Cover: via https://peoplesdispatch.org/2026/05/05/hondurasgate-leaked-audio-links-asfura-hernandez-trump-milei-netanyahu-in-anti-left-plot/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmh7fK__JcY
Schools for Chiapas || Rarely does power reveal itself in its raw form, exposing its foul secretions—those it strives to conceal with the submissive support of the mainstream media and state institutions. When that happens, we have the opportunity to understand the forms of oppression and violence that threaten us. In short, we can shed light on the most repugnant practices—those that will never be aired in public.
Hondurasgate allows us to do just that: to understand the inner workings of the system and confirm our darkest suspicions—those we often cannot confirm because we lacked sufficient evidence. Among them is the close collaboration between capital and organized crime, an operational alliance blessed by the states and the empire. Thirty-seven audio recordings, dated between January and April 2026, were released, in which a voice identified as that of former President Juan Orlando Hernández asserts that his pardon was secured through the mediation of the Israeli government.
https://kpfa.org/episode/guns-and-butter-march-1-2017/
For a long time now, based on what has happened in Colombia in the context of the repression of the left and the guerrillas, we have observed active collaboration between large corporations, the military, paramilitaries, and organized crime. In July 2025, the Colombian courts issued a historic ruling by convicting seven former executives of the multinational Chiquita Brands International for financing paramilitary groups in the Urabá region between 1997 and 2004. The company paid more than $1.7 million to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a paramilitary group that murdered peasants and grassroots activists.
More recently, two senior executives of the company Desarrollos Energéticos SA (DESA) were sentenced to 22 and 30 years in prison as masterminds behind the murder of environmental activist Berta Cáceres in Honduras, who was killed for her opposition to the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project on the Gualcarque River.
We also have a body of research on the relationships between the state, capital, and organized crime—and drug trafficking in particular—that sheds compelling light on these connections. In 2020, Dawn Paley published *Anti-Drug Capitalism: A War on the People*, in which she dissects how Mexico’s war on drugs is, in reality, a war against grassroots movements. In short, there is abundant empirical and analytical material on the subject.
What Hondurasgate reveals is that it is the perpetrators themselves who are exposing their true colors. The pardon of former President Juan Orlando Hernández, sentenced in the United States to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking after it was proven that he facilitated the shipment of some 400 tons of cocaine in alliance with cartels such as the Sinaloa Cartel. Trump’s pardon pursues several objectives: on the one hand, to attack progressive movements in the region, in Honduras as well as in Mexico and Brazil, both of which are currently in government.
The other is that the Pentagon hopes to turn Honduras into a strategic foothold for its interference in the region. In addition to the Palmero base, the United States intends to build another one and expand the Zones of Employment and Economic Development (ZEDES), with the aim of blocking China’s influence in the region. Washington has already managed to limit China’s presence in the Panama Canal and is now preparing to set up a military base in the port of El Callao, in Peru, to counter the port of Chancay built by China. To that end, the empire plans to spend up to $1.5 billion.
But the central issue, in my view, is how the audio recordings expose the proposal to carry out “hunts” against opponents or the demand for blood (“we need blood,” says Hernández, to “keep the people under control”). The former invokes Trump and Javier Milei, as well as Pablo Escobar, to argue for the need to control the Honduran people through violence.
Finally, this violent and repressive network has the backing of evangelical churches, as is the case throughout the region. “The churches are the ones who will make sure we forget the past. And that people think it was the left that did that,” says Hernández, referring to the ongoing culture war. The United States’ objective is military control of strategic resources to reposition itself in the region, contain China, and reverse its hegemonic decline.
I realize that many may say we already knew this. That the long experience of Colombia, Mexico, and the favelas of Brazil attests to this capital-state-organized crime alliance against the people and the left. The difference, in my view, is that with Hondurasgate there is an explicit acknowledgment of that alliance and that the objective is none other than to destroy the people’s movements. And if necessary, the people themselves, with the support of Israel.
This is why we must not separate the state from drug cartels and big business. They are all part of capitalism. This is capitalism as it truly exists—the kind that causes genocide and death, the system that seeks to wipe out peoples and territories. We must remember this when we speak of citizenship and human rights, when we insist on demanding justice from a state that will never deliver it because, as the case of Honduras demonstrates, it works for big capital alongside organized crime.
Original text by Raúl Zibechi published in Desinformémonos on May 11th, 2026.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.
Discover more from Class Struggle Ecology
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
