Fernando Cerimedo built digital campaigns and networks of fake accounts for the Latin American right on software from Donald Trump's former campaign manager, posed for photographs with Donald Trump Jr. and says he arranged Trump's endorsement of Honduras's president. Since 18 August he has been in a Bolivian prison, accused of ordering two gunmen to kill his pregnant former partner and of selling protection to cocaine flights. On 28 September the United States revoked the visa of Roger Mariaca, the attorney general whose office was prosecuting him, and accused Mariaca of protecting drug traffickers. Two days later Bolivian police arrested him, and the minister in charge thanked the US government for its help. The Bolivian government says it had held video implicating Mariaca since March; it moved against him 48 hours after the US did.

Who Cerimedo is

Fernando Cerimedo, 45, is an Argentine political propagandist and troll farm operator who runs digital campaigns for right-wing candidates. His Buenos Aires firm Numen and his outlet La Derecha Diario worked for Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2022, Javier Milei in Argentina in 2023 and Nasry Asfura in Honduras in 2025, and he advised Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia during Paz's 2025 runoff. The Economist called him "MAGA's man in LatAm" in December 2025. His partner in Numen is Brad Parscale, Trump's 2020 campaign manager. He runs networks of fake social media accounts to manipulate voters, and has said so himself. Parscale also runs a propaganda operation for the Israeli government worth about US$46.5 million.

Cerimedo drove a taxi in Mar del Plata and was convicted of fraud in 2016 for selling the same flat to two families, The Washington Post reported in September 2026. He has said he attended Harvard and MIT, holds a doctorate from the University of Phoenix and trained as a Navy SEAL; MIT and the University of Phoenix told the Post they had no record of him as a student. Hugo Alconada Mon, an investigative reporter at La Nación, told the Post: "He is a pathological liar."

Cerimedo carried business cards reading "Principal Advisor to the President" and had a presidential email address in La Paz. In a chat later published by Nadia Beller, his former partner, he wrote: "And luckily Rodrigo started listening to me." In a recording she released on 4 September, a voice she identifies as his says: "The posts, no matter what, have to go through me... What I look at in YPFB is the posts." YPFB is Bolivia's state oil and gas company. "He was the boss of YPFB and decided who they hired and who they fired," Beller said. Cerimedo told prosecutors on 25 September that he never officially worked for the government.

The bot network

Cerimedo told Infobae on 10 May 2023 that his team had created close to 50,000 fake accounts "just for Argentina". "We create accounts with artificial intelligence that have a certain volume, a certain credibility, to use them afterwards in a defined strategy," he said. He said his team had also "intervened with accounts that made comments" during Mauricio Macri's 2019 campaign. Infobae ran the interview under the headline: "We have some 50,000 artificially created accounts to generate content and influence the conversation on social media."

Eduardo Bolsonaro travelled to Buenos Aires in October 2022, between the two rounds of Brazil's presidential election, on a trip organised by Cerimedo's team, and recorded videos there for his father's campaign, Agência Pública reported. Eduardo's re-election campaign paid R$3,900 to Giovanni Larosa, a Cerimedo employee and La Derecha Diario correspondent, for propaganda work. On 4 November 2022, five days after Jair Bolsonaro lost, Cerimedo broadcast a livestream titled "Brazil Was Stolen" to more than 400,000 viewers. The hashtag #BrazilWasStolen went viral the same day, boosted by a cluster of newly created accounts, the Progressive International reported. Members of the plot to stop Lula taking office later cited Cerimedo's claims as evidence the election had been stolen.

Carlos Torres, the La Paz departmental prosecutor, said a search on 20 August 2026 of a property linked to Cerimedo found "a mini bot farm". Juan Santana, a Chilean opposition deputy, has asked Chile's electoral service whether Numen SpA, Cerimedo's Chilean company, appears in any campaign spending report, El Ciudadano reported. Gustavo Petro, Colombia's former president, has alleged that Cerimedo ran about two million fake profiles in Colombia's June 2026 presidential vote.

The hit

Nadia Beller, a 33-year-old lawyer and former congressional candidate, had been Cerimedo's partner. Chats from June and July 2026 that she published show her sending him photographs of bruises on her knee, elbow, neck and cheek. "Now you say you didn't hit me," she wrote on 11 July. "Choking me and throwing me all over the floor." A reply attributed to Cerimedo reads: "I apologised to you a thousand ways."

