Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

In the fall of 2018, as hundreds of Honduran families from the migrant caravan reached the US border, Tony Hernández touched down in Miami, where agents from the DEA arrested him. The charges included trafficking more than 185,000 kilograms of cocaine, paying bribes to politicians up and down his drug routes, and selling weapons. Juan Orlando Hernández denied any knowledge of his brother’s activities, but by the summer of 2019 evidence linking him to drug money was being made public. At the start of August, a forty-four-page court filing against Tony Hernández, in New York, referred to a certain “co-conspirator four.” The person was unnamed, but clearly identifiable: “CC-4 was elected President of Honduras in late 2013.”