Próspera-sites: Tony, Orlando, and Don

The former president of Honduras was serving a 45-year prison sentence for drug trafficking. Why did Trump pardon him? And how do Peter Thiel and Roger Stone fit in?

I. Crash & Burn

On Saturday, December 16, 2017, a military helicopter crashed in the mountains between Tegucigalpa, where it had taken off, and Comayagua, 40 miles outside the Honduran capital.

The wreckage was found a few hours later. There were no survivors. All six people on board were dead: the pilot, four security officers, and Hilda Hernández, the 51-year-old Minister of Communications and older sister of Juan Orlando Hernández, or JOH, as he is known—the President of Honduras.

The crash happened at a critical moment in JOH’s political career. He’d been elected president in 2014, was granted special permission by the Honduran legislature to run for re-election in 2017, and had, on November 26th, eked out a victory by the narrowest of margins.

Too narrow, some believed.

The Organization of American States’s Electoral Observation Mission found the results fishy, citing “the lack of guarantees and transparency, as well as the accumulation of irregularities, mistakes and systemic problems that have surrounded this electoral process during the pre-electoral phase, election day, and the post-electoral phase, that as a corollary do not allow the Mission to have certainty about the results.”

(Washington was not as fussy. Donald Trump recognized his fellow rightwinger Orlando Hernández as the winner straight away.)

Because of the photo finish, the official ratification of the election took weeks. On Monday, December 18—just two days after the helicopter crash—Honduras’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal declared JOH the winner: “With 1,410,888 votes in his favor, that is, 42.95%, Hernández won the 2017 general elections, which were held on November 26 with the massive participation of 3,476,419 Hondurans at the polls.” With the president mourning the sudden death of his sister, it was not the moment to raise concerns.

The timing was so curious that at least one prominent Honduran, Santos Orellana Rodríguez, an army captain who’d been purged from the military by the Hernández regime, called bullshit. This is from a CREITERIO report:

“There are things that are difficult to comment on and hypothetical, but within oneself, one’s hunches, one’s experience as an investigator, as an intelligence officer, I have doubts that Mrs. Hilda Hernández was on that aircraft,” said Orellana Rodríguez this morning on the program in La Plaza, directed by journalist Gilda Silvestrucci and broadcast on Radio Globo.

He pointed out that based on his intelligence training and after analyzing the case: “In my personal opinion, I am sure that Mrs. Hilda Hernández was not on that aircraft,” he insisted.

Orellana Rodríguez gave that interview on November 28, 2018, almost a full year after the accident, and just five days after Hilda and Orlando’s kid brother, Antonio “Tony” Hernández, was busted in Miami—charged with trafficking a veritable fuck-ton of cocaine into the United States.

“As alleged, former Honduran Congressman Tony Hernandez was involved in all stages of the trafficking through Honduras of multi-ton loads of cocaine that were destined for the U.S.,” said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman at the announcement of the arrest. “Hernandez allegedly arranged machinegun-toting security for cocaine shipments, bribed law enforcement officials for sensitive information to protect drug shipments, and solicited large bribes from major drug traffickers. Thanks to the ongoing work of the DEA, Hernandez is now in custody on U.S. soil and facing justice in the U.S. courts.”

The two incidents were not unrelated. Captain Orellana Rodríguez was fired from the Honduran army, he claimed, in retaliation for his 2016 public denouncement of Tony Hernández as a drug kingpin. In the same radio broadcast, he said—and I’m paraphrasing—that, given how close the Hernández family was, and how they all moved in the same circles, it beggars belief that Hilda and Orlando did not know what their little bro was up to.

In time, the U.S. Justice Department would come to the same conclusion. At the DOJ’s behest, President Orlando Hernández was arrested by Honduran police on Valentine’s Day 2022—just weeks after completing his second term—and subsequently extradited to the U.S. to face criminal charges. Attorney General Merrick Garland summarized the allegations against JOH in an April 2022 statement:

Hernández is charged with participating in a corrupt and violent drug-trafficking conspiracy to facilitate the importation of tons of cocaine into the United States from 2004 to 2022.

