cables from the 1990s identified Uribe on lists of suspected “Narcopols” and reported that the notorious Ochoa Vásquez brothers, co-founders of the Medellín Cartel, had financed his Senate campaign. Ambassador Morris Busby, who coordinated United States efforts against Pablo Escobar, said he believed there was “substance to the rumors” of Uribe’s narcotics ties.
The most brazen contemporary case involves Daniel Noboa, Ecuador’s president since November 2023. Investigative journalism published in March 2025 revealed that his family’s banana export company, Noboa Trading Co., has been caught up in at least three major cocaine smuggling operations between 2020 and 2024.
The specifics are damning. Approximately 430 kilograms of cocaine were found hidden in a container shipped by Noboa Trading from Guayaquil port to the Balkans in 2020 and 2021. Another 260 kilograms were discovered in June 2022 in the refrigeration system of a Noboa Trading container. In April 2024, 76 kilograms of cocaine were found in the false ceiling of yet another container from the same company.
Ecuadorian police had seized approximately 700 kilograms of cocaine from Noboa Trading containers between 2020 and 2022, but these police reports were deliberately hidden from public view because the company’s owners were the presidential family.
Journalist Andrés Durán, who exposed the story, was forced to flee Ecuador after receiving death threats and legal harassment from Noboa’s ruling party. His assessment was blunt:
“This is the first documented case in Ecuador’s history in which a presidential family is allegedly involved in cocaine trafficking.”
The hypocrisy is extraordinary. Noboa has built his political identity on fighting drug trafficking, collaborating with United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio to designate Ecuador’s criminal gangs as foreign terrorist organizations and calling for United States military assistance against “narco terrorists.” Yet while publicly waging war on narco trafficking, his family’s company allegedly facilitated the movement of over 700 kilograms of cocaine through Ecuador’s ports.
Most revealing is the Trump administration’s complete lack of action against Noboa despite these allegations. On the contrary, the United States has deepened its alliance with him. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated in September 2025 that the United States “shares a strong partnership” with Noboa on fighting illegal immigration and transnational crime. Not a single United States official has publicly raised the cocaine trafficking allegations against Noboa’s family company.
America is no paragon of virtue in Latin America, having spent decades backing death squads, dictators, and drug traffickers when they served Cold War objectives or corporate interests. The record of partnering with narco-criminals from Noriega to Noboa obliterates any pretense of moral high ground. What the region needs is not more American intervention selecting which corrupt leaders to embrace and which to prosecute, but genuine non-interventionism that allows nations to develop without Washington’s destabilizing interference. Normal relations based on mutual respect and non-interference, rather than subordination to American strategic priorities, offer the only path that doesn’t replicate these shameful partnerships.