A note dated 13 August on Cerimedo's Samsung phone reads: "Don't tell anyone, but Enrique's friend sold us out, remember? Nadia. Either we eliminate her now or we're screwed. Do you know anyone who can do the job?"

Two men on a motorcycle, posing as delivery riders, shot Beller three times in the right arm and left shoulder outside the Swissôtel in Santa Cruz at about 20:54 on 17 August. She was about four weeks pregnant and survived more than three hours of surgery. A forensic extraction of phone data in the case file records a contact identified as E.C.G. writing to Cerimedo that evening: "Is it her?", with a photograph, then "She just went in", then at 20:54: "Brother, right now they shot her. She's wounded." Police stopped Cerimedo at Viru Viru airport the next morning as he tried to board a flight to Argentina.

Aldo Silva Peña, a Colombian known as "Juancho" who is detained over the attack, said in a video posted on social media that three people above him "paid and ordered this done". He named a "Toño", who he said works in the office of the governor of Cochabamba, and an "El Chino", who he said watched Beller. "The objective was not to kill that woman," he said, and he denied being the shooter or the rider. Police also detained his partner and a man accused of selling the gun, and issued a warrant for a former customs official. A medical report ruled out the defence's suggestion that Beller had staged the attack on herself, La Unión reported.

A judge ordered Cerimedo held for 180 days on a charge of attempted femicide. On 8 September he was moved from Palmasola prison in Santa Cruz to Chonchocoro, a maximum-security prison at 4,000 metres near La Paz, under a second detention order for illicit enrichment. "May the president forgive me for not listening to him and getting involved with that crazy woman," Cerimedo said as he was transferred, Perfil reported. Prosecutors have also charged him with domestic violence, money laundering and usurpation of public functions. "My career and my life were destroyed over something unfair that has not been proven," he said from prison. Margarita Arce, his lawyer, said the phone evidence was illegally obtained. "Are there any doubts that this was a state-endorsed crime?" Beller said.

The drug flights

Alexander Mendoza, the Beni departmental prosecutor, opened an investigation on 26 August into "protection given in Santa Ana to irregular flights allegedly linked to controlled substance trafficking" by Cerimedo. Santa Ana del Yacuma is a town in Beni department, in Bolivia's Amazon lowlands. Beller has said Cerimedo told her he had "freed" the aircraft so that radar and GPS units could be fitted to them, and that the fitting was cover for letting drug planes through.

Vice-President Edmand Lara gave prosecutors a recording on 28 September in which a woman tells a voice attributed to Cerimedo: "They pay 15,000 per car." The recording refers to about 45 aircraft across San Ramón, San Joaquín and San Borja and to airstrips at Santa Rosa and San Lorenzo de Moxos in Beni. It also mentions people Cerimedo had placed in Naabol, the state airports authority, Bolpress and the Bolivian journalist Juan Pastén reported. "Fernando Cerimedo handled the tentacles of drug trafficking," Lara said. The recording remains unverified.

Colonel Frans William Cabrera Quispe, named in the recording, ran the FELCN, Bolivia's anti-narcotics police, from late 2025 and attended meetings with the DEA in Washington in May 2026, Urgente.bo reported. Paz's government made him inspector general of the police on 31 August and removed him 24 days later. The US State Department put Cabrera on the same visa ban list as Mariaca on 28 September, and the government has retired him from the police and opened an internal investigation. Beller asked prosecutors to give the recording "the same evidentiary weight" for Cabrera as for Cerimedo. Evo Morales has identified E.C.G., the contact who wrote to Cerimedo on the night of the shooting, as Lieutenant Colonel Erick Correa González, the FELCN's intelligence chief; El Destape reported that the case file has not established the identity.

The money

Prosecutors searched a currency exchange house in the Calacoto district of La Paz around 20 August. "This international exchange house was where Cerimedo received money and also came to deliver money for distribution to other places," said Miguel Cardozo, a prosecutor. About US$400,000 linked to Cerimedo passed through it, and Cardozo said gold transactions had taken place there. Its operators, named by BAE Negocios as Fritz Juniors Gironda Aquize and Claudia Inés Layme Carita, fled with about US$700,000 shortly before police arrived; officers seized firearms and two vehicles and detained two women. A search the same week of a property in La Paz's Aranjuez district found more than 500,000 bolivianos, along with dollars and euros.

