The Spanish media outlet Canal Rojo, together with a group of Honduran journalists, published a series of previously unreleased recordings in which former president Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH) refers to the pardon he received from the Honduran government.EE.UU., indicating that it was sponsored by Israel.

These are 37 leaked audios from WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram, dated between January and April 2026, in which JOH allegedly talks about an international network involving the United States, Israel, and Honduran political actors to dismantle and discredit progressive governments in Latin America.

In the audios, JOH indicates that the current Honduran president, Nasry Asfura, is acting as a transitional leader to facilitate his political return to the Presidency, as well as the general planning for this to happen.

Furthermore, in the recordings, JOH states that “if we have to return to repression to control the country, we will. We have to do everything in our power to never relinquish power again. If you want to control the people, you need to…” press it, squeeze it dry, […] then we blame everything on the communists.”

According to Canal Rojo, one of the audios includes an explicit request for $150,000 to create a digital journalism infrastructure whose main objective would be to focus campaigns against figures such as Manuel Zelaya and Xiomara Castro, former presidents of Honduras.

Furthermore, this communication infrastructure would also disclose content about Mexico and Colombia, according to JOH’s words in other audio recordings: “we are going to set up a cell […] from the United States […] so that they can’t track us there in Honduras. There are some cases coming against Mexico […] against Colombia and most importantly, against Honduras.”

JOH governed Honduras between 2014 and 2022 and was sentenced in 2024 to 45 years in prison in the U.S. for drug trafficking and his ties to the Sinaloa Cartel and drug lords like Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. His brother, Juan Antonio Hernández, is serving a life sentence in the U.S. for money laundering.

JOH, for his part, publicly denied being the author of the recordings. Furthermore, he called them fake, indicating that they were an operation by the “radical left” to violate it politically and in the media.

The recordings reveal how old ghosts of Honduran politics are resurfacing. JOH, a former president convicted of drug trafficking, continues to appear as a figure with ambitions for power and the support of external powers.