As is charged in the indictment, Hernández abused his position as President of Honduras from 2014 through 2022 to operate the country as a narco-state.

Hernández is alleged to have received millions of dollars from multiple drug trafficking organizations, including from the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, known as El Chapo.

In return, drug traffickers in Honduras were allowed to operate with virtual impunity. We allege that Hernández corrupted legitimate public institutions in the country — including parts of the national police, military, and national Congress.

And we allege that Hernández worked closely with other public officials to protect cocaine shipments bound for the United States.

Those officials included his brother, Tony Hernández, a former Honduras congressman who was convicted in 2019 in the Southern District and sentenced to life in prison.

Two years later, Orlando Hernández was convicted on three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy; in June of 2024, he was sentenced to 540 months in prison. (Taking bribes from El Chapo is a bad look.)

“As President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world, and the people of Honduras and the United States bore the consequences,” Garland said at the sentencing. “Thanks to the diligent work of the Justice Department’s agents and prosecutors, Hernández will now spend more than four decades in prison.”

But Orlando Hernández did not spend four decades in prison—not even close. On December 1, 2025, seemingly out of the blue, JOH was given a full presidential pardon by Donald Trump.

Even by MAGA logic, the move was baffling—especially when, just a few weeks later, Trump sent in the special forces to extradite Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to stand trial in the United States, on similar charges of drug trafficking.

Why did Trump sic the dogs on one alleged drug kingpin, only to pardon another?

Why was Orlando Hernández set free?

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II. Live Long and/in Próspera

The small cluster of countries between Guatemala and Costa Rica has long been a stomping grounds for American imperial fuckery peacekeeping:

• The U.S. intervened in Salvadoran politics for decades, its interference culminating in a brutal civil war caused in part by the Carter Administration’s desire for regime change. Fast forward half a century, and Marco Rubio is bosom buddies with “the world’s coolest dictator,” Nayib Bukele, operator of El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison.

• Long before Iran-Contra was a twinkle in Manucher Ghorbanifar’s eye, the United States Marines were in Nicaragua. The country was under U.S. occupation from 1912 to 1933, due to the natives’ inability to elect “good men”—that is, imperial vassals who would play ball with U.S. business interests.

• Honduras is the original banana republic; that term was coined by O. Henry in a 1904 short story drawn from his experiences working there. The United Fruit Company (later rebranded as Chiquita) and the Standard Fruit Company (Dole) had the run of the place for the decades, starting in the McKinley years. In exchange for land rights and other concessions, these mighty corporations established trading centers, built railroads, and developed infrastructure along the northern coast of the country—not that the average Honduran derived much benefit from the arrangement. To safeguard these lucrative commercial interests, the U.S. sent troops to Honduras in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924, and 1925.

What’s happening in Honduras today is, in many ways, a reboot of those corporate banana plantations. There is an island off the northern coast of Honduras called Roatán—a little sliver of paradise, in the general vicinity of the Cayman Islands, Jamaica, and Cancun:

It’s a gorgeous place, but very poor, and populated in the main by native islanders, many of whom are Black, and not people from the mainland. Caribbean cruise ships stop there.

On that island, in St. John’s Bay, is a place called Zona Próspera—“the first modern charter city with world-class institutions,” according to the literature of the corporation that founded it, Honduras Próspera Inc.

It’s not actually a city. Not yet. Technically, Zona Próspera is a ZEDE—a Zona de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico, or, in English, a Zone for Employment and Economic Development. Zona Próspera is basically an autonomous enclave—part United Fruit Company banana plantation 2.0, part tax haven, part crypto cult, part corporate utopia, part fiefdom, part deregulated medical laboratory, and part Ayn Rand fan fiction.

The founding father of the ZEDE is the American economist Paul Romer, a Nobel Prize winner who was a senior VP at the World Bank. Imagining a 21st-century twist on Hong Kong, he coined the term “charter city” in a 2009 TED Talk that became popular with the John Galt set.

