The glaring ‘hypocrisy’ behind Trump’s war on drugs

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/12/02/trump-honduras-president-pardon-drug-boat-strikes/

For weeks, the Trump administration has demonstrated its zeal in taking on supposed “narcoterrorists” in the Western hemisphere. The United States bombed numerous boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that Trump officials claimed were transporting drugs to U.S. shores, while also rattling the saber at the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom the White House has cast as both an illegitimate tyrant and a thuggish cartel boss. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump held a Cabinet meeting on potential U.S. plans for Venezuela, during which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth hailed Trump for “taking the gloves off” and declared that “we’ve only just begun” sending drug traffickers to “the bottom of the ocean.”

According to Justice Department documents, Hernández once allegedly bragged to a drug kingpin that he was going to “stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.” He caused “untold damage” and “unimaginable suffering” in the United States, U.S. prosecutors wrote in the government’s sentencing memo, recommending life in prison plus 30 years. “The defendant engaged in this egregious conduct while publicly posing as an ally of the United States in its efforts to combat the importation of narcotics that destroy countless lives in this country. But behind closed doors, the defendant protected the very traffickers he vowed to pursue.”

“It just shows that the entire counter-drug effort of Donald Trump is a charade — it’s based on lies, it’s based on hypocrisy,” Mike Vigil, the former Drug Enforcement Administration chief of international operations, told the Guardian. “He is giving a pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández and then going after Nicolás Maduro. … It’s all hypocritical.”