Cerimedo declared to prosecutors that he earned about US$1 million a month in 2025 and 2026 from private work outside Bolivia, through Numen Group Inc. in the United States, Numen de Publicidad in Argentina and other companies he owns with Natalia Basil, the mother of his children, BAE Negocios reported. He refused to answer 152 of 219 questions in his first interview. In a second, seven-hour interview at Chonchocoro on 25 September he answered more than 300 questions and said the money had been brought from Argentina and that he could prove its lawful origin, Cardozo said. Prosecutors added charges of money laundering, material falsity and use of falsified documents on 3 September.

Basil, a former official at Argentina's national disability agency, and Vicente Federico Quintanal, a business partner of the couple, own Australis Energy Group, a Buenos Aires company created on 30 July 2025 whose stated purposes include gold, lithium and hydrocarbon mining, Realpolitik reported. Quintanal is president and Cerimedo an alternate director of Surlibre Inversiones, which holds 30 per cent of Sanabria SRL, a port services company at Puerto General San Martín on the Paraná river; a criminal complaint in Argentina names Cerimedo, Economy Minister Luis Caputo and the head of the port authority over Sanabria.

Bolivian customs stopped four suitcases holding 77 gold ingots, 189.5 kilos in all, at Viru Viru airport on 22 July 2026, bound for the United Arab Emirates with a forged export certificate. The exporter, Emporio Dorado SRL, had been registered in La Paz a month earlier, and the courier, Adrián Lema Roca, 22, was released to house arrest on 14 August. In a recording Beller released, Cerimedo tells her that "a minister of state, whose wife is very close to the boy's mother, tried to stop them arresting him and tried to stop them taking the gold". Beller named Defence Minister Ernesto Justiniano. "I am calm, I have not committed any illegal act nor used my office to favour anyone," Justiniano said.

Beller says recordings and chats she gave prosecutors show Cerimedo steering YPFB, the state oil company, towards Futura, a fuel supplier. She says they also discuss commissions for Parscale. She says Basil was to audit the storage tanks where Futura's fuel for Bolivia would be received, and that Cerimedo acknowledged Parscale "has worked with her for a long time" while denying he took a share of Parscale's commission. Branko Marinković, a Bolivian senator, calls Futura a "phantom company" registered in the Caribbean with only a postal box. Beller links Futura to Paz's wife, María Elena Urquidi, whom she calls the government's "single window" for contracts; prosecutors declined on 3 September to widen the case to Urquidi, saying her role had not been specified. Yamil Castro Bianchi, a lawyer for Cerimedo, predicted in September that he would be released in November and that "many people betrayed Fernando".

Trump Jr.

Beller posted photographs on 29 September of Cerimedo standing with Donald Trump Jr., Parscale and Andrés "Andy" Rivas, Cerimedo's business partner; she said Dick Morris, the American consultant who advised Trump in 2019, was also in the picture. Morris advised Vicente Fox in Mexico's 2000 presidential election and worked on Felipe Calderón's 2006 campaign, whose message against Andrés Manuel López Obrador was the slogan "López Obrador, a danger to Mexico", SinEmbargo reported. Peru's La República reported that the photographs were taken in Florida in February 2026, the month Cerimedo was honoured at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate. "Is it the fight of the Shield of the Americas or the protection of the MAGA network?" Beller wrote. "If the explanation is corruption and drug trafficking, someone needs to explain why they're revoking the visa of the attorney general who is investigating a network with exactly those characteristics." She asked: "Are they going after the one investigating, or protecting part of the network?" "It is precisely Brad Parscale who gives Fernando Cerimedo all the technological support," she told SinEmbargo the next day. "They are all the MAGA circle." Gustavo Petro, Colombia's former president, called Cerimedo a friend of the US president's son. The photographs went up the day after the US visa ban on Mariaca and the day before his arrest.

