The News You Need on Tuesday, May 5th, 2026.
A look at Trump's Mexico strategy, his gift to Vladimir Putin, Southern Baptists and the GOP and other news you need today.
Trump, Milei and the Drug Lords
La Jornada (Mexico City)
Scott: So what is Donald Trump’s attitude towards the narcotraficantes, the drug lords who constitute a powerful force across Latin America?
A senior Drug Enforcement Agency official who was involved in several White House briefings tells me “it’s complicated… When we proposed campaigns to destroy drug lords, Trump was never particularly interested. But he was interested in spectacular bombings and firefights that could be captured in video for audiences on Fox. He was interested in battling drug lords for entertainment value, full stop.” This insight has been born out in spades.
But a leaked conversation in Mexico City’s La Jornada reveals the complexity of Trump’s drug lord dealings. If they’re willing to cut him in on the profits, they can be very valuable allies.
The leaked tapes show Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei conspiring with the drug lord Juan Orlando Hernández—the drug-trafficking former dictator of Honduras, whom Trump freed from prison, the man the DEA identified as dominating cocaine traffic in Mesoamerica.
In a recording between Milei and the drug lord, Hernández proposed creating a right-wing fake news operation, with the support of Donald Trump and co-funding from the US Treasury, in order to spread propaganda online to “eliminate the left” in Latin America, targeting Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, and the left-wing opposition in Honduras.
The audio files—sourced from WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram—“form part of a detailed investigative report published by Diario Red América Latina (directed by Spaniard Pablo Iglesias and based in Mexico) and the portal Hondurasgate,” notes the newspaper Página 12.
Hernández was arrested on drug trafficking charges in the United States in 2024, sentenced to 24 years in prison, and subsequently pardoned by Donald Trump—despite being one of the region’s most prominent drug kingpins.
In one of the audio files, Hernández asserts that, “as part of this group”—or continental entity—Milei plays a crucial role, as he contributes thousands of dollars toward the creation of these sources of “fake news.” “We are going to set up a cell, Mr. President [referring to Honduran President Nasry Asfura]. We’ll do it from here—from the United States—so that we can’t be traced back there in Honduras. It’s going to function as a Latin American news site,” the newspaper highlighted.
The audio recordings also reveal that Hernández has been tasked with “attacking and excising the cancer of the Left from [Honduras]—and from all of Latin America,” notes Diario Red. To achieve this, he needs to organize and establish a “digital journalism unit” within the United States—an operation that will be managed by “someone else from here... from the U.S. President’s team.”
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Charles: Scott Horton and I first bonded 20 years ago when we were each blogging about the horrendous torture being carried out by the second Bush administration during the so-called War on Terror. The New York Times news department never called torture torture. They always called it ‘enhanced interrogation.’
We both thought it was a terrible thing.
Scott: On the issue of the journalist and the journalist’s responsibility, I’m really quite struck by something that Pope Leo said. That the moral, ethical and professional responsibility of journalists is not to be regurgitating the views of people in power—like political figures and wealthy corporate interests that control commercial media—but to be an independent voice.
To assess carefully whether the things that are claimed as facts really are facts, and to discover what the facts are.
