As the United States ramps up strikes on Venezuelan boats and threatens a land invasion to fight alleged drug trafficking networks, President Donald Trump has pardoned Honduras’s former President Juan Orlando Hernandez and released him from a 45-year prison sentence in the US for weapons and drug trafficking offences.

Since September, US military strikes on at least 21 Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have killed more than 80 people . The Trump administration claims these boats were trafficking drugs to the US but has not backed these allegations with any evidence.

Meanwhile, the US itself has a long history of leveraging narcotics smuggling and drug gangs to support its foreign policy goals in various parts of the world, beginning with the 19th-century Opium War

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