Trump Jr. and Parscale were among 13 guests at a dinner in Tallinn on 6 September 2026, three weeks after Cerimedo's arrest, at which Trump Jr. discussed Ukraine with Estonia's foreign minister, Bloomberg reported. Another guest was Michael Franzese, a former Colombo crime family captain who ran a petrol tax fraud worth about US$40 million with Russian émigré gangsters in Brighton Beach in the 1980s. Trump Jr.'s wedding in the Bahamas in May 2026 was paid for in part by Umar Kremlev, a Russian boxing executive and ally of Vladimir Putin, ProPublica reported.

Andrés Rivas worked with Cerimedo on the Asfura and Paz campaigns, according to Bolivia Verifica, and travels in official Paraguayan delegations with Foreign Minister Rubén Ramírez Lezcano without a contract. "Andrés Rivas is a personal friend of mine; he has no contract with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs," Ramírez said on 18 September 2026.

The arrest of the prosecutor

Roger Mariaca widened the case against Cerimedo to money laundering on 9 September and confirmed his office was investigating the Beni flights. On 28 September the US State Department named Mariaca among 27 officials from Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru whose visas it revoked or denied under the Shield of the Americas, Trump's regional security coalition. It accused him of soliciting and accepting bribes to facilitate drug trafficking and helping violent criminals evade justice, and said his actions "endanger President Trump's efforts to combat narcoterrorism". Alberto Zeballos, the Santa Cruz departmental prosecutor whose office handled the attempted femicide case, was also named. "Cooperation yes, interference no," Mariaca said that day, and he said the Cerimedo case would continue.

Bolivian police detained Mariaca and Zeballos at Viru Viru on the evening of 30 September. Marco Antonio Oviedo, the government minister responsible for the police, said: "This particular operation was carried out by the Bolivian Police; however, I must thank the help, the cooperation of the US government." Police entered the prosecution service's headquarters in Sucre after 23:00 and searched its offices in Santa Cruz and La Paz; staff called the detention a kidnapping and said there was no legal order. Lara said that "no foreign police agent, whether from the DEA or any other institution, can carry out arrests within our territory outside Bolivian law". Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, praised Paz's "bold and decisive actions to combat narco-trafficking" on 1 October.

Police stopped an ambulance leaving Mariaca's Santa Cruz home early on 1 October and removed more than 3.5 million bolivianos and US$10,000 from its panels, according to prosecutors and the Associated Press. Fourteen people were detained. Oviedo said the government had known since March of video in which Sebastián Marset, a Uruguayan trafficker extradited to the United States, said he paid Mariaca and former minister Eduardo del Castillo US$500,000 to stay in Bolivia. Mariaca stayed in office until the US visa ban. Justiniano said on 29 September that the US accusations could lead to an investigation and an extradition request, and on 1 October that "the ideal would be for him to serve his sentence here in Bolivia". The only Peruvian on the US list was Juan Carlos Núñez Matos, a Lima constitutional judge who ruled in January 2026 for Cosco Shipping Ports Chancay, the Chinese-owned operator of Peru's Chancay megaport, against the Peruvian port regulator; the State Department gave no reason, Caretas reported. Beller asked why Cerimedo and Justiniano had kept their visas.

Evo Morales said the United States had decided "whom they are going to persecute and arrest to save Cerimedo". Petro called the arrest a coup against democracy. Beller said on 29 September that removing Mariaca without solid evidence and due process would be an "institutional coup" against the prosecution service that would stop the investigations from advancing. Tomasa Yarhui, a Bolivian senator for Libre, said she feared the government would take over the prosecution service "to cover up the Cerimedo case".

The elections

Donald Trump has used money, tariffs and threats to help the candidates Cerimedo worked for. He tied a US$20 billion currency swap for Argentina to the result of Milei's midterm elections: "If he loses, we are not going to be generous with Argentina," he said on 14 October 2025. Milei's party won 12 days later. Milei said on 22 August 2026 that Cerimedo had no link of any kind with his government.

