A series of leaked audio recordings alleges that Israel helped finance the pardon and release of former Honduran president and convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández, while revealing alleged US-Israeli efforts to undermine progressive Latin American governments.
Between January and April 2026, Canal Red and the investigative website Hondurasgate released a series of leaked audio recordings revealing conversations that allegedly occurred on WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram between the former Honduran leader and current government officials.
They include evidence of Hernández’s proposed return to the Honduran presidency and plans to impeach his left-wing counterparts and maintain power, no matter the cost.
“If we have to kill people so we can be at peace, we will. If we have to return to repression to control the country, we will,” he is alleged to have said in one of the leaked voice notes.
They also paint a picture of close ties to Israel, including Hernández’s request for support in the fields of logistics, intelligence, and “other matters that are very necessary for my return”.
One alleged conversation between Hernández and current President Nasry Asfura specifically implicates pro-Israel actors in Trump’s decision on 1 December 2025 to pardon Hernández, convicted on three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy in 2024.
Israel had “everything to do with my departure and negotiation,” he allegedly said, adding that the money to fund his pardon “came from a group of rabbis and people who supported Israel”.
‘Close friends’: Ties between Israel and Honduras
Israel and Honduras were “close friends and strategic allies” during Hernández’s presidency, which lasted from 2014 to 2022. “As long as I am president, Honduras will stand behind Israel,” he announced in 2015.
In the years that followed, his commitment deepened. In 2016, the two nations signed a $209 million military cooperation agreement aiming to strengthen the armed forces and increase military participation in public security matters.
The agreement included plans to upgrade the military’s F5 and A37 fighter jets and helicopter fleet, the construction of an Offshore Patrol Vessel (OPV) and “sophisticated communications equipment with nationwide coverage”.
Since Asfura entered office in January 2026, Honduras has returned to the pro-Israel policies of the Hernández era, overturning diplomatic decisions that had been made by the Castro administration in favour of Palestinian rights.
Most recently, for example, Asfura announced his intention, alongside Chile, to return the Honduran ambassador, recalled in November 2023 in protest of the Gaza war, to Tel Aviv.
Furthermore, according to leaked audio published by Hondurasgate, it is still Hernández in the driving seat. “Thanks to me, you are sitting in that chair,” he is heard telling Asfura.
“Hernández has been running the show for the National Party for a long time,” Dana Frank, Professor Emerita of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told The New Arab.
Although the party was discredited because of its ties to narco-trafficking and corruption, “the top leadership has remained loyal to Hernández,” she said.
“The clearest example of this is Tomás Zambrano,” added Frank, who has written extensively about human rights and US policy in Honduras.
One of Hernández’s top henchmen, Zambrano was involved in the 2012 technical coup when the unconstitutional removal of four Supreme Court judges from the Constitutional Chamber solidified judicial control by post-2009 coup elites, including Hernández.
He was also a key actor in the 2015 decision to overturn a constitutional ruling against re-election, thus securing Hernández’s second term.
According to the leaked recordings, his loyalties have not changed: “You are going to be the president,” he allegedly told Hernández, to which his boss replied, “you’re going to be my right-hand man.”
Pardons and Christian Zionism
“One very alarming aspect is that Israel was funding the pardon,” Valeria Duarte Gallaguillos, a political scientist, journalist, and author of the report, told The New Arab. But it does not begin or end there.
Zambrano is also the Honduran caucus chairman of the Israel Allies Foundation, a Christian Zionist lobbying group seeking to promote “faith-based diplomacy” between Israel and “bible-believing Christians” in governments around the world.
His ties to Israel are corroborated by the audios, according to which Hernández allegedly told him: “I sent you the people from Israel, they sent you money,” before adding, “I am lobbying here.”
Zambrano played a key role in moving his country’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May 2021, following in the footsteps of US President Donald Trump and directed by Hernández himself.
“It was not easy,” he said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post in 2022, “but we did it, in spite of the fact that several strong economic groups in Honduras are of Palestinian origin.” After all, “Honduras is a highly Christian country – Catholics and Evangelicals – and the two churches backed our resolution,” he said.
This is a principal aim for Christian Zionists in the Americas, where groups like The Israel Allies Foundation and Philos Latino work to forge ties with evangelical Christians, mostly right-wing politicians, and pro-Israel pastors.
“In the audios, Juan Orlando even mentions that the operational arm of communication to change the population’s common sense, to stigmatise the left, will be through the churches,” explained Gallaguillos to TNA.
There is “a configuration in the traditional de facto powers that seek to exclude, or even perhaps proscribe, the left from Honduran politics,” she added.
Targeting progressive Latin American governments
The leaked audio recordings have been forensically verified by Phonexia, a Czech technology company specialising in speech analytics and voice biometrics. Founded in 2006, it is used by intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and corporations in more than 60 countries.
Hernández, however, has denounced them as “fake” and “laughable”.
“The radical left with its international ideological partners seeks to spread lies as truth. Today, they come out with a new campaign of disinformation and attacks aimed at imposing a false narrative. The same tactic of fake audios they used to try to steal the 2025 elections,” he wrote.
Zambrano also commented: “to put an end to this ridiculousness and prevent them from continuing to distract us from Honduras’s true problems, the National Congress has just approved the sending of these audios to specialised laboratories in the United States.”
Yet, according to the recordings, it is the right-wing governments of Honduras, the US, and Argentina that intend to “attack and remove the cancer of the left in Honduras and throughout Latin America”.
One plan reportedly involves establishing a “digital journalism unit” led by someone “from the US President’s team,” and financially-backed, in part, by the Argentine President Javier Milei, who allegedly provided $350,000 to the scheme.
The unit would target the left-wing and left-leaning governments of Colombia and Mexico, former President of Honduras Xiomara Castro, and her husband, former President Manuel Zelaya.
Crushing Latin America’s “pink tide”, not least in Gustavo Petro’s pro-Palestinian government of Colombia, serves to benefit Israel too.
Doing so turns the clocks back to a 20th-century landscape in which Latin American regimes from Guatemala to Colombia crushed Indigenous and left-wing movements using weapons and tactics that had reportedly been tried and tested by Israel in Palestine.
Current relations between Honduras and Israel are also “about the geopolitical legitimisation of the genocidal government of Israel,” noted Frank. And they serve to benefit the military and corporate agenda of the Trump administration as well.
After all, “for much of the 20th century, Honduras was the US’s most captive nation in Latin America,” Frank told TNA.
Now, with Trump at the helm, Hernández allegedly handing out orders, and Asfura a seemingly enthusiastic puppet, “that is returning with a vengeance”.
Ana Maria Monjardino is an independent journalist and writer from London
Follow her on X: @ammonjardino
Edited by Charlie Hoyle