“The key to the project is a charter city,” Romer explained to Freakonomics that same year, “which starts out as a city-sized piece of uninhabited territory and a charter or constitution specifying the rules that will apply there. If the charter specifies good rules (or in our professional jargon, good institutions) millions of people will come together to build a new city.” A Barry Goldwater Field of Dreams, in other words.

ZEDEs became legal in Honduras in 2013. The legislation was championed by the president, who was—you guessed it!—Orlando Hernández. By law, JOH was required to set up an advisory committee, which he did. And the dude gets points for creativity. Among the ZEDE advisors are, as Rachel Corbett noted in her 2024 New York Times feature,

a granddaughter of the final Austrian emperor and a band of Republicans from the U.S. that included the former Reagan speechwriter Mark Klugmann, the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, the former Reagan aide Faith Whittlesey, the libertarian economist Mark Skousen and Ronald Reagan’s son Michael Reagan.

If that doesn’t convey the political bent of the enterprise, perhaps this detail about AmityAge Academy, a local “Bitcoin education center and cafe,” will prove more illuminating. At AmityAge, Corbett met the outfit’s lead educator, Zussel Ramos,

next to a bookshelf stocked with Ludwig von Mises’s Bureaucracy, Ayn Rand’s Capitalism and Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. I bought a coffee — the barista let me pay with “fiat” paper money on a one-time basis — and then Ramos took me on a tour. On the walls downstairs hung a Bitcoin mining machine, a portrait of Guy Fawkes astride a bucking green stallion and a map of Roatán with colored squares of paper marking the dozens of businesses that now accept Bitcoin…

Still not getting the gist? There’s also this piece of local color:

Próspera has become particularly well known for the zone’s experimental medical facilities, which run clinical trials unburdened by F.D.A. standards. The week of my visit, Patri Friedman, grandson of the economist Milton Friedman and the founder of a start-up-cities fund that invested in Próspera, had a chip with his Tesla key implanted into his hand. On a previous trip he brushed his teeth with genetically modified bacteria purported to prevent cavities. Another time he was injected with a protein booster intended to make him “stronger and faster,” as he put it at a conference in Roatán that weekend.

I mean, a descendent of Milton Friedman—the late Chicago School doyen whose reactionary economic theories, when implemented IRL in Chile, gave us Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship…implanting a microchip…in his hand, Revelations-style…that controls the electric automobile built by Elon Musk’s company…which is itself heavily subsidized by the U.S. government…and thus, theoretically, anathema to Friedman? You can’t make this shit up. Kurt Vonnegut couldn’t make this shit up.

If you’re still on the fence, there’s also the fact that Próspera’s investors include Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, and Balaji Srinivasan, whose 2022 book, The Network State, helped flesh out the concept.

“A network state,” Srinivasan writes, “is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.”

He also offers a more detailed definition:

A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.

What a robust ZEDE network state would look like in the real world remains to be seen. What its overlords would want to do there—far from pesky government regulators; where no one can hear you scream—is anybody’s guess. But given the Thiel crew’s dual obsession with immortality and genetic engineering, it’s not hard for one’s imagination to wander into dark, dark places.

Edith Romero of Truthout sums it up neatly:

These ZEDEs are a project of Praxis, a tech billionaire-funded start-up that aims to create libertarian city-states to “restore Western Civilization.” The ZEDEs are allowed to have their own government, police force, courts, laws, and any taxes collected would not be paid to the Honduran government but to the ZEDEs themselves. ZEDEs are a tech billionaire’s dream: unbridled power, tech fantasy, and resource hoarding, where the government is run by AI and cryptocurrency is the main currency.

Network State author Srinivasan and his Silicon Valley chums think of “network” as in The Social Network. I think of “network” as in Network. The tech-bros want everything online, everything on the blockchain; me, I’m channeling Howard Beale:

Turn off your phones. Turn them off now.

