By: Insight Crime
January 23, 2026
On February 12, 2025, a convicted drug trafficker named Bayron Ruiz stopped at a warehouse in Fraijanes, Guatemala, a town of about 60,000 residents near the country’s capital that’s known for its acidic coffee.
Ruiz was slim, having dropped significant weight while in prison so that, as he would describe later, “no one would recognize” him. When he returned to his car, his bodyguards were waiting. But so were a pair of assassins on motorcycles.
Videos that later appeared on social media show the chaos that ensued. In one, shots from semi-automatic weapons ring out, and a body is seen lying in the street. In another, armed men pull a limp body from a gray Lexus SUV, stuff it in the back of a white pickup truck, and then speed away.
At least two people died in the shootout: a Colombian assassin, whose body was left in the street, and Ruiz, who was pronounced dead after being taken to a nearby hospital.
There are many theories about Ruiz’s death. Authorities speculated that it could have been the result of a drug deal gone wrong, while others suspected it was someone taking revenge over Ruiz’s cooperation with US authorities as part of a plea deal he had worked out to reduce his prison sentence or the result of a long-simmering dispute between rivals.
Adding to the mystery is one thing they might not have known: Ruiz was the source of a video published by InSight Crime and N+ Univision in which Carlos Zelaya, the brother-in-law of Honduran President Xiomara Castro, negotiates a bribe with notorious drug traffickers during Castro’s failed 2013 bid for the presidency.
The video rocked Honduras. Members of the first family, including Zelaya, resigned from their government posts, and it set off a diplomatic clash between the United States and Honduras over counternarcotics and law enforcement cooperation – one that has been further muddied following US President Donald Trump’s December 1-pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been convicted of drug trafficking by the US.
It also colored the recent November 30 election, leaving the ruling Libre Party battling many of the same accusations of drug trafficking and corruption that catapulted Castro to victory in 2021. Libre Party candidate Rixi Moncada received 19% of the vote during the November 30 election, finishing in third place. The winner, Nasry Asfura of the National Party, will take office on January 27.
Origins of the Investigation
On April 4, 2022, we sent a letter requesting an interview to Ruiz, who was imprisoned in upstate New York. The letter was one of dozens we sent. They were part of an investigation that began in the fall of 2019 following the drug trafficking trial of Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, a former legislator and a brother of the then-president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández.
The trial made two things clear: first, that President Hernández was also a target of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); second, that some of the key witnesses, the notorious leaders of the Cachiros drug clan, had made an untold number of recordings of politicians and other traffickers before turning themselves in to US authorities. Tony Hernández was convicted and sentenced to life in prison; Juan Orlando was later convicted in a separate trial before being pardoned by President Trump.
But during and after the trials, only a small portion of these videos had been made public, and strict legal rules regarding evidence made obtaining these videos via records requests and other means very difficult. We wanted those videos, but we also wanted to know more about the links between politicians and traffickers in Honduras. As part of that effort, we sent batches of letters, starting just before the COVID-19 pandemic, to all the Honduran drug traffickers we believed were imprisoned in the United States, as well as several other traffickers from Guatemala and Mexico who had worked with Honduran trafficking rings.
Five years after we started our letter-writing campaign, on May 14, 2024, we received a text message from a Guatemalan number with a picture of the letter that we had sent to Ruiz.
“You sent me this letter in prison,” said the text.
The next message was a screenshot of Google search results of Carlos Zelaya, then-secretary of Congress and the brother of former Honduran President Manuel “Mel” Zelaya. Mel’s wife is the current president, Xiomara Castro.
“You wanna know about that guy? I have something that could be interesting for the press,” wrote Ruiz in the text accompanying the screenshot.
In a subsequent phone call, Ruiz said that he had a video of Zelaya and asked to meet with us in Honduras. But Ruiz, who allegedly started out as a sicario, or hitman, had a reputation for violence. He allegedly killed dozens of people, including a police officer who he had reportedly decapitated. One former trafficker, who spoke with InSight Crime on the condition of anonymity, called Ruiz “a psychopath.” So we asked Ruiz to send the video via email instead.
“I’m gonna send it, and then I will explain to you what that is,” said Ruiz in the call.
