Podcast: Juan Orlando Hernández Returns to Honduras | The Lighthouse

This is the transcript of episode 83 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.

HERNÁNDEZ: They wanted me banished from my homeland for life, but they never measured the power of God: the truth. Today, thanks to your prayers, thanks to the fact that the truth came to light, I have returned to my homeland.

GRESSIER, HOST: That’s Juan Orlando Hernández, the former Honduran president who was convicted in the United States on drug trafficking charges and pardoned by Trump last November. He’s standing at his front door, addressing a throng of supporters after finally returning to Honduras.

I’m your host, Roman Gressier. From the studios of El Faro English, this is Central America in Minutes.

JOH is back in Honduras

Hernández returned to Honduras on July 26. A large group of supporters and party activists went to the airport to welcome him with applause. He still faces charges in Honduras of fraud and money laundering brought by the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

Honduran digital outlet Contracorriente reported that, of the more than 288 million lempiras embezzled from the state through two foundations, at least 62 million lempiras (about three million dollars) were used, directly and indirectly, to finance Hernández’s 2013 presidential campaign.

Despite the charges, he was not arrested upon setting foot in Honduras because a judge had withdrawn the arrest warrant a month earlier. The defense argued that he would voluntarily appear in court and that he was not a flight risk.

Two years ago, Hernández was sentenced in New York to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking during his administration. He had been serving his sentence for just over a year when, two days before the November 2025 elections in Honduras, President Donald Trump pardoned him.

That same day, Trump posted On social media that Hondurans should vote for Tito Asfura, the candidate of Hernández’s National Party. After the Trump bump, Asfura won the election and took office in January of this year.

Hernández’s case in the United States remained under review by a Court of Appeals until April. The court ruled that it made no sense to keep the case open since he had been granted a pardon. The case was closed.

The former president did not miss the opportunity to publicly state that the court had declared him “innocent” of the drug trafficking charges. But the court’s decision merely closed the case, as it had already been released.

With his party in power, Trump’s support for President Asfura, and his case closed, Hernández prepared to return to his country. I have stated in a post on X that he is returning “as just another citizen, to rebuild my life in peace and without any political or electoral ambitions.”

Now, from his home, he is awaiting a preliminary hearing scheduled for August 3, at which he will appear before the Honduran courts. The course of his legal proceedings in Honduras has yet to be seen.

Returned migrants die in Guatemala

This week in Guatemala, a man deported from the United States and his wife, ‌who self-deported to join him, were found dead in a sugarcane field.

The couple had been missing since Monday, July 20. When searchers found their bodies, their 14-month-old daughter was still beside them, according to Reuters.

Nixon Giovanni Pérez, 43, and Glendy Marisol González, in their 20s, were found with their hands tied behind their backs in a field outside the city of Retalhuleu, 112 miles west of Guatemala City near the border with Mexico.

Pérez was deported last year from Missouri. González self-deported in recent weeks, despite having an asylum court date set for 2027.

The Trump administration has pushed self-deportation through a $915 million dollar program and app, known as CBP Home. It’s designed to incentivize undocumented immigrants to leave the country quote-unquote voluntarily, with a cash payment and flight to the country.

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The official figures of just how many immigrants have self-deported since Trump returned to the White House are a point of debate.

Late last year, the administration claimed that as many as two million people had self-deported or been removed since January 2025. But advocacy groups like the Center for Migration Studies of New York call that figure a lie and a logistical improbability.

The center takes note of a survey by the New York Times and Kaiser Family Foundation that found that around 15 percent of all immigrants had considered leaving the country — but not that they had actually done so.

From January through July 28, the Guatemalan Institute of Migration reported A total of 38,720 returned to Guatemala. The statistics do not specify how many self-deported.

Reporting by El Faro English has shown the human toll of deportation: from shattered life plans to those who picked up the pieces in Quetzaltenango, in the western highlands, and started over. But that wasn’t the case for Nixon and Glendy.

Opposition dilemma in El Salvador

Now to El Salvador. Over the past five years, opposition parties have lost nearly all their political representation in national offices. They’ve been defeated by President Nayib Bukele’s popularity and stifled by official hostility and funding restrictions.

But for some, internal strife has seemed almost as intense as the external.

Not only is Claudia Ortiz, one of the most prominent figures in the opposition in El Salvador, facing “the dictatorship.” She told us she’s also clashing “in vision” with the leaders of her centrist minority party, Vamos.

This is the subject of new reporting by Leyrian Colón Santiago and Gabriel Labrador in El Faro English this week.

In El Salvador, 57 of 60 seats are held by the ruling Nuevas Ideas party and allies. Ortiz is the party’s only sitting assemblywoman. And she’s known more for her opposition to Bukele than for any other policy. She’s running for her third term in the national elections on February 28.

El Faro interviewed Ortiz and the party’s secretary-general, Cesia Rivas, who is also, uncomfortably, Ortiz’s alternate in the Assembly. Their visions were visibly at odds, especially over the broader strategy needed to mount any substantive resistance to Bukele after the elections.

In the national elections set for February 28 of next year, Ortiz asserts that she and other party members see the need to form alliances with diverse sectors and ideologies. But the rest of Vamos decided in November not to form party coalitions, nor to accept former members of other political groups into their ranks.

But Rivas said it isn’t true that the party is not seeking alliances. “90 percent of the candidates didn’t previously belong to Vamos. If that isn’t opening up the party, I don’t know what it is,” she said.

Ortiz said she tried to get more people to join Vamos. But party leadership rejected 30 of around 150 candidates, in part because they were former members of other parties.

Vamos is the third-most-preferred party for the 2027 legislative elections, according to a June poll by Central American University. But in a country where nearly nine out of ten Salvadorans say they support Bukele, more than 60 percent said they had no party preference.

Seven months before the elections, the rift in Vamos is simmering. Claudia Ortiz had originally planned to run for president in 2029, until Bukele moved the elections forward and extended the next term from 2027 to 2033.

“We’ll have a plan for who knows when,” she told us. “Now the rules are that the rules can be changed at any time.”

This episode was written by Yuliana Ramazzini, Leyrian Colon Santiago, Megan Mandrachioand Gabriel Labrador. Editing by Roman Gressier and sound design by Omnionn. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, amazon, iHeart, and YouTube.