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III. Hilda & Hermes & Helicopters & Honduras

As it turns out, Hilda Hernández is not blameless. For all we know, she was the mastermind of the entire operation—the smarter big sister telling her doting little brothers what to do.

Minister of Communications is just a fancy term for Chief Propagandist. Hilda took that part of the job seriously. She recognized the importance of having journalists look with favor on her brother’s administration. So she made sure to compensate them for being nice.

On March 17, 2022, the Honduran publication Contracorriente reported that the late Hilda Hernández’s

name is in the spotlight once again following an indictment by UFERCO (Unidad Fiscal Especializada Contra la Corrupción), the Ministry of Justice’s anti-corruption unit. UFERCO names Hernández as the person who in 2013, created a shell company called Servicios e Inversiones AID, through which more than 122 million lempiras (US$5 million) from the Office of the President was funneled to pay off more than 70 journalists, buy airline tickets, transport pro-government activists to government events, rent armored vehicles, and gain other personal benefits.

The UFERCO investigation alleges that journalists received millions of dollars for “writing favorable news articles about President Juan Hernández, brother of Hilda Hernández, Minister of Communication and Strategy, without disclosing any connections between the journalists and the presidency.” Dubbed the “Hermes” case by UFERCO, the indictment alleges that Hilda Hernández directed Carol Vanessa Alvarado, her friend and assistant, to create a shell company and funnel government funds through that entity to pay for various efforts benefitting her brother’s political campaign and to influence a pro-government narrative in the media. Hermes is the continuation of Pandora and Corruption on Wheels, two investigations initiated earlier by MACCIH (Misión de Apoyo contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad), the now defunct anti-corruption commission.

The investigations revealed that Hilda Hernández worked with a circle of co-conspirators, among them: her assistant, Carol Vanessa Alvarado; José Adolfo Sierra, Alvarado’s chauffeur; her husband, the businessman Jean Francoise de Peirecave; and her incarcerated brother Tony’s wife, Miriam Vanessa Cruz. The journalists they allegedly paid off, meanwhile, are some of the most prominent in Honduras.

Members of JOH’s administration were also indicted, including, Contracorriente tells us, the Secretary of State for Financial Management, a general accountant, and two high-level administrative managers.

By December 2017, JOH’s political future was in doubt. Tony Hernández was still a free man, still working with the Sinaloa cartel, having taken a million-dollar bribe from El Chapo—never a wise idea. Tony was more reckless than Orlando, and both brothers took greater risks than their more careful older sister. But all three were in the crosshairs of law enforcement.

Had Hilda’s heli landed safely in Comayagua, she, too, would have been under indictment. Right before the long arm of the law caught up to her, she died. Could it be that Orellana Rodríguez was right—that Hilda Hernández was not on board the doomed helicopter? Could it be that she read the writing on the wall and was looking for a way out—and found one, when the chopper went down?

Stranger things have happened—especially in Honduras.

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IV. The Need for ZEDE

On June 28, 2009—around the time Paul Romer was giving his TED Talk—Honduran soldiers placed under arrest the president, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, of the liberal party. The charge was, he’d [checks notes] failed to heed a Supreme Court ruling and stop a poll that would have convened a constituent assembly to write a new constitution. Some nerve! When the soldiers whisked him away to Costa Rica rather than allowing him to stand trial in Tegucigalpa, what began as an arrest became a coup d’état.

A new election was held that November, and Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa, of the rightwing National Party, became president. Lobo’s administration was rife with corruption. In 2017, his son, Fabio Lobo, was arrested in Haiti, extradited to the United States, charged with drug trafficking, convicted, and sentenced to 24 years in prison. According to the DOJ, Pepe Lobo was no innocent bystander (boldface mine):

LOBO’s participation in drug trafficking began as early as 2009. During that year, while LOBO’s father was running for president of Honduras, LOBO’s father began receiving bribes from members of a drug-trafficking organization known as the Cachiros, which was a prolific and violent criminal syndicate that relied on connections to politicians, military personnel, and law enforcement to transport cocaine to, within, and from Honduras. The leaders of the Cachiros paid Porfirio Lobo over approximately $500,000 in exchange for, among other things, political protection from law enforcement investigations, prevention of extradition to the United States, and awards of contracts by Honduran government agencies to money-laundering front companies controlled by the Cachiros.