Trump endorsed Asfura in Honduras and wrote on 29 November 2025, the day before the vote: "If he doesn't win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad." He pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, a former Honduran president from Asfura's National Party serving a 45-year US sentence for drug trafficking, who was released on 1 December. Cerimedo told The Economist he coordinated Trump's endorsement and that it gave the campaign the boost it needed. Parscale coached Numen's team on using data to target Honduran voters, The New York Times reported. Asfura was declared the winner on 24 December. Marlon Ochoa, a member of the electoral council for the opposition Libre party, said recordings he handed to prosecutors in December 2025 capture Cerimedo discussing putting votes for Asfura into specific ballot boxes, removing unfavourable ballots, lining up the armed forces and blocking vote-by-vote recounts, La Jornada reported; Ochoa called him "an international criminal". Honduras's Supreme Court suspended the investigation at the request of two justices. Rixi Moncada, the Libre candidate who lost to Asfura, said on the day he was declared the winner: "The civilised peoples of the world must know that the president-elect belongs to the businessmen who asked for Donald Trump's intervention." She demanded on 22 August 2026 that prosecutors find out who hired and paid Cerimedo: "What is coming to light in Bolivia about Fernando Cerimedo cannot be ignored in Honduras."

Cerimedo told Infobae in May 2023 that he had spent the previous year "travelling constantly because I was working on the campaign against the proposal for the new Constitution in Chile", and that his team kept fake accounts "for Chile, which we use to generate content and relevance in conversations on specific topics". Chileans rejected the draft constitution on 4 September 2022 by 62 per cent. Gerardo Jofré, a former chairman of the state copper company Codelco, has acknowledged helping to hire Cerimedo, El Clarín of Chile reported. CIPER, a Chilean investigative outlet, found digital links between Cerimedo's operation and Facilitadores Constitucionales, a group that distributed pamphlets falsely claiming the new constitution would abolish home ownership. Jaime Araya, a Chilean deputy, has asked the chief adviser to José Antonio Kast, who won Chile's presidency in December 2025, about any meetings, contracts or payments involving Cerimedo.

Cerimedo broadcast a livestream on 4 November 2022 alleging that Bolsonaro's defeat was fraudulent, and Brazil's electoral court removed it. Brazil's Federal Police indicted Cerimedo on 21 November 2024 with Bolsonaro and 35 others in the coup investigation; the prosecutor general left him out of the charges filed in February 2025. Trump imposed a 50 per cent tariff on Brazilian goods from 1 August 2025, calling Bolsonaro's trial "a Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY", and the US Treasury sanctioned Alexandre de Moraes, the Supreme Court justice overseeing it. On 8 January 2023 thousands of Bolsonaro supporters invaded and ransacked Brazil's Congress, Supreme Court and presidential palace. The Supreme Court convicted Bolsonaro in September 2025 of leading a plot to prevent the transfer of power and sentenced him to 27 years and three months in prison. "Brazil is nobody's backyard," Lula said at the United Nations in September 2026. "We will not allow the enemies of democracy, internal or external, to undermine the popular will."

Abelardo de la Espriella, a right-wing lawyer, defeated the leftist Iván Cepeda in Colombia's presidential runoff on 21 June 2026 and took office on 7 August. Petro, by then Colombia's former president, wrote that forensic data from Cerimedo's phone showed links to Colombian officials and that more than two million bots and fake profiles run from farms in Medellín and Miami had manipulated voters. "The elections in Colombia, just because of the mass manipulation of voters, constraining their vote, should be annulled if we have a brave justice system," he said.

Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico's president, named Cerimedo as a specialist in disinformation and bot manipulation in presentations in November 2025 and June 2026. "He told me he was going to blow up the elections, yes, because he hates the president," Beller told Nodal. Mexico and Brazil have stayed out of the Shield of the Americas, which 14 Latin American and Caribbean governments have joined.

Rubio wrote on 21 May 2026, during protests against Paz's removal of fuel subsidies, that the United States "stands squarely in support of Bolivia's legitimate constitutional government" and called those trying to topple it "criminals and drug traffickers". Paz's government raised petrol prices by 86 per cent and diesel by 160 per cent, according to Truthout. On 20 June it declared a state of exception banning blockades and mass gatherings, which the legislature extended for 90 days on 19 September. Bolivia joined the Shield of the Americas at its founding summit, hosted by Trump at Doral, Florida, on 7 March 2026. Cerimedo attended with accreditation and sat across from Rubio alongside Paz, Drop Site News reported. "He went holding onto Rodrigo Paz's coattails," Beller told SinEmbargo. "He sat next to Rodrigo Paz, not next to the State Department." Paz said on 27 August that there had never been a contract with Cerimedo and that he never had authorisation to represent the government.

