The rise and fall of “Maga’s Man” in Latin America.
Since Trump’s return to the White House in early 2025, the United States has expanded its power over Latin America with ruthless efficiency. In Venezuela, US forces pulled off a two-hour regime change operation by kidnapping the president, Nicolás Maduro. In other countries (Honduras, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia…) Trump-endorsed presidential candidates have had a field day.
With the exception of a few outliers — Cuba (under crippling siege), Nicaragua (also in Rubio’s crosshairs) and Brazil (elections in October) — most countries are now under firm US control. They include Bolivia, where a violent episode has pulled back the veil on how the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine — aka the “Donroe Doctrine” — is being executed from behind the scenes.
On the night of August 17, Nadia Shirley Beller Delgado, 33-year-old lawyer and activist, was waiting alone outside a hotel in the Canal Isuto neighbourhood of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Two men approached her disguised as delivery drivers and shot her three times from point-blank range.
Beller, who is four weeks pregnant, threw herself to the floor, pretended to be dead, and miraculously survived. She was rushed to hospital where she underwent major surgery. Days later, from her hospital bed, she accused her Argentine ex-boyfriend of ordering the hit to silence her.
“Maga’s Man in Latin America”
Beller’s ex-boyfriend is Fernando Cerimedo, the co-owner of La Derecha Diario (“The Right-Wing Daily”), one of the main digital disseminators of far-right ideas in Latin America and Spain. He is also former advisor to Argentine President Javier Milei and current advisor to various political leaders in the region, including Bolivia’s President Rodrigo Paz. The Economist has called him “MAGA’s man in LatAm” for helping to forge “close ties” to the Trump’s right-wing movement.
The following morning (August 18), Cerimedo was arrested at Viru Viru Airport as he attempted to flee to Buenos Aires. The assassination attempt was caught on CCTC cameras. The footage quickly went viral:
Anoche, la abogada y activista boliviana Nadia Beller fue atacada por 2 sicarios que le pegaron 3 tiros a quemarropa.
Hoy, en el aeropuerto de Viru Viru, detuvieron a su ex pareja @FerCerimedo_ok, sospechado de ser el autor intelectual. pic.twitter.com/eUksT4nMPJ
— Javier Smaldone (@mis2centavos) August 18, 2026
According to Beller’s testimony, Cerimedo had arranged to meet her outside the hotel to give her information on former President Evo Morales. Before the hit, Beller had publicly accused Cerimedo of domestic violence and even shared photographs of bruises and private conversations to document the assaults.
The lawyer accused Cerimedo of acts of corruption in Bolivia and Argentina and alleged that Cerimedo had even bragged of being a CIA agent, though she lacks the evidence to back up the claim. Speaking from hospital, Beller said she fears for her life and asked Bolivian authorities for protection. The problem is that Cerimedo is a senior advisor to the Rodrigo Paz government.
Bolivia: The President’s most senior adviser has just been arrested for hiring hitmen to murder his girlfriend (she was shot 3 times in a luxury hotel).
He’s a far-right extremist from Argentina, and has now become the main link between the US govt & the Latin American right. pic.twitter.com/sl7uDQmSgJ
— Ollie Vargas (@Ollie_Vargas_) August 18, 2026
Following the arrest of Cerimedo, the Bolivian Prosecutor’s Office requested a minimum of 180 days of preventive detention for the Argentine citizen. Cerimedo faces charges of attempted femicide, money laundering and illicit enrichment, and is being held at Palmasola prison, Bolivia’s largest and most dangerous detention centre. Given his contacts, he will presumably be able to afford one of the “luxury” suites.
So, Who Is Cerimedo?
Before entering the dark murky world of political spin doctoring, Cerimedo had worked as a taxi driver, insurance consultant, as well as a high school teacher. In 2016 he was sentenced to two years in prison for selling the same house to two people. In Argentina, he is under investigation for a possible case of bribery.
