The Trump and Netanyahu governments allegedly have big plans for the newly freed Hernández, including putting him back in power in Honduras.
Leaked WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal audio messages published this week by the Spanish news website Canal RED suggest that pro-Israel groups helped secure President Trump’s pardon of Honduran president and convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez, popularly known by his initials JOH, from US federal prison late last year.
According to the recordings, the arrangement consisted of trading Trump’s pardon for a package of concessions in Honduras. However, as Drop Site News notes, “they do not clearly delineate which concessions are assigned to which actor, but frame them as part of a joint U.S.- and Israel-aligned agenda in the country”.
Nor is it clear who the “pardon money” went to. Canal RED says it has more leaked audios to publish, so maybe these questions will become clearer in time. One thing that is clear, as Stephen Holmes warns in an article published by Project Syndicate shortly after JOH’s pardon, is that Trump is fast turning the presidential pardon into a giant indulgencies racket (h/t JohnA).
JOH is heard saying in one of the leaked audios: “The pardon money … came from a board of rabbis and people who supported Israel, and they had previously supported Yani Rosenthal.” Rosenthal is a former president of the Liberal Party of Honduras and close associate of JOH’s who was convicted in 2017 of laundering drug proceeds for a prominent Honduran cartel.
In 2024, JOH was convicted in a US federal court of trafficking 400 tonnes of cocaine as well as arms running, for which he received a 45-year prison sentence. He was also found guilty of receiving money from the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquin Archivaldo “El Chapo” Guzman, to finance electoral fraud.
However, Trump pardoned JOH on December 1 last year — at the same time that US forces under his command were pulverising speed boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific suspected of transporting illicit narcotics. Trump described the DEA investigation into JOH as a “Biden administration set up” without providing a shred of proof.
Interestingly, as Holmes notes, JOH’s prosecution was overseen by Emil Bove, who would go on to “become Trump’s personal lawyer, then his acting deputy attorney general, and who now sits on the US Court of Appeals. So, Trump has pardoned a man his own future counsel helped to convict.”
Trump’s pardon of JOH apparently forms part of a much larger plan by the US and Israel to extend their “areas of control” in Central America, reports Valeria Duarte Galleguillos for Canal RED, a crowdfunded news and analysis website co-founded in 2023 by the former Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias, who has close ties to left-wing governments in Latin America.
The leaked recordings suggest that JOH has already begun building a “web of corruption” to eliminate any political resistance to his eventual return to power. For the moment, legal obstacles prevent him from returning to Honduras, but the Asfura government is apparently working round the clock to have them removed (machine translation):
The plot also involves the current president, Nasry Asfura, the president of the National Congress, Tomás Zambrano, the National Electoral Counselor, Cosette López-Osorio, and Vice President María Antonieta Mejía.
All of them appear in a series of WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram audios obtained exclusively by Canal RED and Hondurasgate that uncover an operation of political interference and corruption of historic proportions, which includes the return of Hernández to the presidency of Honduras with the support of Trump and Israeli financing. [In return, JOH has agreed to] cede control of development zones, a US military base, and legislative development of a legal environment favourable to US and Israeli AI companies…
The plot revealed by the audios has an ultimate goal: to guarantee the return of Juan Orlando Hernández to the presidency of Honduras in the next elections. According to the leaked conversations, the former president is not only planning his physical return to the country once all the judicial proceedings against him are annulled, but is already negotiating with Nasry Asfura an agreed succession.
Under this scheme, Asfura would be a transitional president who would pave the way for Hernández to run again in the next electoral cycle. If it comes off, Hernández would become Donald Trump’s main political operator and Israeli lobbyist in the region, a person in charge of turning Honduras into a strategic area of military, logistical and economic operations for the United States, replicating the model of the Palmerola base and the ZEDES (special economic zones), but with even more concentrated power.