In 2019, Pepe Lobo’s wife, Rosa Elena Bonilla, was convicted of three counts of misappropriation and eight counts of fraud, and sentenced to 58 years in prison.

The Hernández clan was closely allied with Lobo; during Pepe Lobo’s term, JOH was president of the National Congress, while Hilda Hernández served as his Minister for Social Development. Tegucigalpa was as incestuous as it was corrupt.

In January of 2022, JOH was succeeded as president of Honduras by Xiomara Castro—a Democratic Socialist who also happened to be the wife of Mel Zelaya, the liberal president ousted in the 2009 coup. She became the first female president of Honduras, a sort of Tegucigalpan HRC/Kamala Harris, and brought much-needed reform to the country.

Naturally, Donald Trump hated her guts. But it wasn’t just Castro’s similarities to the two extraordinary women he ran against that drew his ire. She was also staunchly opposed to the ZEDE law, perhaps having flashbacks to the exploitative banana republic era. Later in 2022, under her bold leadership, the ZEDE law was repealed. Two years after that, it was declared unconstitutional by the Honduran Supreme Court, putting the future of Zona Próspera in doubt.

Grace Blakeley at the Jacobin explains what happened next:

Thiel and his band of libertarian ideologues weren’t going to go down without a fight. Honduras Próspera launched an $11 billion ISDS case against the government of Honduras, claiming that its repeal of the ZEDE laws violated the terms of existing international treaties. That amount, $11 billion, represents about two-thirds of the government’s annual budget.

I was not familiar with the ISDS, which stands for Investor-State Dispute Settlement. It is, apparently, a global judicial body that grants corporations the right to sue governments for insane amounts of money, but in the Solomonic wisdom of international law, does not let the same governments sue the corporations—even though the corporations depend on the governments to enforce the rulings. To me, it sounds like the legal equivalent of a sucker punch—but then, I didn’t go to law school.

And you’re not gonna believe this, but the process favors the corporations. A deep-pocketed company suing a poor country via the ISDS is like a pit boss appealing to the casino manager to help arbitrate a round of blackjack—the house always wins.

If Honduras Próspera v. Honduras goes the way these things typically go, Honduras Próspera will prosper—but Honduras will be fucked.

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V. Twice on the Pipe…

And so what was once a banana republic became a narco-state. Each of the two crops has its pluses and minuses. Cocaine is a more lucrative export; bananas are not illegal. But the market for both is driven by heavy demand from the United States. The drug cartels would cease to exist if Americans—including, as that French general recently suggested, and as I have no problem believing, key members of Donald Trump’s inner circle—stopped snorting so much nose candy. It seems unfair to blame little Honduras for substance abuse in the big, bad United States.

We are now 4,000 words into the story. This is, I realize, a lot of information to absorb, and probably too many names to keep track of. So before we explore the motives for Trump pardoning JOH, let’s simplify the timeline:

• 2009: Coup d’état removes liberal president; prominent economist touts charter cities

• 2010: Rightwinger #1 wins the presidency; his family does corrupt shit with cartels

• 2013: ZEDEs legalized in Honduras

• 2014: Rightwinger #2 wins the presidency; his family does corrupt shit with cartels

• 2017: Rightwinger #2 wins re-election by razor-thin margin; Rightwinger #2’s sister dies in accident; Rightwinger #1’s son convicted for drug trafficking (Rightwinger #1 also implicated); Zona Próspera established on island of Roatán; Trump is POTUS

