In late June, US authorities sentenced Honduras’s former president Juan Orlando Hernández to forty-five years in prison, on a series of drug and weapons-conspiracy charges. US prosecutors deemed the lawyer and businessman-turned-politician the leader of a “narco-state” where drug traffickers escape prosecution thanks to bribes, repression, and official favors. Hernández has sworn his innocence — labeling the verdict both “wrong and unjust.”

Hernández, a long-term US ally, has clearly now fallen out of favor with Washington. Yet this is owed not to his political record of aiding death squads, blatant corruption, nepotism, or even involvement in drug trafficking — but rather to the fact that his chosen successor, National Party candidate Nasry Asfura, lost the 2021 presidential elections. With the Honduran oligarchy kicked out of the presidential palace, Hernández and his allies could no longer ensure carte-blanche protection for US interests.

By the time Hernández was extradited to the United States on April 22, 2022, the former director of the Honduran police was already in US custody. Juan Carlos Bonilla, known as “El Tigre” and trained and educated at Fort Moore, Georgia, was on August 2 sentenced to nineteen years in prison in the United States in a Manhattan court, which added further embarrassment for his former chief.