It would not only be a matter of restoring JOH to power but also transforming Honduran territory into a key geopolitical node for US interests vis-à-vis China and other rival powers in Latin America.
Most legacy media outlets in Spain and the US have so far not covered the story. Whether this is due to their prominence, the delicate nature of the allegations or concerns about their veracity is unclear. But it’s not like this sort of thing is out of the ordinary these days…
JOH has personally denied the allegations, saying the recordings are clearly fake. But there has so far been a conspicuous lack of any threat to sue Canal RED for defamation, as one would expect in a case like this. Like Trump, JOH blames the Biden administration for conducting a witch hunt against him.
There’s a glaring problem with this storyline, however: JOH’s brother and fellow National Party congressman, Tony Hernández, was charged with drug and gun-related offences in 2019 by the Trump 1.0 Justice Department and was eventually sentenced in 2021 to life imprisonment for distributing 185 tonnes of cocaine.
Tony Hernández’s prosecution would end up incriminating JOH, who in turn was extradited in 2022 and later sentenced to 45 years’ imprisonment on three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy. New York prosecutors even went so far as to describe Honduras as a “narco-state” under JOH’s watch fuelled by millions in cartel bribes.
The former president allegedly even had an accused co-conspirator taken out in a Honduran prison to protect himself, and once apparently boasted, “We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses, and they’re never even going to know it.”
Selective Application
In his decision to pardon Hernández, Trump did not present a single shred of evidence that Hernandez’s trial was biased or corrupted, points out the Gray Zone’s Wyatt Reed:
“Nor has he explained how the then-president of Honduras could have been unaware of the massive cocaine trafficking conspiracy which his own brother – Tony Hernandez – was indicted for by Trump’s Department of Justice.”
Trump pardoned Hernández a day after the Honduran elections of November 30, 2025, in a move that, according to the audios, was less a gesture of clemency than a down payment on a far-reaching agreement between Trump, JOH and Netanyahu. Trump also intervened directly in the Honduran elections by endorsing Tito Asfura, the candidate of Hernández’s National Party, while pillorying his opponents and warning of severe consequences if Asfura wasn’t elected.
What was not known at the time is the alleged role played by pro-Israel groups in JOH’s release. In one of the recordings, JOH claims that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had “everything to do” with his release and the negotiation that made it possible.
JOH’s ties to Israel and Netanyahu go back a very long way, as the journalist José Alberto Niño documents in a prescient post published just after JOH’s presidential pardon:
[JOH’s] relationship with Israel began long before he held national office. As a young man in the early 1990s Hernández traveled to Israel under the auspices of Mashav, the Israeli Agency for International Development Cooperation. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted that he completed a Mashav enrichment course in 1992, at the beginning of his diplomatic career.
Three decades later, at the opening of the Honduran embassy in Jerusalem, Hernández stood before an audience and called that first visit to Israel a “life-changing” experience. He said the trip had shaped his view of security, agriculture, and innovation.
Once he entered the presidential palace, Hernández turned that personal link into state doctrine. In October 2015, he arrived in Jerusalem as head of state and told an audience convened by the Israel Council on Foreign Relations and the World Jewish Congress that “As long as I am president, Honduras will stand behind Israel.” The World Jewish Congress described the event in glowing terms and singled out his declaration that ties between the two countries had never been closer.
This was not idle rhetoric. Hernández set out to reposition Honduras as one of the most reliable pro-Israel governments in Latin America… He adjusted the Honduran voting record at the United Nations so that his country would abstain from or oppose resolutions deemed hostile to Israeli interests…
Hernández also opened a diplomatic and trade office in Jerusalem, signaling recognition of the city as Israel’s capital. He then promised to relocate the full Honduran embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, issuing joint statements with Israeli and U.S. officials that set public deadlines for that step. In June 2021, he completed the move.