• 2018: Rightwinger #2’s brother convicted for drug trafficking

• 2019: Rightwinger #1’s wife convicted for financial crimes

• 2020: First businesses and residences open at Zona Próspera

• 2021: Zona Próspera enters “rapid growth phase;” Biden is POTUS

• 2022: Social Democrat elected president

• 2022: Rightwinger #2 arrested on drug charges, extradited to United States; ZEDE law repealed

• 2024: ZEDE law declared unconstitutional; Honduras Próspera sues Honduras for $11 billion

• 2025: Trump returns as POTUS; Trump announces pardon of Rightwinger #2 two days before election, endorses Rightwinger #3; Rightwinger #3 wins election; Rightwinger #2 receives pardon

Notice how closely intertwined the Honduras Próspera investors are with Honduras’s rightwing National Party; and Honduras’s rightwing National Party with the drug cartels; and Donald Trump with all three. Yes—all three. He’s right there in the middle of this Diagrama de Venn.

Remember, Donald Trump is a creature of organized crime. Everything he does must be viewed through that criminal lens. Why do we think he routinely denounces the drug cartels? Is it because he wants to keep the American people safe? Or because he wants the cartel bosses to cut him in on the action? Seriously: given what we know about this cruel, petty, greedy, sadistic rapist, which is more likely?

The downside of Donald granting Orlando Hernández a pardon was some grumbling in Congress and a few hours of negative coverage on MSNOW. The benefits were manifold. First, he helped his candidate of choice, Nasry “Tito” Asfura—that is, Rightwinger #3 from the above timeline—win the 2025 election. Asfura is likely to revisit the ZEDE law, which, if re-enacted, would further endear Trump to his billionaire Silicon Valley donors—another plus. In JOH, he not only let loose a fully-owned puppet with deep political networks in Tegucigalpa, which might prove useful down the line, but also established a potential backchannel to the cartel bosses, should that need arise. Too, he threw a bone to Roger Stone, his old pal from the Roy Cohn days, who’d been lobbying for months for a JOH pardon, and even helped Hernández craft the letter that allegedly convinced POTUS to whip out his presidential Sharpie. And if you don’t think Trump somehow made actual cash money from this pardon, then I have some United Fruit Company stock certificates to sell you.

In January 2026, Trump removed Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela, siphoned off the country’s oil reserves, plundered a virtual pirate ship full of gold, and stashed all the proceeds in a private bank in Qatar. He did these things in broad daylight. He bragged about doing these things. And none of them are legal.

Given all of that, as well as his aforementioned ties to organized crime, and his insatiable lust for money and power, why should we assume that Donald hasn’t make the same kind of deal for Honduran cocaine that he made for Venezuelan oil? Because drug trafficking is illegal? Last time I checked, child sex trafficking was illegal; that didn’t stop him from trafficking children with his buddy Jeffrey Epstein for many years.

To be clear, I’m not alleging that Trump is profiting off the narcotics trade. I’m just pointing out that nothing would stop him from doing so, if he saw the right opportunity—and given the known associates of the crook he just pardoned, there’s ample opportunity.

We could ask Juan Orlando Hernández. He might know. But we can’t.

As Pro Publica reported,

prisoners who are released from Hazelton [Federal Prison] when there’s inclement weather or when it’s too late in the day to catch a plane or bus home are put up at the Microtel Inn and Suites at the bottom of the hill. It’s a two-star hotel where a room costs $69 per night. In the morning, they’re given a ticket and sent on their way.

But for Hernández, prison officials activated a four-man tactical team, paying at least three of them overtime to drive him to the luxury hotel in Manhattan, according to government records and law enforcement sources. A standard room there costs more than $1,000 per night.

TL;DR: JOH went straight from Misery Mountain to the fucking Waldorf-Astoria!

That was in early December. JOH hasn’t been seen since. He’s surely not in Honduras, because there’s a warrant out there for his arrest. His wife says he’s safe and in a secure location. She may not even know his actual whereabouts.

Orlando Hernández has gone to ground.

Hilda taught him well.

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Photo credit: JOH at the World Economic Forum, 2014. Plus some add-ons.

Thanks to DH for the help.