But weeks went by, and despite repeated assurances from Ruiz that he would send it, the information never arrived. Maybe he was afraid, we surmised, or maybe sending a large file was beyond Ruiz’s technical capabilities. After weighing the risks, we decided to meet with Ruiz in person. Days later, Jeff boarded a plane to Honduras.
Meeting Bayron Ruiz
On the evening of July 4, 2024, Jeff sat near the pool of a hotel in the coastal city of La Ceiba when a skinny man wearing designer clothes and a baseball cap entered and scanned the scene. Jeff, despite not being sure who it was, waved the person over.
The two exchanged a handshake and greeted one another, “Mucho gusto.”
When Bayron Ruiz was arrested in Guatemala in 2018, the pictures that appeared in the media showed a heavyset man. But this man was slim and wearing tight jeans. As he would explain later, he used his time in prison to slim down, which he hoped would help him fly under the radar.
“No one is going to recognize me,” he told Jeff.
When Ruiz first received our letter, he was in a federal prison in New York after pleading guilty to a drug conspiracy charge. While the charge carries a maximum of life in prison, he was released on June 23, 2022, after serving five years.
Usually, such preferential treatment is reserved for people who have provided significant cooperation to prosecutors. .
When Jeff asked him about his cooperation, Ruiz took an ironic tone. “I told them everything,” he said with a smile.
After spending some time in the United States on a deferred deportation, Ruiz said he traveled to Guatemala, where he also had citizenship. He later returned to Honduras, he said, to see his mother and because he wanted to get one of his brothers out of jail. But he said he planned to return to his adopted country soon, where he felt safer.
“Guatemala is more peaceful,” he said.
When they finally spoke about the video, Ruiz said it was one of several implicating politicians that had been given to him by someone close to Devis and Javier Rivera Maradiaga, the leaders of the Cachiros. For more than a year, they recorded countless videos of their drug trafficking associates and political allies before surrendering to US authorities.
“And the video?” Jeff asked. “Do you have it?”
Ruiz said he had left it at his residence nearby.
“Tomorrow I’ll take you to my house,” he said.
The Second Meeting
The next day, Jeff was eating lunch beside the hotel pool when he saw a man enter with the butt of a handgun sticking out from the waist of his jeans. Unsure of the man’s intentions, Jeff kept his head down, but after surveying the pool, the man approached him.
“Are you waiting for the boss?” he asked.
“Ah, yes,” Jeff replied.
The man then led Jeff to a shiny, new pickup truck that was idling outside. Ruiz was behind the wheel, a handgun between his legs. Another handgun sat on the center console. As Jeff climbed into the back, Ruiz and Jeff exchanged hellos, then Ruiz hit the accelerator.
As Ruiz drove, the subject turned to women. Ruiz asked Jeff about his experience with catrachas, slang for Honduran women. He boasted about the women he was seeing and offered to connect Jeff with some that he knew.
After driving for about 20 minutes, the vehicle approached a police checkpoint. Despite the weapons in the car, Ruiz seemed unfazed and rolled down his tinted window. The police in Honduras regularly set up checkpoints, and it is not clear what criteria they have for stopping people, but they do search vehicles and make the occasional arrest. In this case, the officer waved the car through without any questions.
Soon after, Ruiz pulled off the highway down a dirt road that led to a house with high walls. Inside, there was a pool that had seen better days. Several armed men sat watch, including men from a pickup that had been trailing the car since it had left the hotel.
Ruiz sat Jeff at a table beside the pool and entered the house. A couple minutes later, he returned with a banker’s bag. “Here it is,” he said matter-of-factly, handing it to Jeff. He then pulled four cell phones from his pockets and sat down.
Jeff unzipped the bag and found a USB drive, which he connected to his laptop. He then scrolled through the video. It took a while before finally, in minute 22, the face of Carlos Zelaya appeared on the screen.
“There he is,” said Ruiz, a smile cutting across his face.
‘They’re all Hypocrites’
After Jeff and Ruiz finished watching the video, Jeff spent the next half hour chatting with Ruiz about the video and other topics. Ruiz said he had gotten it from a close associate of the Cachiros.
Ruiz claimed he had other videos as well, including one of Mauricio Villeda, a Liberal Party legislator and former presidential candidate. But he said that he had hidden them in different places and had only so far been able to retrieve this one. (A video of Villeda meeting with drug traffickers was later one of several apparently leaked to Honduran media in 2025 by the public prosecutor’s office.)
“They’re all hypocrites,” he said.
The Zelayas, he added, referring to Mel and Carlos, were the same as Juan Orlando and Tony Hernandez, the two highest-profile Honduran politicians ever convicted in the US for drug trafficking. The Zelayas have denied working with drug traffickers in any way, and Carlos, when discussing the video, said they had not worked with drug traffickers nor received any campaign contributions from them.
Meanwhile, the police had been tipped off that Ruiz was back in Honduras and had been hunting for him. Around mid-August, the police believed Ruiz was at the home in the La Ceiba area where Jeff had met with him. But, as he had on previous occasions, Ruiz escaped. Authorities’ suspicions were correct: Minutes after they executed the raid, one of Ruiz’s bodyguards arrived with a Colombian prostitute he had just picked up for Ruiz from the airport.
During their search that day, police found the banker’s bag with a USB that had the video of the drug traffickers meeting with Carlos Zelaya on it.
A justice official said that after police officers reviewed its contents, the USB was passed to the Public Prosecutor’s Office. The implications for the government were troubling. Unsure how Ruiz could have gotten his hands on the video, some authorities suspected he was working for the DEA.
The ‘Narco Video’
On August 23, 2024, as part of our reporting to corroborate the video’s authenticity, Jeff spoke with Juan Ramón Matta Waldurraga, a convicted drug trafficker who spent several years in a US prison before returning to Honduras. Matta Waldurraga, who reportedly has close ties to the Zelaya family, denied that the meeting shown in the video had taken place despite being told by Jeff that it had been captured on camera.
On August 28, President Castro denounced the extradition treaty with the United States that had sent dozens of Honduran drug traffickers to face justice, including her predecessor Hernández, who was indicted the day he left office, arrested a few weeks later, and extradited to the United States in April 2022. The Honduran government cited comments made by the US ambassador about a meeting between the heads of the Honduran and Venezuelan armed forces as the motivation behind the stunning move. The Castro administration later sent a formal letter to US authorities, setting off a six-month sunset period.
By then, according to the justice official, the Honduran government had already become aware of the existence of the video.
On August 31, Carlos Zelaya was met by a gaggle of reporters upon exiting the Public Prosecutor’s Office in downtown Tegucigalpa, where he gave a stunning impromptu press conference. InSight Crime had yet to publish the video, but Zelaya confirmed that the video of the meeting between him and several drug traffickers was real. He announced that he would be resigning from Congress. Not long after, his son, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, resigned as defense minister. In his defense, Zelaya claimed that he thought he was meeting with legitimate “businessmen.”
On September 1, a host from a media outlet closely aligned with the Libre Party said live on air that the reporter Jeff Ernst had the video. At that point, the only person reporters from InSight Crime had contacted about the video was Matta Waldurraga.
On September 3, InSight Crime published the video.
The Aftermath
The publication set off a political firestorm that is still smoldering in Honduras. Members of the Castro administration called it suspicious and suggested that it was part of a conspiracy by the US government to tarnish the image of the Honduran government. But they did not question the veracity of the video.
Nearly six months later, on February 12, 2025, Ruiz stopped at that warehouse in Fraijanes, Guatemala. His subsequent murder remains a mystery. Guatemalan authorities said that it may have been a result of a drug deal gone wrong, and Honduran authorities pledged to support their counterparts. But no one has been charged beyond the surviving assassin, who was recently convicted for the murder.
Days after that, on February 18, as the sunset period for the extradition treaty was about to expire, the Honduran government struck a deal with the Trump administration that would allow the treaty to remain active but with safeguards against supposed political use.
On January 10, 2026, President Castro announced that she would rescind the denouncement of the extradition, saying that doing so demonstrates her administration’s commitment to the fight against drug trafficking.
President-elect Nasry Asfura has vowed to continue with the extradition treaty. But Trump’s pardon of former President Hernández, then capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro a month later, has made US counternarcotics policy appear incoherent and damaged the Department of Justice’s credibility.
Although Carlos Zelaya resigned from Congress, he continues to be a powerful figure within the Libre Party, according to numerous sources.