In the security arena, Hernández took positions that aligned perfectly with Washington and Tel Aviv. His government designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, a move welcomed by major American Jewish groups…
Even when the walls began to close in, Hernández treated Israel as his ultimate safety net. As his legal exposure increased and the prospect of extradition grew more likely, he reportedly turned to Israeli officials to ask for help in delaying or preventing his transfer to U.S. authorities. The Times of Israel reported that plea and underscored Hernández’s assumption that his years of unwavering support had earned him political capital in Jerusalem.
That calculation looked naïve when he arrived in New York in chains. It looks far more rational now that Donald Trump has delivered a pardon.
The audio recordings suggest that Hernández’s presidential pardon was managed through intense lobbying by Roger Stone and the Republican caucus in the United States, with the implicit support of Netanyahu. Stone had been publicly calling for a pardon of JOH since 2024. According to the leaked conversations, the former president’s return to Honduras and all the logistics involved in putting him back in the presidential seat would be financed by Israel.
Four Main Objectives
The audio files, if authentic, imply that the US and Israel are pursuing four main objectives in their support of JOH:
1. The expansion of special employment and economic zones, or ZEDEs as they are known in Honduras. The ZEDEs, which the government of Xiomara Castro had begun to dismantle, represent a huge cession of national sovereignty, effectively allowing foreign legal systems and courts independent of the State to operate on Honduran soil.
As we reported in 2024, the amount of autonomy that the government of Hernández’s predecessor, Porfirio Lobo Sosa (Jan 2010- Jan 2014), had granted to the owners of the ZEDEs was simply mind-boggling:
[T]he 2013 law clearly established that “each ZEDE will have its own internal security bodies (…), including its own police, crime investigation bodies, intelligence, criminal prosecution and penitentiary system.” The cities will also have an independent financial regime, and will not be subject to the exchange control of the Central Bank of Honduras; they are empowered to develop their own internal monetary policy.
Even before Castro’s election, local businesses were complaining that the law had granted too many privileges to foreign investors to the detriment of domestic capital. The US economist Paul Rohmer, the godfather of international charter cities who had initially worked with the Lobo Sosa government to develop ZEDEs, had disowned the project, warning that Honduras’ ZEDEs system was undemocratic, opaque, destined for collapse and shrouded in lies. As an article in The Intercept explains, the legal showdown between the Honduran government and the investors behind the charter cities presents an “almost impossible-to-believe scenario”:
A group of libertarian investors teamed up with a former Honduran government — which was tied at the hip with narco-traffickers and came to power after a U.S.-backed military coup (in apparent reference to the governments of both Lobo Sosa and Hernandez) — in order to implement the world’s most radical libertarian policy, which turned over significant portions of the country to those investors through so-called special economic zones. The Honduran public, in a backlash, ousted the narco-backed regime, and the new government repealed the libertarian legislation. The crypto investors are now using the World Bank to force Honduras to honor the narco-government’s policies.
Under a new Hernández government, those policies will not only be honoured but aggressively expanded. In orher words, we can expect new Prosperas Inc, backed by radical Silicon Valley “libertarians” like Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen, to prosper in the years ahead.
2. New US military base, or bases. Honduras is already home to one major US military base — the US Soto Cano Air Base, also known as Palmerola Base, which is seen as key to Trump’s mass deportation program and drug war policies, reports VoA. But the US apparently wants more.
This follows a clear pattern across Latin America, with a new base under construction in Argentina as well as a $1.5 billion upgrade to the US naval base in Callao, Peru, just 70 kms south of the Chinese run mega-port at Chancay.
El Salvador’s main international airport has quietly turned into a forward operation location for the US Air Force while Panama’s José Mulino government, under extreme pressure from the Trump administration, has allowed for the return of US troops, although in limited numbers, to the so-called Canal Zone.
In Ecuador, more than 38,000 troops have been mobilised nationwide as part of security operations involving US forces — despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of the populace voted against the reestablishment of US military bases in last year.
Meanwhile, the threats against Cuba continue to escalate…
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Nick Corbishley 