Audios allege that the US, Israel and Argentina are plotting to build a regional propaganda hub. And more warning signs about Latin America’s aging population.
Ignacio Portes & Jorge C. Carrasco
HONDURASGATE
A US-backed Latin American propaganda network?
Ahead of Honduras’s contested election last year, Donald Trump endorsed conservative candidate Nasry Asfura (who went on to win) and pardoned his party ally and former President Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been convicted in the United States on drug-trafficking charges.
Just a few months later, Hernández and Asfura are at the center of a new regional uproar. Leaked audio recordings, not independently verified, appear to show the pair coordinating a US-backed network of partisan media outlets to target left-wing governments in the region, including those of Mexico and Colombia.
The case emerged after website Hondurasgate.ch published an anonymous report drawn from 37 recordings, said to be pulled from WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram conversations between Hernández and Asfura from January to April 2026.
In a January voice memo, a voice identified as Hernández asks President Asfura for USD 150,000 to rent an apartment in the US and set up what he calls an “information cell.” “We’re going to set up a cell, president, from here, from the United States, so they can’t track us in Honduras,” the voice says. “It’ll be like a Latin American news site.”
The audio also mentions support from Republican Party figures and someone on Trump’s team. Asfura reportedly replies that he will route the money through a friend’s account and pull another USD 150,000 from Honduras’s public infrastructure ministry.
In 2022, Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison by a New York court after the Justice Department argued he had helped move more than 400 tons of cocaine into the country. Trump pardoned him two days before Honduras’s 2025 presidential election, narrowly won by Asfura, calling the conviction politically motivated.
👉 Why it matters. Honduras has been a testing ground for right-wing experiments in recent years, from libertarian charter cities backed by US billionaires like Peter Thiel to one of the world’s first relocations of an embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. If authentic, the recordings would point to a coordinated effort by right-wing governments to finance a covert media network aimed at their rivals.
In a separate exchange with Honduras’s vice president, María Antonieta Mejía, Hernández said that Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, would contribute another USD 350,000 to “extirpate the left-wing cancer” from Latin America.
A January 20 recording carries a voice attributed to Hernández crediting his pardon to Israeli lobbying: “The Prime Minister of Israel is going to give us his support. They had everything to do with my release and my negotiation.”
The recordings also describe benefits allegedly offered to Washington in exchange for its support: expanded special economic zones, control of the interoceanic corridor for General Electric, and a new US military base on Honduran soil.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum dismissed the alleged scheme as an attempt by the “international right” to spread falsehoods, saying it “would not make a dent” in her administration. Colombia’s Gustavo Petro said the affair proved that his country and Mexico were leading the genuine fight against drug trafficking.
“What reasons does Netanyahu have to pay for the release of a major drug trafficker, the former president of Honduras, solely to destroy the governments of Colombia and Mexico?” Petro said. “Doesn’t this prove that we are the ones leading the fight against the narcos?”
Hernández dismissed the recordings as fabrications. “It is clearly not my voice,” the former president said, calling the case an attack by “the radical left and its international partners” using “the same fake audio tactics that they used to try to steal the 2025 elections.”
On May 7, the day the recordings went viral, Hondurasgate reported nearly 40,000 hacking attempts in a single day, traced mostly to the US and Israel.
Still, the recordings first surfaced on Diario Red, a digital outlet run by the Spanish left-wing politician Pablo Iglesias and staffed in part by writers sympathetic to Russia and Venezuela — a chain of custody that warrants skepticism in all directions. Especially because the revelations are tidy. Perhaps too tidy.
DEMOGRAPHICS
More warning signs about South America’s aging population
From sports to music, from delivery couriers to retail clerks, Latin America’s most visible faces tend to be young. The region is indeed younger than Europe, East Asia, North America or Australasia — but it is aging fast, and demographers do not expect that youthfulness to last.
👉 Why it matters. According to the United Nations’ World Population Prospects, the median age in South American countries has been rising for decades, and it is increasing at an accelerating pace. The figures come from lining up each country’s population from youngest to oldest and finding the midpoint in a given year.
In 1950, the oldest median age in the region was Uruguay’s, at 26.8. Thirty years later, the median Uruguayan was 29.1 — a gain of 2.3 years. By 2010, the figure had reached 33, a gain of 3.9 years over the same span. By 2025, it stood at 36.4: another 3.4 years added, in half the time.
Uruguay is often described as culturally European, but the same trajectory is visible across the region. Chile vaulted from a median age of 26.8 in 1990 to 36.9 in 2025, making it the oldest country in South America by this measure.
Brazil’s shift is starker still, as we have covered through the years: from an extraordinarily youthful 17.5 years in 1950, to 21.4 in 1990, to 34.8 in 2025. Colombia tracks a similar arc, from 16.9 to 20.8 to 32.5 over the same span.
Looking further out, analysts expect Chile to reach a median age of 48.9 by 2050, followed by Uruguay at 45.2 and Brazil at 43.9. Paraguay, Bolivia and Venezuela will remain relatively young, at 37 or lower — but that is still a sharp rise compared to their current medians of below 30.
Needless to say, the assumptions behind these projections could vary. The figures from 2024 onwards are based on the UN’s “medium scenario,” one of several demographic projections which rely on different premises about future fertility, mortality and migration trends.
Yet no matter how the variables are tuned, the conclusion is the same: Latin America is going gray faster, and the region will have to adapt — with fewer young workers and mounting pressure on health and pension systems.
🎂 You can also read: Latin America’s population pyramid is starting to invert
QUESTION OF THE WEEK
Which of these famous Latin American billionaires does not control a media group?
- Marcos Galperín (Argentina)
- The Marinho brothers (Brazil)
- The Luksic family (Chile)
- Ricardo Salinas Pliego (Mexico)
QUICK CATCH-UP
📉 After a stretch of corruption scandals and economic strain, Argentina’s Javier Milei caught a break this week: April inflation came in at 2.6%, still higher than most of the region but ending a 10-month run of accelerating price increases, which we had flagged in March.
🪫 As Cuba contends with prolonged blackouts across much of the island (its energy minister said this week the country has run out of diesel and fuel oil due to a US blockade), CIA Director John Ratcliffe met with Raúl Castro’s grandson Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, known as “El Cangrejo” — the latest in a series of high-level encounters with the Castro family over the future of a cornered US foe.
🥷 The CIA is also making headlines in Mexico, where President Claudia Sheinbaum clashed with CNN over a report that US intelligence operatives were carrying out covert attacks to kill drug traffickers on Mexican soil. The CIA has a long record of clandestine operations in the region — a sensitive topic for the Latin American left, and one sharpened by rumors that Sheinbaum may be secretly collaborating with Donald Trump on the matter.
🌎 Trump, for his part, is doing little to dispel the perception of regional encroachment, posting memes about absorbing Venezuela as a 51st US state on social media (which official government accounts reposted). Washington exerts heavy influence over President Delcy Rodríguez since the capture of her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro — a leverage that has fueled accusations of treason against Rodríguez inside the Venezuelan Armed Forces.