Let’s start with the end.
The man is seen from behind, his head tucked into the hood of his raincoat, surrounded by microphones. Journalists’ questions fly fast:
“Are you an advisor to the president?”
“Did you know Nadia Beller was pregnant?”
“What do you have to say to the president?”
“What do you think of your career?”
“Are you innocent?”
“Fernando, what do you have to say in your defense? You are accused of many things; you have the right to respond.”
“Say something in your defense; this is your chance.”
“Did you threaten Nadia Beller? Where were you during the attack?”
The man, pressed up against an elevator door at the Santa Cruz courthouse in Bolivia, manages to sob out: “I want to see my sons!” He hiccups pathetically in the face of the journalists’ countless questions.
This image marks, for now, the end of the meteoric trajectory of one of the most influential propagandists of the Latin American far-right in recent years.
Cerimedo. Since at least the Covid pandemic, that name has quietly accompanied most of the right-wing and far-right movements and governments in Latin America. From Bolsonaro in Brazil to the office of President Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia, via Nasry Asfura’s Honduras, misinformation campaigns in Chile, or Milei’s ascent in Argentina, Cerimedo is there, faithful to his post. His mission: to lie, initially. Then, to amplify the lie.
But where has he really been, where does he say he has been, and where do people think he has been? Here are three very different versions of the career path of this professional of misinformation, manipulation, and self-promotion.
Some journalistic versions recently presented him as a adviser to the Bolivian president so powerful that no one would have access to the head of state without going through him. Other versions indicate that he played a significant role during the campaign for the election of that same president, but that he had no definite role in his government.
No official position, rumors, insinuations, half-spoken words, things left unsaid. CIA agent? Mossad agent? “Both,” he answers in a message, but should one believe him? Chief organizer of Milei’s campaign? Spreader of false information about fraud that would return Lula to the Brazilian presidency? Harvard scholar? Founder of the far-right outfit La Derecha Diario? Trained militarily with the U.S. Navy SEALs? Him or someone else? True or false?
It is always a bit murky. Sometimes there is a grain of truth and a lot of carefully sprinkled lies by the principal in question, other times pure fantasy, also issued by him. To understand who Fernando Cerimedo is and how he became the cog in the conquest of Latin America by the far right, one must dive back into the life of this professional liar.
Fernando, the swindler
In 2012, he did not work for any party, and no political opinion of his was known. But the justice system was already watching him.
We are in Mar del Plata, the city where he was born in 1981, on the Argentine coast about 400 kilometers from Buenos Aires. The parents of Argentine television journalist Rodrigo Lussich want to settle there soon and invest all their savings—the result of years of work, 30,000 dollars for a modest two-bedroom apartment. They sign before a notary the transaction with the seller, Fernando Cerimedo. At that moment Cerimedo was a taxi driver and still had to settle one last bureaucratic detail before he could hand Lussich the deed in proper form. But in the meantime, he asks that the money be given to him as soon as possible. He pleads, there is urgency: his nephew, gluten-intolerant, needs a surgical operation, without which he risks death. Cerimedo needs the money to pay the clinic. Mrs. Lussich gives him the 30,000 dollars and takes possession of the apartment, furnishing it before returning to Buenos Aires.
If the nephew is indeed gluten-intolerant, the rest is false. And the apartment had already been sold previously, so the initial buyers—owners of the deed—evict these “squatters” cheated by Cerimedo who, in the process, also steals the Lussich family’s new furniture. No small profits here.
Justice took its time: Cerimedo was convicted of this offense only in 2016, two and a half years with a suspended sentence and the full repayment of the money stolen from the Lussichs. He arranged his insolvency, so that the Lussich mother is still waiting for her money.
Between this scam in 2012 and his 2016 conviction, the taxi driver tried to enter local politics, through the Radical Civic Union (UCR) of Mar del Plata, without success.
La Derecha Diario
In 2019, now in Buenos Aires, he creates a site whose title is meant to be the exact counterpart of La Izquierda Diario, the Trotskyist media (Revolution Permanente, in its French version): La Derecha Diario. But, rather than a right-wing newspaper as its name promises, which would inform with a political lens, Cerimedo’s media immediately plunges into fake news and manipulation. The following year, he also presents himself as a communications adviser, offering his services notably to Mauricio Macri’s former Security Minister (2015-2019), Patricia Bullrich, a possible right-wing candidate.
But he breaks through the notoriety with the pandemic, during which he becomes a reference as a propagator of wild theories, following in the wake of another far-right agitator opposed to confinement measures: Javier Milei.
