Forensic analysis of the Hondurasgate audios. Photo: Hondurasgate.
Canal Red América Latina, through its social media channels and digital newspaper Diario Red América Latina, has published a series of audio recordings obtained by the team at the Hondurasgate platform. These recordings are triggering a political scandal of the first magnitude, with Honduras at its epicentre.
The trove of WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram messages, dated between January and April 2026, reveals a transnational operation directed by the United States and Israel and using Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH) as its regional operator in Honduras and several Latin American countries. Hernández was president of Honduras between 2014 and 2022.
In June 2024, he was found guilty in a federal court in New York on charges of conspiracy to traffic narcotics, use of firearms, and conspiracy to traffic firearms and was sentenced to 45 years in prison. Hernández allegedly accepted multimillion-dollar bribes before and during his presidency to facilitate drug trafficking in Honduras by criminal gangs.
Allegations and admissions
According to US prosecutors, during his presidency, Honduras operated as a narco-state, allowing drug trafficking with the help of state security forces. However, in December 2025, Juan Orlando Hernández was pardoned by Donald Trump.
In one of the published audio recordings, Juan Orlando Hernández acknowledges that the money for the pardon “came from a group of rabbis” and that Netanyahu had “everything to do” with his release from prison.
The network revealed by the recordings includes admissions that Nasry Asfura, the current president of Honduras following disputed elections last November, should be supported as a transitional president to pave the way for Hernández’s return to power.
In exchange for the pardon and support to return to the presidency, the recordings suggest, the Honduran government would hand the US an expansion of the ZEDEs in Roatán and Comayagua — ZEDEs being areas of Honduran territory in which the country cedes its sovereignty, creating exceptional legal environments favourable to foreign companies.
Honduras would also facilitate the construction of a new US military base along the lines of Palmerola, build an interoceanic canal for General Electric, enact an artificial intelligence law tailored to US companies, and construct a Terrorism Confinement Centre in Tegucigalpa modelled on the Bukele regime’s prisons in El Salvador.
The leaked audio
Hondurasgate has published both the complete bank of 37 audios that make up the investigation and the forensic analysis carried out using the Phonexia Voice Inspector forensic analysis programme. Phonexia is a company specializing in voice recognition and biometric technologies.
The audios reach far beyond Honduras, pointing to the creation—funded with Honduran public money and multimillion-dollar contributions from Javier Milei’s regime in Argentina—of a media appratus set up in the United States to “strike media blows” against left and left-leaning politicians such as Gustavo Petro in Colombia, Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, and the Zelaya family in Honduras.
The “media cell” referred to by Juan Orlando Hernández in the recordings apparently forms part of a continental front against progressive governments in Latin America and is committed to preventing Iván Cepeda from winning the upcoming Colombian presidential elections.
The audio leaks also confirm the United States’ new National Security Strategy aimed at expelling rival powers from Latin America: “The Chinese were bidding, but we are not going to give way,” president Nasry Asfura is heard telling Juan Orlando Hernández.
On the strictly Honduran front, the recordings detail the implementation of several lawfare mechanisms through which the Honduran Congress, on 16 April, removed an inconvenient member of the National Electoral Council and a magistrate of the Electoral Justice Tribunal after bringing down the attorney general and the president of the Supreme Court—all of this, the audios suggest, through the purchase of votes from members of the legislature.
The recordings also include threats of “prison or death” against electoral councillor Marlon Ochoa, as well as instructions from Hernández—who goes so far as to invoke Pablo Escobar—to the president of the Honduran National Congress, Tomás Zambrano, not to hesitate in applying “any type of violence.”
The audios also refer to the use of Honduran evangelical churches as a mobilizing arm to combat former president Xiomara Castro and her democratic socialist LIBRE political party.
The wider picture and verification of the recordings
This adds to US interference in Latin America via Honduras, a narco-president pardoned by Trump and placed at his service, Israeli money, money from Milei’s government in Argentina, cells set up to manufacture fake news against the left in Colombia and Mexico, and actions against Chinese interests in the region.
Canal Red attempted to verify the legitimacy of the audios obtained by the Hondurasgate team. “We first verified the identities of the sources behind the audios,” wrote Canal Redthrough its Diario Red outlet. “These were first-rate, direct sources. Our professional duty of confidentiality and our commitment to protecting the safety of those sources oblige us to maintain absolute discretion regarding their identities and roles—which we were nonetheless able to establish beyond any doubt.
“Second, after examining the audios and reviewing their audits with the Hondurasgate team, we agreed that the complete bank of audios would be made available to the public, along with the forensic analysis confirming that they were neither fabricated nor manipulated.”
International media coverage
Hondurasgate has now published both the complete vault of 37 audios comprising the investigation and the forensic analysis carried out using the Phonexia Voice Inspector programme. Anyone can now access the full audios and their forensic reports on the Hondurasgate website.
Prestigious Latin American newspapers such as Mexico’s La Jornada and Argentina’s Página 12 have carried the story on their front pages, as have the public broadcasters of Colombia and Mexico. International outlets with varying editorial perspectives, including Euronews, Infobae, and Al Jazeera, have also covered it.
Yet, many outlets have still to pick up an investigation that sheds light on how Trump and his proxies operate in Latin America.
For their part, Canal Red continue in the service of information, committed to rigorous, courageous journalism guided by the values of social justice and the sovereignty of peoples.
(Diario Red) via Hondurasgate with Orinoco Tribune content
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/CB/SL
Cameron Baillie is an award-winning journalist, editor, and researcher. He won and was shortlisted for awards across Britain and Ireland. He is Editor-in-Chief of New Sociological Perspectives graduate journal and Commissioning Editor at The Student Intifada newsletter. He spent the first half of 2025 living, working, and writing in Ecuador. He does news translation and proofreading work with The Orinoco Tribune.
