When, exactly, did I start using the term “axe murderer” all the time? As in, “The President of Honduras is an Axe Murderer.” At first, I was just being flip and only threw it out there every once in a while, in private, to refer in a general sense to the successive governments that took power in Honduras after the coup. “The Honduran government is run by axe murderers,” I’d drop, but only with people who already understood what I meant.

But as Juan Orlando Hernández’s presidential campaign advanced over the course of 2012 and ‘13, I got more specific. I needed some kind of shorthand to try to capture his criminal bulldozing of the rule of law and to convey quite how villainous he was.

In public, I still held back my epithets, instead building my case slowly but clearly from documented evidence — although when he was inaugurated I did call him a “dangerous thug” in the Houston Chronicle. But during meetings in Congress, I was increasingly blindsided by the turnover among aides: every six months I’d meet with a new sea of twenty-six-year-olds who knew nothing about Honduras at all.