The humbling of Honduras’s president, Juan Orlando Hernández

LIKE MOST citizens of Central America’s northern-triangle countries, Hondurans have reasons to flee. Gangs terrorise them. Jobs pay poorly. Many of the half-million Hondurans in the United States urge relatives to come. Since October, Mexican and American border agents have detained a 30th of Honduras’s population. On July 26th Guatemala and the United States signed a safe-third-country agreement, the main aim of which is to oblige Hondurans who wish to seek asylum in the United States to do so in Guatemala first. That is unlikely to stop the exodus.

Honduras at least has strong leadership, or so it once seemed. Guatemala’s ineffectual president, Jimmy Morales, a former comedian, will soon hand power to the winner of an election to be held on August 11th. El Salvador’s new president, Nayib Bukele, is energetic but has little support in congress. Juan Orlando Hernández, Honduras’s president since 2014, was thought to be the region’s political genius, endowed with a preternatural talent for keeping and wielding power.