Trump's Personal Prosecution of Maduro are His Own Geopolitics Desires

6 min read

 

By Jonah E. Bromwich

New York Times

 Two Latin American strongmen were charged in Manhattan with corrupting their governments, using state power to import hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States.

One, the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, was abruptly pardoned by President Trump last month.

The other, President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, was captured on Saturday in a military raid that the secretary of state characterized as a law enforcement operation. He was brought to the United States to face fresh allegations of narco-terrorism.

The divergent fates of the two men accused of similar crimes by the same prosecutor’s office underscores the way President Trump and his aides are using the federal justice system to conduct a highly personalized geopolitics.

Mr. Trump, when asked on Saturday about his December pardon of Mr. Hernández in light of the operation against Mr. Maduro, made no attempt to disguise his feelings about Mr. Hernández: He saw himself in the imprisoned president.

“The man that I pardoned was, if you could equate it to us, he was treated like the Biden administration treated a man named Trump,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “This was a man who was persecuted very unfairly. He was the head of the country.”

The U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York has long been the most prominent federal prosecutors’ office in the country and for years was known for its independence from Washington. It took on Wall Street, prosecuted high-ranking political officials from both parties and, in 2022, charged the ex-president of Honduras in what authorities would later characterize as “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”

Two years later, prosecutors asked a judge to ensure that Mr. Hernández died in prison, saying that he had abused his power, had connections to violent traffickers and was responsible for the “unfathomable destruction” cocaine had caused in the United States. Mr. Trump pardoned him nonetheless.

“Trump thinks he can use federal criminal prosecutions for any purpose, which is to say to promote his foreign policy views, to promote his vendettas, to promote his self-interest and to promote his perceived political interests,” said Bruce Green, a former federal prosecutor who teaches legal ethics at Fordham Law School in New York.

Both the Hernández and Maduro cases began as Drug Enforcement Administration investigations around 2010, were investigated by the same D.E.A. unit and were handled by the same investigative unit in the Southern District.

Each prosecution was led at various stages by Emil Bove III, who eventually rose to lead the office’s terrorism and international narcotics unit. After leaving the office, Mr. Bove became a criminal defense lawyer for Mr. Trump and then a top Justice Department official. He is now a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

The factual similarities in the cases are striking. It is not just that the charges resemble one another; prosecutors also accused both men of overseeing key way stations in the same hemispheric trade.

Taken together, the indictments provide a bird's-eye view of the supply chain that for years has brought processed cocaine from Colombia and Venezuela to shipment points in Honduras and, ultimately, to the United States.

Mr. Hernández was charged in 2022 with conspiring to import cocaine into the U.S. and using machine guns as part of that conspiracy. The charges unveiled against Mr. Maduro on Saturday also include a cocaine importation conspiracy and possession of machine guns as part of it. The combination of the trafficking and gun charges makes the potential penalties in such prosecutions more severe.

In 2020, Mr. Maduro was one of six defendants charged with participating in a narco-terrorism conspiracy, with prosecutors accusing him of leading a drug-trafficking organization known as Cártel de los Soles. Venezuelans have used the phrase for years, a reference to a sun insignia that high-ranking Venezuelan military personnel wear on their uniforms.

Mr. Maduro, that indictment said, “coordinated foreign affairs with Honduras and other countries to facilitate large-scale drug-trafficking.” The newly unsealed indictment was even more specific, saying that the shipment points in Honduras — as well as in Guatemala and Mexico — relied on a “culture of corruption,” in which traffickers paid off politicians for protection and help.

One of those politicians, prosecutors persuaded a jury, was Mr. Hernández. Jurors in 2024 convicted him of having received millions from drug-trafficking organizations throughout the region.

When Mr. Hernández was extradited, Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, erupted in celebration, and, after his conviction, expatriates rejoiced outside the Manhattan courthouse. But after pardoning Mr. Hernández last month, Mr. Trump defended the decision, saying it was the will of Hondurans.

“The people of Honduras really thought he was set up, and it was a terrible thing,” he said.

Mr. Hernández’s wife has said he would not immediately return to Honduras, where authorities have issued a warrant for his arrest.

David Smilde, a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans who has studied Venezuela for decades and lived in the country part-time until last year, said that the prosecution of Mr. Maduro might be perceived differently by the eight million Venezuelans who live outside the country, compared with the roughly 30 million who are still there.

The diaspora, he said, might thrill to the prosecution, viewing Mr. Maduro as a Saddam Hussein-like figure whose capture could bring an end to the Venezuelan regime.

People who live in the country, Mr. Smilde said, were likely to be less moved, given that several Venezuelans were prosecuted in recent years, only to be returned to their home countries by the Biden administration. They include two nephews of Mr. Maduro’s wife who were convicted on drug charges in 2015 but released in exchange for Americans.

“With the U.S. justice system and its inconsistency in recent years, it’s not as big a deal as it used to be,” Mr. Smilde said.

• Can the U.S. Legally ‘Run’ Venezuela?: The operation revives disputes over the legality of the 1989 Panama intervention, enhanced by President Trump’s vow to take over the country and also by Nicolás Maduro’s formal status as president.

• Interim Leader: Trump said that Venezuela’s new leader, Delcy Rodríguez, would help the United States. She quickly said the opposite.

• Venezuela’s Oil: Trump appears to be counting heavily on U.S. intervention in the oil industry to help transform Venezuela, a proposition that could prove to be complicated and expensive.

• Global Reaction: Several Latin American leaders responded with anger, while European leaders were more cautious. Trump’s audacious raid drew support, too.