Former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, in an interview with the Mexican mainstream media El Universal, March 2015. Photo: El Universal/Lucía González.
Donald Trump’s pardon gave Juan Orlando Hernández back more than just his freedom: it returned him to the center of decision-making. A new set of audios from the Hondurasgate scandal shows him once again to be close to the world that led him to prison. He talks about the money that drug trafficking left buried, demands control over the police, and discusses how to attribute crimes to his rivals.
The voice notes reproduced in this piece were subjected to an independent forensic audit by the British organization Earshot, which evaluated them as authentic recordings and not generated by artificial intelligence.
A stash of money
In Honduras, a “caleta” is a hideout—buried or camouflaged—where drugs and, above all, cash are kept. The main audio of this set, attributed to Juan Orlando Hernández, revolves around those hideouts and a “letter” that, according to what is heard, he keeps in his possession.
Voice note from Juan Orlando Hernández (audio 88):
In the stashes they stole from Tony, it was the Police who stole that money, from there they assembled some teams and bought kevlar, says our friend, over there in Gracias. I am telling you this so that you know and understand the paranoia that I have with the police system, that is, controlling the Ministry of Security and the army intelligence. Well, those stashes were distributed. Tony no, he woould not say this, like, when one requests a meeting, one cannot talk because sometimes they have ways to listen, but in a letter, and that is something that can be done. I have it in my possession, he reveales the locations of those stashes, we make it clear that it was under the government of Xiomara Castro that drug traffickers from Colón unearthed them, it is just that if we say drug traffickers, military police, and police, it will fall on General Muñoz, let us say they are members of the police. They went there and stole the money from the stashes, they divided it up, and with that, some organized group from Colón started to operate.
Two elements stand out in this recording. The first is that Hernández knows where the drug trafficking money is, thanks to a “letter” attributed to his brother Tony Hernández, with the location of the stashes. And the second, the plan to turn that money into a narrative against the government of former President Xiomara Castro. Juan Orlando Hernández was sentenced in 2024 to 45 years in prison in the US for drug trafficking, and Tony Hernández is serving a life sentence after a trial found him responsible for trafficking about 185 tons of cocaine and coordinating at least two murders.
A “non-aligned” police force
The recordings show that Juan Orlando Hernández was obsessed and upset because the Police and intelligence were slipping out of his hands. In a note to the President of Congress, Tomás Zambrano, he says it bluntly.
Voice note from Juan Orlando Hernández to Tomás Zambrano (audio 86):
Everything that was done in Colón. All the people who were investigated at that time were by my orders. Now that an attempt is being made to restart it, it cannot be done. The police are not aligned… We should have it under control… to start reporting the people who were meeting with Maduro, and thus build cases against them here in the United States.
He wanted to “control the Ministry of Security and the army intelligence” and claimed that “everything that was done in Colón… was by my orders.” And Colón is not just any department: it is one of the historical corridors of Honduran drug trafficking, the territory that appears in almost all these audios.
Massacres and a leadership removed
While those audios were circulating, Honduras was entering its most violent period in years. On May 21, 2026, a massacre in the village of Rigores, in Trujillo, Colón, left around 20 dead—including women and minors—at an African palm plantation in Bajo Aguán. The authorities attributed the massacre to a clash between criminal structures for control of the territory. On the same day, five agents of DIPAMPCO, the anti-drug police unit, were ambushed and killed in Corinto, Omoa, during an operation in which about 300 kilos of cocaine were seized. The official response reconfigured the police structure. After the ambush, and following the investigation which established that the operation had been unofficial and irregular, the Security Secretariat of Nasry Asfura’s government intervened in DIPAMPCO, suspended its director, Marlon Enrique Lagos, the deputy director, and the operations chief, and ordered a military and police intervention in the area. On May 29, 2026, the government went further: it completely dissolved DIPAMPCO and created in its place a new Anti-Extortion and Terrorist Associations Division, under the Police Directorate of Investigations. Within days, one of the country’s anti-drug structures disappeared, and its replacement fell under the new Security leadership. The move was executed by the Asfura government, the same one that in these audios appears determined to “align” the Police.
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Manufacturing the adversary
The control of security also serves another purpose: to fabricate adversaries. In a voice message to his wife, Ana García, the audio attributed to Hernández suggests framing a political rival for murder and, in the same sentence, admits that the actual perpetrator was someone else.
Voice note from Juan Orlando Hernández to Ana García (audio 107):
Bayron Ruiz disappeared, and it happened because he kidnapped Chafalo’s brother. We should attribute that murder to Carlos Zelaya. Let us pin this on them. Support me, Ana, please, and go to Human Rights and show them this… even though we know it was “Chafalo,” for the kidnapping of his family member.
In the audio, Hernández wants to pin that murder on Carlos Zelaya, brother of former President José Manuel Zelaya.
Overall, the audios illustrate the hypocrisy of Trump’s anti-drug policy. While he bombs fishers in the Caribbean without any judicial process to prove their connection to drug trafficking, he pardons a drug trafficker convicted by US courts for introducing more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, a drug trafficker who, as soon as he regained his freedom, is again making maneuvers to reinstall the same apparatus that allowed that drug to flow.
Forensic verification: According to the audio analysis by Earshot (earshot.ngo), a British organization and the first nonprofit to use sound in defense of human and environmental rights, audios 88, 86, and 107 are, with high probability, authentic recordings of Juan Orlando Hernández and were not generated by artificial intelligence. The audit can be consulted at this link.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/CD
