Fernando Cerimedo, a political strategist known for running social media campaigns for far-right candidates across Latin America, is under investigation in Bolivia after authorities said they found evidence on his phone that he had ordered the killing of his pregnant partner, Nadia Beller.
Bolivian investigators said they recovered a message from Cerimedo's phone in which he told an associate not to tell anyone, said that Beller had betrayed them, and said they needed to eliminate her immediately or they would be in serious trouble. In the message, he asked the associate whether they knew someone who could carry out the job. Prosecutors have said they have few doubts about what the exchange shows.
Confession to Running AI Troll Farms
The case has drawn renewed attention to a 2023 interview Cerimedo gave to journalist Hugo Alconada of Argentina's La Nacion newspaper. Asked whether he ran trolls, Cerimedo acknowledged that he did, saying he ran a lot of them. He said the accounts were generated using machines and artificial intelligence, that operators supplied the instructions and variables used to build them, and that his team would then wait three or four months before activating the accounts so that social media algorithms would not flag them as fake.
Comparison to Cambridge Analytica
The only precedent for a disinformation operation of this scale, according to the column, is Cambridge Analytica, the British consultancy that harvested data from 87 million Facebook users without their consent to build personalized political advertising. That data was later linked to both Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 United States presidential election and the Brexit referendum held in the United Kingdom the same year.
Espinoza argued in the column that the case is more than a tabloid scandal, describing it as evidence that voters across the region have been treated as an easily manipulated electorate, steered toward particular political decisions through disinformation, bot farms and hate campaigns.
She wrote that it remains undocumented what arrangements Cerimedo may have made with candidates and their inner circles, or whether campaign financing involved drug trafficking or illegal mining, as well as the precise nature of his ties to the MAGA movement associated with United States President Donald Trump. She described the bot operation as a large-scale deception with no possibility of reversal, since the governments that benefited from it are already installed in office.
'If I Talk, Eight Governments Fall'
Cerimedo reportedly said, after being detained at the Palmasola prison in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, that if he talked, eight governments would fall. People familiar with his career said he was referring to Argentina, Chile, Honduras, Colombia, El Salvador, Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay, all countries where far-right candidates have recently won office.
Of those, the leader most closely tied to Cerimedo, after Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz, appears to be Argentine President Javier Milei, whom Cerimedo described in the Alconada interview as submissive.
Ties to the Bolsonaro Family
Another politician linked to Cerimedo is Flavio Bolsonaro, who has not yet won election and, according to the column, is unlikely to do so following the scandal. His brother, Eduardo Bolsonaro, thanked Cerimedo at a gala held at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida estate of Donald Trump, where Cerimedo was honored as a leading political strategist for his role in the family's candidacy. Peru's Keiko Fujimori was reportedly also in attendance.
During the gala, Cerimedo spoke about what he called a cultural war, describing it as the ideological core of the MAGA movement. He said its main objective was to ensure the left never returns to power in Latin America, which he said required helping far-right candidates not only win elections but also govern.
The column also raised the possibility that low-income supporters of far-right movements, who often defend policies that primarily benefit the wealthy, might feel taken advantage of upon learning how Cerimedo's operation worked.