Cerimedo rose to prominence on the Latin American political scene in 2022 during Jair Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign. Days after Bolsonaro lost re-election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, aka Lula, he hosted a live-stream titled “Brazil Was Stolen”. In it he alleged that old voting machines had been rigged to swing votes to Lula.
Two years later, Cerimedo become the only foreigner charged by Brazil’s Federal Police in the investigations of the coup attempt led by Jair Bolsonaro, for which Bolsonaro was sentenced to 22 years’ imprisonment. His media outlet, La Derecha Diario, was also implicated in the attempted coup and has since been banned from the country.
Since his break out campaign for Bolsonaro in 2022, Cerimedo has played a role in the presidential campaigns of Javier Milei in Argentina (2023), Nasry Asfura in Honduras (2025), Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia (2025), and José Antonio Kast in Chile. He also has close ties to Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa and El Salvador’s Nayeb Bukele.
Following his election in 2025, Rodrigo Paz was so pleased with Cerimedo’s work that he offered the Argentine a full-time position in his cabinet. This put him on direct collision course with Paz’s popular vice president, Edmand Lara, who recently accused Cerimedo, an unelected Argentine, of commanding more influence than anyone bar the president.
“I saw it there. Imagine, Cerimedo participated more in the meetings than the vice president himself, who was democratically elected,” Lara said. “Fernando Cerimedo managed the editorial line of some media outlets… and oversaw the government’s communication both on the outside and also from the inside.”
Lara also noted that nobody seemed to understand how Cerimedo was getting paid:
“He had a position, but he did not appear on any payroll, he did not have any memorandum. We never knew where he was paid.” (According to Beller, Cerimedo was being paid $800,000 a month from Argentina)
Lara is not the only senior figure to have made such allegations. Jaime Aparicio, a diplomat and former Bolivian ambassador to the United States, told The Associated Press that Cerimedo “had an indeterminate role, a great deal of power and made decisions that were not appropriate for a foreign advisor.”
The Miami Connection
Cerimedo is a business partner with President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale, who is now a registered foreign agent for Israel. He is also a business associate of Damian Merlo, a lobbyist, former state department official and ex-vice president of Otto Reich Associates* with deep ties to Miami’s gusano industrial complex (h/t Max Blumenthal).
Cerimedo registered his political consultancy business in May, 2023, at the height of Milei’s presidential campaign. When he brought Merlo on board, he bought Milei and himself access to a vast network of contacts in Miami and Washington that included Brad Parscale, Republican representatives María Elvira Salazar and Mario Díaz-Balart, Mauricio Claver-Carone, the US Special Envoy for Latin America, and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
In a brief feature for the Grayzone, Max Blumenthal calls Cerimedo the “bag man for Trump Inc across Latin America”:
Lurking behind Trump aligned leaders such as Javier Milei, Daniel Noboa, Jair Bolsonaro, and Nayib Bukele are lesser known but highly influential operatives who dictate the course of events in their countries.
Perhaps the most consequential of these figures is Fernando Cerimedo, a top advisor to the right-wing Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz, who’s known as MAGA’s man in Latin America.
On August 18, Cerimedo was arrested and accused of masterminding an attack that would have killed his ex-girlfriend, the Bolivian lawyer Nadia Beller, who is pregnant.
Beller miraculously survived four shots at point-blank range, and from her hospital bed, in a desperate bid to avoid being murdered, she denounced Cerimedo.
According to Beller, Cerimedo assisted a vast network of CIA assets as they manipulated Latin American politics on behalf of Trump’s Washington, and oversaw a deluge of dark money into the coffers of Trump’s hand-picked candidates.
So far, this approach has been remarkably successful. In most presidential elections in Latin over the past two years, Trump-friendly candidates have won. Not fairly and squarely, mind. Starting with the Argentine mid-terms in late 2025, Trump has meddled in most of the elections by endorsing a particular candidate and threatening dire economic consequences if said candidate doesn’t win.