Parscale

Cerimedo told The New York Times: "Brad set up all the infrastructure that I work with." The Times described the two men as partners in Numen "for a couple of years" and reported that Parscale travelled to Bolivia during Paz's campaign. Cerimedo announced on 10 March 2025 that he had become the exclusive Latin American licensee of Campaign Nucleus and EyesOver, Parscale's campaign software companies; Campaign Nucleus is backed by the Texas oil billionaire Tim Dunn. At a Latino Wall Street gala at Mar-a-Lago on 10 February 2026, Eduardo Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president's son, introduced Cerimedo as he received the award for Hispanic Political Consultant of the Year, and Cerimedo used his speech to call for continuing the "culture war" to stop left-wing governments returning, SinEmbargo reported. He said: "Thank you to Brad Parscale! For believing in me all the time, and giving me your technology." Parscale told the Times: "I had no contact at all with the administration, including the president, about the election in Honduras or the pardon."

Darío Epstein, an Argentine financial consultant, told the journalist Natalia Volosin that he dined with Cerimedo and Parscale to discuss investment in data centres and AI infrastructure in Argentina, Perfil reported on 21 August 2026. The project moved to Paraguay and did not go ahead.

Israel

Parscale's company Clock Tower X registered as a foreign agent of the State of Israel on 18 September 2025, working through Havas Media Germany, the Israeli foreign ministry's prime contractor. Its statement of work commits it to the "deployment of websites and content to deliver GPT framing results on GPT conversations", a campaign to influence what chatbots tell users about Israel, and its contracts run to about US$46.5 million to October 2026. Parscale told the Associated Press in 2024 that Campaign Nucleus, the software Cerimedo licenses, was "helping over there a lot with the war with Hamas". On a 2024 business trip to Israel he told officials his companies were "probably the largest thing outside of Fox News to help fight misinformation and Jewish hatred".

Beller told Folha de S.Paulo in August 2026 that Cerimedo had been to Jerusalem and had talked of travelling to Israel with Eduardo Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president's son. "I know he was in Jerusalem, that he went around there a bit, but he didn't say much more," she said. Beller told SinEmbargo on 21 September that another of Cerimedo's partners, whom she named only as Vicente and who appears to be Quintanal, "has very good relations with the Mossad" and with the International Monetary Fund. She said Cerimedo used the presidents he worked for to reach the State Department, the CIA and the DEA. She rejected the idea that he was an operative sent by those agencies. "All he cares about is making money, winning over presidents so that along the way he gets access to these countries to lobby for major companies," she said. She said she holds an unreleased photograph of Cerimedo with Parscale, Rivas and a man she called "the CIA's head of intelligence". She has also said Cerimedo and Parscale told her they were CIA agents; Realpolitik and Perfil, which reported that claim, wrote that there is no evidence for it.

The courts

Prosecutors Daniel Portales Barja and Edwin Sarmiento Valdivia charged Mariaca, Zeballos, senior prosecutor Martín Irusta and police Major Rubén Aparicio on 2 October with drug trafficking, criminal organisation and money laundering, and asked for six months of preventive detention in San Pedro prison. A Santa Cruz court rejected a habeas corpus petition by the three prosecutors. At a hearing on 3 October Judge Juan Carlos Montalbán of the Fifth Criminal Investigation Court in La Paz ruled that Mariaca would be tried in the ordinary courts rather than through the trial of responsibilities reserved for senior officials, because the alleged offences "correspond to ordinary crimes", and sent the case file to a judge in Santa Cruz. Mariaca's defence said it would appeal.

Cerimedo's first detention order runs to February 2027, and Castro Bianchi, his lawyer, has said he expects him out in November. The prosecutors on his case now report to Luis Montaño Morales, an interim attorney general the government refuses to recognise and says is wanted for arrest. Mariaca, who opened the money-laundering and drug-flight lines of the inquiry, is in custody in La Paz on charges filed four days after the United States put his name on its list.