Apart from La Derecha Diario, which quickly finds a place in a microcosm of small far-right media, Cerimedo founds an advertising agency offering digital campaigns for political candidates, Numen. This agency specializes less in promoting candidates than in negative campaigns against opponents.
Continental stature
It is the 2022 Brazilian elections that allow Cerimedo to make another leap in his rising notoriety. In December of that year, he spread false information suggesting a massive fraud that would have allowed Lula to return to the presidency. He managed to attract 400,000 live viewers on YouTube, hyping them with these fabrications and frenzied theories starting December 11, 2022. A month later, on January 8, 2023, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters attacked Congress, the presidential palace, and the Supreme Court in Brasília.
Although this coup attempt marked the beginning of the end for Jair Bolsonaro, now in prison for these acts, it was, for Cerimedo, the springboard to become a continental reference of the far-right, “the Argentine loved by half of Brazil” as he liked to congratulate himself then.
His next coup reveals how manipulation and misinformation campaigns could be countered. In 2022, Cerimedo travels to Chile where, after the 2019 popular uprising, a constitutional process unfolds. The projected new constitution would recognize Indigenous rights, rendering Chile plurinationnel, along the lines of Bolivia and Ecuador, to fully recognize the peoples prior to the Chilean nation. The constitution was to replace the one imposed in 1980 during Pinochet’s ultra-liberal dictatorship.
Instead of using his media to challenge certain articles of the future constitution or its spirit deemed too social, Cerimedo pulls off a far cleverer move: he fabricates a poll that shows the “No” winning the referendum. No other poll produced this result, and even the most cursory analysis of Cerimedo’s poll should have warned of its deception (it displayed an implausibly large number of respondents). But it hardly mattered to the country’s leading right-wing newspaper, which is also the oldest in the country, El Mercurio. It publishes the manipulative poll. This poll opened voters’ minds to the possibility of rejecting the constitution, a possibility that excited other media to continue widening the trench Cerimedo had dug. This possibility turned into reality at the elections, with more than 61% rejecting the new constitution on September 4, 2022. The result, of course, should not be entirely attributed to Cerimedo, but he played a significant role. As is often the case, the (false) poll proved performative.
During the same campaign, Cerimedo’s agency printed tens of thousands of leaflets, copying the calligraphy used by the Constitutional Commission in its official communications, but disseminating false information. One leaflet stated that the new constitution would abolish private property (the “casa propia,” i.e., housing). In reality, the constitutional project sought to establish the right to “decent and adequate housing” for all.
The Milei Troll Factory
By this point, Fernando Cerimedo has a small media group (La Derecha Diario and Madero Radio, mainly) that makes a lot of noise, despite a skeletal newsroom entirely oriented toward misinformation and the pursuit of abject and defamatory headlines — aided by an unusually lax Argentine jurisprudence. He also relies on his notoriety that extends well beyond Buenos Aires’ far-right microcosm. Most importantly, he runs a troll factory, both bots and humans, enabling him to amplify on social networks the reach of his misinformation and defamation campaigns.
Javier Milei was then a deputy, having moved from television sensationalism to being a punchy legislator during the 2021 elections, riding the trauma of Covid—the Argentinian country endured one of the longest lockdowns in the world. Cerimedo quickly took a significant role in Milei’s communications team, led by Santiago Caputo, the deputy aiming for the presidency in the 2023 elections. He generously offered the team use of his infrastructure, his troll factory, and offices in the Buenos Aires business district, Puerto Madero.
During the 2023 campaign, between Caputo, Milei, and Cerimedo, it’s hard to tell who sparked the day’s outrage; all three were at the forefront of insult and indecency. Yet the hierarchy is clear: the youngest, Santiago Caputo, runs the communications strategy. As journalists Maia Jastreblansky and Manuel Jove demonstrated in their biography of the political adviser, El Monje (Planeta, 2025), it was not Milei who chose Caputo, but Caputo who had previously argued that only a far-right outsider could win the election. Caputo chose his candidate based on those criteria.
Thus, it was not about changing Milei, smoothing him for the elections, but about adapting the communication to his eruptive temperament, his fundamentalist (market fundamentalists, understood as a divine work) ideas, his insults, and his extravagant vulgarity. Caputo thus reversed the order of the lessons learned from his former boss, Jaime Durán Barba, the strategist behind Mauricio Macri’s 2015 victory, who adapted his candidate to the demands of the electoral market. In Buenos Aires, Santiago Caputo is often nicknamed the “Kremlin Mage,” a nod to Giuliano da Empoli’s novel, signaling the influence he wields over the current presidency.