There have also been accusations of vote rigging in elections in Ecuador, Honduras, Peru and Colombia. Coordinated campaigns of misinformation on social media have also played a part. In Colombia, the former President Gustavo Petro has accused the Israeli company Black Cube of organising digital media campaigns with fake accounts. When the Bolivian Police searched Cerimedo’s premises, they found a mini bot farm in one.
Bolivian police have raided the home of known US asset, Fernando Cerimedo.
Along with piles of cash in dollars and euros, they also found devices & servers that functioned as bot farms. Cerimedo was an adviser in charge of US disinfo operations in Latin American elections. pic.twitter.com/ctM2JR0kxq
— Ollie Vargas (@Ollie_Vargas_) August 22, 2026
In politics, bot farms can be used to manipulate the appearance of public opinion by making a political message, candidate or cause seem more popular than it actually is. The recent explosion of bot farms in Latin America may explain how fringe candidates such as Colombia’s Abelardo De la Espriella are able to rise from relative obscurity to win presidential elections.
Bot farms are organised operations that use large numbers of automated or human-controlled social media accounts to create the appearance of widespread online activity. The term can refer to networks of automated accounts, as well as groups of people operating multiple accounts in a coordinated manner.
These accounts may use false identities or fictitious personas and can be programmed or managed to post, repost, like, comment on and otherwise amplify content at a scale that would be impossible for a single person to achieve.
A 2025 blog post from the cyber-security firm F5 breaks down how AI has helped supercharge the impact of bot farms on political campaigns:
Where bot farms once needed armies of workers pushing repetitive posts, AI tools can now generate coherent, varied, and highly believable content. According to NewsGuard’s 2023 report, AI-generated propaganda is increasingly indistinguishable from authentic commentary, even down to regionally specific language and emotion.
This isn’t junk content anymore. It’s plausible, contextual, and reactive. It looks like grassroots support, but it’s manufactured influence at industrial scale.
And the platforms still reward it. They were built to amplify what performs, not to assess what’s real.
It also helps, of course, if the owners of the tech platforms are broadly aligned with the political projects being sold. As readers may recall, one of the biggest proponents of Javier Milei’s fake brand of libertarianism was Elon Musk. Other key figures in the US tech sector — such as Palantir and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel — see Latin America as a testing ground for models of extreme deregulation and techno-authoritarianism.
Former Bolivian President Evo Morales called Cerimedo “an agent of the empire” while echoing Beller’s assertion that Cerimedo was a CIA operative. Morales has also demanded that the Bolivian State Attorney’s Office conduct a transparent investigation into Cerimedo.
“With the arrest of Fernando Cerimedo, the Latin American right is hurt,” said Evo Morales. “[The government in Bolivia] is in disarray — an accidental president without a program, without a grassroots base, without militancy.”
The Paz government has already faced a 53-day general strike that culminated in a “state of exception” and Paz’s deployment of the military (quite ironic given “Paz” is the word for “peace” in Spanish). With economic conditions in the country continuing to deteriorate and public anger rising over Paz’s governing failures and the Cerimedo scandal, it’s only a matter of time before the protests recommence.
Meanwhile, for the Trump administration Cerimedo’s arrest and imprisonment represents barely a flesh wound. It won’t take long to find someone equally skilled in the dark arts to replace him. A new bot farm can be erected in a matter of days. As Blumenthal notes, “even with MAGA’s continental point man behind bars, the rampage of resource theft and electoral manipulation, and the killing of national sovereignty, continues full steam ahead”.
But there is an important lesson to draw from the Cerimedo affair: the US’ retaking of Latin America is built on a flimsy foundation of lies, manipulation and outright vote rigging. And that foundation can break quite easily, especially when the local populations realise just how little their interests and welfare matter to the US and Israel and their vassal governments in the region.
* Otto Reich, a fervent anti-communist, was one of the officials most responsible for devising and overseeing the destructive “Reagan doctrine” in 1980s Central America, which included the dirty wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua and the Iran Contra scandal.
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