Fernando Cerimedo, the Argentine political operative who served as top adviser to Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz, is being held in preventive detention in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, accused of hiring gunmen to murder his former partner, Bolivian lawyer and activist Nadia Beller.
Beller, who is pregnant, was shot three times outside a hotel on the night of August 17 by two assailants dressed as delivery drivers. She survived. Cerimedo was arrested the next morning attempting to board a flight to Buenos Aires and has been ordered to remain in pre-trial custody for 180 days. Bolivian authorities have since granted Beller protected-witness status and are holding her at an undisclosed location.
Three further investigations have been opened against Cerimedo in Bolivia: for illicit enrichment, following searches that turned up an initial $40,000 in cash and, according to subsequent reports, as much as $500,000 in cash and suspect assets; for the protection of irregular flights out of the Beni municipality of Santa Ana, allegedly carrying illicit substances toward Brazil; and in connection with a case known as the “narcoencomiendas,” involving the irregular movement of 350,000 bolivianos with the participation of a pilot and three police officers.
On August 29, a Bolivian tribunal ordered a second preventive detention for Cerimedo on the illicit enrichment charge.
Cerimedo has wept publicly at several of his hearings, complaining at the most recent that his life had been ruined. What is being ruined is something larger. The man behind digital publicity operations of Trump’s allies throughout the region is now in the public eye, and the material emerging from his telephone threatens to bring down entire governments.
The Trump connection
Cerimedo’s position was never that of a mere public relations consultant. His business partner is Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager and owner of Campaign Nucleus, which uses artificial intelligence to analyze voter sentiment and generate individually targeted messages. In March 2025, Cerimedo was presented as Latin American representative for Campaign Nucleus and for EyesOver, a project led by Parscale in direct collaboration with the Trump family.
Parscale’s own trajectory illustrates the character of these operations. He engaged Cambridge Analytica for Trump’s 2016 campaign. In January 2025 he was named chief strategy officer of the conservative Salem Media Group. In September 2025 he registered as a foreign agent for the government of Israel, managing a $45 million contract that, according to the Wall Street Journal, involved millions of AI-generated text messages sent to American mobile phones by a group calling itself “Friends for Peace”—an operation aimed, according to Time, at producing 100 pieces of content monthly with 80 percent directed at Generation Z, explicitly intended to prevent young conservatives from turning against Israel over Gaza.
Cerimedo has also been linked to Roger Stone, the self-described “political hit man” and decades-long Trump confidant. Stone was a key lobbyist behind Trump’s pardon of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been convicted for trafficking more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.
In February 2026, at Mar-a-Lago’s first “Hispanic Gala,” Cerimedo received the award for “Hispanic Political Consultant of the Year,” presented personally by Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Brazilian former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is currently serving a sentence for leading a failed coup attempt in 2022. Eduardo Bolsonaro praised Cerimedo for having “had the courage, from Argentina, to help Brazil” by spreading the lies about election fraud in 2022 used to promote the abortive coup.
The depth of these relationships found public expression when Marco Rubio appeared alongside Paz and Cerimedo in Doral, Florida, during the “Shield of the Americas” summit. This is the actual content of Washington’s hemispheric offensive. The political and military operations being conducted under the false banner of fighting organized crime and drug trafficking are realized through figures now under criminal investigation for organizing narcotics deals, bot farms and murder-for-hire.
Brazil, Honduras, Chile, Colombia
The pattern is consistent across the region: aggressive digital operations built on automated accounts, followed after victory by installation inside the incoming government, almost always without any formal position requiring accountability.
Brazil. Cerimedo worked on Bolsonaro’s digital strategy in 2018 and 2022, then hosted a YouTube livestream drawing 400,000 viewers to allege that Lula’s victory was fraudulent. A 135-page report by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes assigned him a concrete role in the destabilization that followed, through the “digital militias” that established the fraud narrative.
Honduras. Cerimedo advised Nasry Asfura’s 2025 campaign and says he arranged Trump’s Truth Social endorsement days before the vote. Marlon Ochoa, then a National Electoral Council member, states that Cerimedo’s voice appears on recordings he delivered to the attorney general on December 23, in which the speaker says votes were inserted for Asfura in certain ballot boxes, unfavorable votes removed, and the armed forces already brought into line. He further instructs that a vote-by-vote recount should be refused.
Chile. The country where Cerimedo’s operations are longest-documented is also where the legal case is now widest. Socialist Party deputy Juan Santana filed a criminal complaint in Valparaíso on August 27 tracing Cerimedo’s intervention back to October 2020, when his Numen consultancy firm published a poll through El Mercurio on the referendum over replacing the constitution inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship. Numen’s survey put approval at 42 percent against 34 percent for rejection, forecasting a narrowing race. The actual result was 78 to 22. The complaint’s core concerns a network of coordinated accounts operating on X since 2024. A report by the traditional right’s own Chile Vamos coalition, published by Ciper, found that some 38 percent of accounts participating in coordinated attacks on presidential candidate Evelyn Matthei simultaneously supported the Republican Party of José Antonio Kast—including with the fabricated claim that Matthei suffered from Alzheimer’s.
Colombia. Former president Gustavo Petro states that forensic material from Cerimedo’s telephone substantiates his allegations of mass manipulation of voters through two million bot accounts operated from automated farms, including from Miami, during the process that brought fascist Abelardo de la Espriella to the presidency.
Peru. Cerimedo publicized a 2023 meeting with Carlos Díaz-Rosillo, then a former senior Trump adviser on international security affairs, writing that “very good things are coming these next years.” Díaz-Rosillo now directs the Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom, which employed far-right President Keiko Fujimori as an instructor for $45,000 in the year before her election. He played a central role in Keiko’s election campaign.
Mexico. President Claudia Sheinbaum has accused Cerimedo of spreading fake news through social media trolls. He has openly admitted operating bot farms, telling La Nación: “People know they exist, so why lie?”
Money, drugs and the state apparatus
The financial trail is the least explored and potentially the most explosive element. Senator Leonardo Roca, of the right-wing Alianza Libre, has revealed that a report by Bolivia’s Institute of Forensic Investigations identified a cold cryptocurrency wallet linked to Cerimedo’s telephone, with holdings subsequently transferred across ten accounts, one of which concentrated sums reported at $130 million. Roca has announced a Senate investigative commission.
Beller alleges that Cerimedo held conversations with drug trafficking operators and arranged authorizations for light aircraft to take off from eastern Bolivia, disguised as a radar-tracking system. She states that Cerimedo boasted of taking in $800,000 a month through his relationship with the Bolivian presidency, and that “Rodrigo Paz does not govern Bolivia—Fernando Cerimedo governs.”
Bolivia’s attorney general has confirmed that Erik Correa González, Paz’s intelligence chief, was in contact with Cerimedo. Text messages indicate Correa was informing him of the attack on Beller in real time. Correa has acknowledged before prosecutors that the two were in contact, describing the subject as “security.”
What this case exposes are the anti-democratic mechanisms through which Washington has reshaped the hemisphere. Vast sums—their ultimate sources still unestablished—have been channeled into bot farms, disinformation networks and micro-targeting operations to manufacture public opinion and install governments that function as instruments of US policy.
Yet the responsibility for these operations’ success does not rest with Washington alone. Petro’s demand that “world progressivism” defeat this project evades his own record. The nominally left governments of the “Pink Tide” imposed the demands of finance capital on the working class and accommodated themselves to Trump at every turn. It is this bankruptcy that created the social ground on which the far right has grown.