So it was the ideas and the style of Milei, and Caputo’s overarching strategy for winning elections. Cerimedo, for his part, brings infrastructure and know‑how in smear campaigns and harassment. The team achieved astonishing results. They managed to implant in a large swath of the right-wing electorate the idea that their candidate, then “natural,” the powerful Buenos Aires mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, was a “leftist.” This helped Milei become hegemonic on the right. Subsequently, a large number of voters believed that if Milei were elected, their salaries would be nominally converted from pesos to dollars. A delirium that, thanks to carefully nurtured confusion, thrived.
At the end of this campaign, the ultra-libertarian TV troublemaker was elected to lead Argentina.
Madero Media Group
In the wake of Milei’s election, Cerimedo’s media outlets, grouped under the Madero Media Group, expand significantly. He fully benefits from the new prosperity of far-right production, especially YouTube programs, which quickly gain quasi-official media status, with guests often being the top figures of the new government, starting with President Milei and his powerful Economy Minister, Luis Caputo.
While the audience success of libertarian media is undeniable, this growth of the company is also explained by public funding sources. These are, for now, impossible to quantify, but probably substantial and come by at least two routes — aiming to display ideological coherence and a campaign promise, the Milei government has scrapped official ads which were previously the main source of public funding for media. On one hand, state-owned enterprises, notably YPF and Aerolíneas Argentinas, have heavily funded media close to the government — YPF is notably involved with La Derecha Diario. This funding is far more opaque than the former system, the company invoking business secrecy when lawmakers demand accountability. On the other hand, Santiago Caputo, who effectively controls the intelligence services, has access to the fountain of reserve funds (which, by definition, the public does not know what they are for).
It is quite possible that Santiago Caputo, former head of Milei’s campaign communications, taps into these funds to finance the media whose leading figures are regarded as his own people, the “Heaven’s Forces” as they call themselves, meant to represent the “Milei youth.”
Be that as it may, Madero Media Group, of which Cerimedo is a founder and major shareholder, is one of the main beneficiaries of the public windfall managed by the far right in power.
The idyll, or symbiosis, between the ultra-free-market far-right government and the propagandist, also heading a private security service, breaks apart in mid-2025. He is then suspected by the power circle of having triggered the leakage of numerous recordings that would prove a corruption system within the agency dedicated to assisting people with disabilities (ANDIS). According to its director, recorded without his knowledge, 3% of all contracts awarded by the state agency would be allocated to Karina Milei, the president’s sister and chief of staff.
Cerimedo’s wife, Natalia Belén Basil, was appointed to head one of the agency’s departments. This is why Milei’s associates suspect him of being the source of the leaks of these recordings that shook the Milei circle just before the midterm elections on October 26, 2025. This suspicion was reinforced by Nadia Beller’s statements, who, after surviving a gun attack, told the press that Cerimedo had repeatedly told her that the recordings indeed came from his wife. However, the reasons for these recordings and their dissemination remain unclear.
The on-the-ground MAGA man for Latin America
This distancing from Milei surely did not translate into unemployment. The propagandist worked on the election of Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia in October 2025, Nasry Asfura in Honduras elected on November 30, 2025, and José Antonio Kast to the Chilean presidency secured on December 14, 2025 with 58% of the vote.
The presence of the propagandist in Kast’s campaign team is not surprising; it sits at the intersection of his ideological line and the continuity of his role in misinformation operations during the 2022 referendum on the new constitution. By contrast, his involvement in Rodrigo Paz’s Bolivian campaign is counterintuitive. Paz faced Jorge Quiroga, the hard-right candidate whose campaign featured brandishing Javier Milei’s chainsaw—Quiroga even calling it the “Mick Jagger of politics.” Between the two competing right-wing blocs in the runoff, Cerimedo logically should have joined Quiroga’s side, with Paz representing the more centrist and traditional option. Cerimedo took charge of Paz’s communications, invited by the candidate’s daughter who had taken a course with the propagandist.
This episode shows that Cerimedo is less attached to ideology than to power and money. Following Rodrigo Paz’s victory, the propagandist continued to play a significant role in the new government. Given his contacts, it is highly likely he established links with the MAGA sphere in the United States. On March 7, the newly elected president, accompanied only by his foreign minister and Cerimedo, attended the inaugural meeting of Shield of the Americas, designed by Marco Rubio and chaired by Donald Trump at the Trump National Doral in Miami—officially founded to combat drug trafficking. Thus, Cerimedo expanded the MAGA sphere by incorporating a president who professed a moderate right, or, conversely, he participated in the rapid rightward shift of Rodrigo Paz.
Honduras remains. This may be the most emblematic case, perfectly illustrating the link between Cerimedo’s propaganda work and Donald Trump’s agenda. Recall that last year’s elections were marked by overt interference from the White House that leveraged every channel to ensure its candidate, Nasry Asfura, would win. This support was spectacularly manifested by Donald Trump’s pardon of Asfura’s mentor, former president from 2014 to 2022, Juan Orlando Hernández. Hernández had been sentenced to 45 years in prison in 2024 by a New York federal court for participating in a network that trafficked hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States, turning his country into a “narco-state,” according to prosecutors.
Cerimedo, a MAGA man for Latin America
Fidelity to Steve Bannon’s strategy, Cerimedo, whether through his bots or his misinformation media, continually “floods the field with shit.”
After such a path, we see a little more clearly this figure, emerged from the underbelly of swindling and touching (without being) the summit of power. But how can such a second-rate crook manipulate algorithms to such a degree as to alter the course of elections, becoming so indispensable to powerful men? Cerimedo is certainly adept at spouting nonsense in a media outlet like La Derecha Diario, organizing smear campaigns or lying without a shred of scruple, but not at building a network of bots capable of influencing powerful algorithms.
For that, he had a powerful patron.
In February 2026, Cerimedo received an award at an improbable “Hispanic Prosperity Gala” organized by an equally improbable “Latino Wall Street.” The event took place at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Florida residence and event center. The prize was presented to him by Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of Brazil’s former far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro. During the evening, Cerimedo gave a speech in Spanish that he finished with a few words in English:
“I wanna say something in English. Thank you, Brad Parscale, for believing in me all the time and giving me your technology. And Tim Dunn, for fighting in Latin America against socialism. Thank you, Brad.”
The two individuals thanked here throw light on who enabled the Mar del Plata petty crook to rub shoulders with presidents. Brad Parscale was Donald Trump’s digital campaign manager for the 2016 election. Tim Dunn is a Texas-based billionaire, ultraconservative. Technology and money. Nothing is hidden.
Since 2023, Cerimedo’s company’s headquarters have been in Miami. All those technological and financial links with the United States show that he has become a key figure in the expansion of the U.S. far-right program for Latin America.
Cerimedo? Never heard of him
On August 17, Nadia Beller went to an appointment in front of a hotel in a posh district of Santa Cruz. Following recommendations from her ex-partner, Fernando Cerimedo, she was to meet people possessing documents that would prove lurid information about Evo Morales, the iconic former left-wing president. The people were late; she went into the hotel to have a treat, to nourish the fetus she had seen in ultrasound images the previous evening, accompanied by Cerimedo. She came out, waiting for her appointment, phone in hand. Two helmeted men dressed as couriers approached her. One drew a pistol and fired at her, the other bent to steal something from her. The scene was filmed by a surveillance camera.
She survived, and so did the fetus, despite three bullets in her body.
From her hospital bed, the 34-year-old lawyer and political adviser has accused her ex-partner as the mastermind behind the assassination attempt. The police arrested Cerimedo at Santa Cruz airport. According to the prosecutor, who placed him in preventive detention, he planned to flee to Argentina.
Since then, most politicians who had Cerimedo as adviser pretend to barely know him or have had no contact with him for years, as Javier Milei did on August 22: “He’s someone who has no ties to us and with whom we ceased all collaboration in 2023.”
The records of the Casa Rosada show no fewer than fourteen visits by Cerimedo in the first half of 2024. The Argentine president’s stance follows another attitude. Initially, in the first twenty-four hours after the assassination attempt, the video saturating the media space, Javier Milei posted several messages suggesting it was a staged attack or a self-inflicted attack.
The Bolivian president, for his part, waited more than ten days to comment on his close adviser. He claimed it was a relatively marginal figure in his campaign. In response, Nadia Beller published numerous documents demonstrating Cerimedo’s heavy influence within the Bolivian presidency’s structure. Beller uses the media space as much as possible, considering it her only protection against Cerimedo and others who would like to see her dead. Her Facebook page has thus become a source of many illustrative documents.
Moreover, Santa Cruz’s prosecutor’s office released messages from Cerimedo’s phone, while he remains presumed innocent. The most incriminating shows the staggering degree of impunity with which Cerimedo believed he could operate. In a scene worthy of a very bad thriller, he writes to his interlocutor: “Nadia betrayed us. Either we eliminate her now, or we are screwed. Do you know anyone who could do the job?”
Between his arrest for attempted femicide and today, new investigations have been opened for illicit enrichment and drug trafficking. If they are not too hindered, the judicial outcomes are likely to be rich in revelations in the months and years to come.