Reuters reports:

President Donald Trump, who has cast himself as a relentless foe of illegal drugs, pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, freeing him from a 45-year sentence for conspiring to import tons of cocaine into the United States.

Trump’s extraordinary move undermines decades of U.S. efforts to combat transnational drug networks, potentially damages Washington’s credibility in Latin America, and signals to corrupt actors that political connections can outweigh criminal accountability.

Trump signed the pardon for Hernandez on Monday night, a White House official said. The Federal Bureau of Prisons released him from prison in Hazelton, West Virginia, on Monday. While some conservatives in the U.S., including Trump ally Roger Stone, had pushed for Hernandez’s release, it was not clear what, or who, prompted Trump to issue the surprise pardon. [Continue reading…]

In March, Gizmodo reported:

Rightwing freakshow Roger Stone has never met an idiotic idea that he wasn’t willing to run with. It makes sense, then, that Stone is now encouraging the Trump administration to pardon the former president of Honduras—a convicted drug trafficker—to use him in an effort to defend an experimental libertarian enclave that is backed by tech billionaires.

The enclave in question is Prospera, a kind of island resort that was established off the coast of Honduras several years ago and that purports to be a manifestation of the libertarian ethos. Prospera is part of a project called the “Network State,” an ideological movement that seeks to create autonomous, privately funded (and governed) cities, many of which utilize cryptocurrency and attract tech bros like biohacker Bryan Johnson.

Prospera was made possible by a special regulatory setup, dubbed a special economic zone (or ZEDE), that was established in the country in 2013 in the wake of a U.S.-backed coup. ZEDEs allow for private actors to essentially move into geographically partitioned areas and write their own regulatory and judicial rules. Indeed, Prospera describes itself as having a “regulatory system designed for entrepreneurs to build better, cheaper, and faster than anywhere else in the world.”

In recent years, the government of Honduras has cracked down on the project. In 2022, its congress repealed the law that allowed ZEDEs to flourish in the country, which would have thrown Prospera’s very existence into question. This turn of events led Prospera’s corporate backers to sue the entire country for over ten billion dollars. If successful, the litigation would decimate the nation’s finances.

Now, Stone seems to think that the country would really benefit from another brush with regime change. In a recently published blog, Stone and conservative writer Shane Trejo suggest that Trump should pardon the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted of drug trafficking last year and is currently serving time in a U.S. prison. [Continue reading…]

On November 30, Stone said:

I was delighted about three hours after I sent a copy of this letter [from the former president of Honduras] to President Trump to read on Truth Social that he had announced the full and unconditional pardon for Juan Orlando Hernández.

A New York Times magazine feature from August, 2024, reported:

[T]he Delaware-based company that founded this experimental town in 2017 has raised $120 million in investments — including from venture-capital funds backed by the Silicon Valley billionaires Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen — to transform the territory, about twice the size of Monaco, into the most developed start-up city in the world. Built in a semiautonomous jurisdiction known as a ZEDE (a Spanish acronym for Zone for Employment and Economic Development), Próspera is a private, for-profit city, with its own government that courts foreign investors through low taxes and light regulation. Businesses can choose a regulatory framework from a menu of 36 countries or customize their own.

Yesterday, Democracy Now! reported:

What happens when American billionaires build a private city in your country, from AJ+ in April: