The following is adapted from The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the Aftermath of the Coup , now available from Haymarket Books.

When, exactly, did I start using the term “axe murderer” all the time? As in, “The President of Honduras is an Axe Murderer.” At first, I was just being flip and only threw it out there every once in a while, in private, to refer in a general sense to the successive governments that took power in Honduras after the coup. “The Honduran government is run by axe murderers,” I’d drop, but only with people who already understood what I meant.

But as Juan Orlando Hernández’s presidential campaign advanced over the course of 2012 and ‘13, I got more specific. I needed some kind of shorthand to try to capture his criminal bulldozing of the rule of law and to convey quite how villainous he was.

In public, I still held back my epithets, instead building my case slowly but clearly from documented evidence — although when he was inaugurated I did call him a “dangerous thug” in the Houston Chronicle. But during meetings in Congress, I was increasingly blindsided by the turnover among aides: every six months I’d meet with a new sea of twenty-six-year-olds who knew nothing about Honduras at all.

Over and over, I’d try to explain in a half-hour meeting quite how bad it was down there and who the US was supporting. Afterwards, describing those meetings, I’d groan to friends, “It’s zero to axe murderers in thirteen minutes.” Casting “axe murderer” out there, I flailed in the gap between the horrors I was tracking in Honduras, on the one hand, and my inability to get other people to understand what I wanted to communicate, on the other.

Despite all the atrocities, though, I never deployed the phrase in print. I’d already gotten letters threatening to sue me for character defamation from Miguel Facussé, whose Dinant Corporation was widely alleged to have murdered campesinos struggling for land rights in the Bajo Aguán Valley. Widely alleged, I am now careful to insert. So, let me clarify: The president of Honduras is an alleged dangerous thug. The president of Honduras is an alleged axe murderer.

Actual axe murderers in Honduras, however, don’t, as rule, use axes. When it comes to that, they are more likely to use machetes.

On March 13, 2012, Fausto Flores Valle, a radio host in the Aguán Valley, was riding along on his bicycle when assassins suddenly killed him with 18 machete blows. On March 5, 2014, a group of people ambushed María Santos Dominguez, an Indigenous activist with COPINH who had been vocally opposing a dam development, and attacked her with machetes, rocks, and sticks. When her son ran up to help, they cut off his right ear and part of his face. On May 4, 2014, Cándido Rodríguez Castillo allegedly raped a thirteen-year-old girl, then killed her, her ten-year-old sister, her seven-year-old brother, and their eighteenth-month-old baby brother, using a machete.

But those stories are about individual acts, in which you can see the axe/machete-wielder. They don’t capture the systemic way in which raw violence is countenanced, encouraged, and committed by the post-coup Honduran government as an institution, and directed especially at social justice activists, land rights defenders, the opposition, and journalists. They don’t capture the judges who let off their vicious drug trafficker allies; they don’t capture the illegally-appointed attorney general transferring out twenty-one prosecutors who had been pursuing high-level cases of organized crime. They don’t capture Hernández and his allies in the Honduran Congress abolishing the Commission for the Review of Public Security in 2013, with a green light from the US Embassy, as the president swept into office.

What’s going on in Honduras — the axe murdering — is collective, then. Yet at the top of that government sits a single individual who, to the best of my knowledge, has never physically killed anyone with an axe or a machete, but who bears enormous responsibility for what’s going on.

When the supposed “crisis” of children at the border hit the media in June 2014, Juan Orlando Hernández’s track record was suddenly a hundred percent latent; he was just Mr. Charm, with his glowing interviews. US senators and members of Congress quoted him like he was a heroic figure fighting the good fight against the drug traffickers, protecting his borders against human smugglers, and caring for the little children with nationalistic love.

I went nuts. “You’d never know the President of Honduras is an [alleged] axe murderer,” I sobbed.

On July 25, 2014, when Barack Obama rewarded Juan Orlando with a meeting at the White House, the two were joined by then-President Otto Pérez Molina of Guatemala, who has been widely implicated in torture and the “scorched earth” mass razing of entire Mayan villages during the 1980s, and Salvador Sánchez Cerén, the new President of El Salvador, a leader of the guerrilla war against the US-supported regime during the 1980s. It read like a joke: “A genocidal torturer, an axe murderer, a former guerrilla comandante, and the leader of the free world walk into a bar….” (Correction: “An alleged genocidal torturer, an alleged axe murderer…”)

Those unaccompanied minors who fled Honduras in the first six months of 2014, like thousands since, were running away from the axe murderers in their woods. What did they find in the northern woods, when they reached the US border? When US government planes, driven by rabid packs of immigrant-haters, deported them back south, into whose arms have they been delivered?

In September 2016, I was finishing dinner with a colleague in a small Italian restaurant in Washington, D.C., when suddenly Secretary of State John Kerry came in and sat down at the table next to us, two feet away. My dinner-mate and I exchanged astonished looks for the next hour, prolonging our meal with a second glass of wine and then dessert. When we got up to leave, she introduced herself to Secretary Kerry and chatted a bit. So I decided I would, too. I said my name, then told Kerry that I worked on Honduras policy. “How are we doing down there?” he queried, amiably. I blurted back matter-of-factly: “We’re supporting the axe murderers.”

I didn’t need thirteen minutes, only four seconds and five words. Then the maitre’d and secret service officers swooped in and whisked us away.