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Last year, a US district court sentenced Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking. Orlando was convicted of accepting millions of dollars in bribes and importing 500 tons of cocaine into the United States, where he was extradited after completing his second presidential term in 2022.
The Biden administration’s Department of Justice considered the Hernández conviction a victory. “As President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world, and the people of Honduras and the United States bore the consequences,” wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland in a statement last year. “The Justice Department will hold accountable all those who engage in violent drug trafficking, regardless of how powerful they are or what position they hold.”
“I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.”
That is, until this week, when President Donald Trump abruptly pardoned Hernández in the midst of a tumultuous Honduran election. “I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The pardon came during the same week that US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was facing scrutiny for his role in lethal strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats, and Trump accused Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro of “narco terrorism.” So why would an administration hell bent on punishing drug traffickers pardon a kingpin like Hernandez?
Some have argued that this could simply be a way to make trouble for the left- wing successor to Hernández, the current Honduran president Xiomara Castro, who has been a strong critic of Trump’s mass deportations. In a recent thread on X, right-wing extremism researcher Jennifer Cohn unearthed an article from January that Trump’s longtime adviser Roger Stone—the convicted and now pardoned felon and political strategist—wrote with conservative commentator Shane Trejo. They suggested that Trump pardon Hernández as a way of trolling Castro:
Castro’s statements in recent weeks in defiance of President Trump’s proposal of mass deportations have raised her profile and caused enmity to build against her from the ‘America First’ right. Castro’s provocations of President Trump, a desperate attempt to rally Hondurans to her side in an election year, may backfire and prove to be her undoing as Trump has quite a bit of leverage at his disposal to upend her fledgling regime.
But they went further in elaborating the benefits of this strategy. In helping to unseat Castro, Stone and Trejo wrote, Trump could both “crush socialism and save a freedom city in Honduras.” The “freedom city” in question, they explained, was Próspera, a special economic zone founded in Honduras by a cadre of American tech titans including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen—both friends and fans of Trump family.
While Hernández strongly supported Próspera, his successor, Castro, spoke out against the project, which she saw as merely a shelter for foreign actors to undermine Honduran sovereignty and to skirt labor and environmental regulations they may face elsewhere. Last year, the Honduran Supreme Court declared special economic zones like Próspera unconstitutional, a move that Stone and Trejo described as “a starkly political maneuver.”
Próspera is an example of the tech-right concept of the network state, a phrase coined by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan. I wrote about it earlier this year:
In a 2021 essay on his website, Srinivasan laid out his vision for people seeking to build a new utopia or, as he put it, “a fresh start.” Sure, there were conventional ways to do this—forming a new country through revolution or war. But that would be, well, really hard, not to mention unpredictable. A cruise ship or somewhere in space were appealing options, but both presented logistical challenges. Far simpler and more practical was “tech Zionism,” creating an online nation, complete with its own culture, economy, tax structure, and, of course, startup-friendly laws.
Eventually, Srinivasan mused, such a community could acquire actual physical property where people would gather and live under the laws dreamed up by the founders—a “reverse diaspora,” he called it—but that land didn’t even need to be contiguous. “A community that forms first on the internet, builds a culture online,” he said, “and only then comes together in person to build dwellings and structures.” Acknowledging that the idea might sound a little goofy—like live-action Minecraft—he emphasized that it was also a serious proposition. “Once we remember that Facebook has 3B users, Twitter has 300M, and many individual influencers”—himself included—“have more than 1M followers,” he wrote, “it starts to be not too crazy to imagine we can build a 1-10M person social network with a genuine sense of national consciousness, an integrated cryptocurrency, and a plan to crowdfund many pieces of territory around the world.”
A network state would, like a kind of Pac-Man, gobble up little pieces of actual land, eventually amassing so much economic power that other nations would be forced to recognize it. Once that happens, laws in more conventional nations could become almost irrelevant. Why on earth would, say, a pharmaceutical company with a new drug choose to spend billions of dollars and decades on mandated testing when it could go to a deregulated network state and take it to market in record time? As Srinivasan argued in a Zoom talk at last year’s conference, “Just like it was easier to start bitcoin and then to reform the Fed,” he said, “it is literally easier to start a new country than to reform the FDA.”
Trump has expressed some interest in this idea; on the campaign trail, he proposed building “freedom cities” on federal land.
Still, it’s not entirely clear why the American president would care so much about saving a special economic zone in Latin America. That is, until one takes a look at Próspera’s Trump-aligned investors. That list includes Paypal’s Thiel, a Trump campaign donor who also is said to have played a key role in the selection of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate. Another prominent Próspera investor is venture capitalist Andreessen, who made significant campaign contributions to Trump and has also served as an adviser. Both Andreessen and Thiel have investment companies that benefit from government tech and defense contracts awarded under Trump.
At any rate, Stone appears to be taking a victory lap for having engineered the pardon. “Thank you, President Trump, for doing justice and granting the presidential pardon in the case of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was framed by Biden for an alleged drug trafficking that never existed,” he posted last week. “For a long time, I have advocated for a pardon in this case.”
Indeed, as he put it in his January article:
Castro’s regime could be upended and Honduras liberated without firing a single shot or deploying a single troop in what would be a massive strategic victory for US interests in the region. May the Próspera experiment prevail, the common good be saved, and global leftism be damned by the benevolent hand of President Trump!