Fernando Cerimedo, the founder of La Derecha Diario (The Right-Wing Daily), was recently arrested after being implicated in a murder for hire plot. The victim, Nadia Beller, survived the assassination attempt after being shot three times. During his arrest, police found a bot farm and a hoard of cash in multiple currencies at one of his many properties. Cerimedo faces charges of attempted femicide, money laundering, and illicit enrichment. Beller, in fear for her life, decided to publicly expose him, his network, and many of his connections.
“…there’s a conspiracy involving the entire government,” Beller said from her hospital bed. “The police aren’t going to act against this … because he controls the police. Rodrigo [Paz] doesn’t govern here; Fernando Cerimedo does.”
When coupled with U.S. government documents, her allegations lead us to look more deeply into Cerimedo’s influence in Washington, D.C., and many Latin American countries. Beller alleges that Cerimedo was at one point a CIA operative, an assertion former Bolivian President Evo Morales echoed. While the CIA operative connection has yet to be definitively made, his relationships with various U.S. government agencies, lawmakers, and registered foreign agents tell quite a story. An investigative report from the Cuban Media Observatory, republished by La Jornada in Mexico and using U.S. government filings, helps expose many of those connections.
Cerimedo, whom The Economist called “Maga’s man in LatAm,” is a business partner of Brad Parscale in Cerimedo’s Argentine consultancy firm Numen Group. Parscale, the former campaign manager for President Donald Trump, maintains connections to Trump and the White House. Parscale is a registered foreign agent of the Government of Israel and maintains connections to various Latin American leaders and political movements.
In 2023, while helping Argentine President Javier Milei win the presidential election. Cerimedo described Grupo Numen as a conglomerate of several companies.
“It’s the digital agency we work with on consulting and marketing projects for corporate and political clients. It comprises several companies,” Cerimedo said in 2023. “One is Madero Media Group, which owns its own digital media outlets. We have a radio studio, Madero Radio, and we’re also developing a streaming television channel with journalists and producers,” he added. “We’re an independent media outlet and don’t receive advertising revenue. And we have the websites Madero News and La Derecha Diario, exclusively dedicated to a right-wing audience,” Cerimedo said. “It’s to support everything we do, because we often want to disseminate news, both corporate and political. And since there isn’t always space in the media, we share it on our own websites and channels. We have corporate clients in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and the United States.”
According to Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings, Cerimedo and Parscale exploit connections with lawmakers and government officials through their affiliation with lobbyist Damián Merlo, also a registered foreign agent. Merlo is a Miami-based managing partner of the Latin America Advisory Group, which partnered with Numen in 2023 to help elect Milei.
In a separate FARA filing in 2024, Merlo is listed as a foreign agent for Argentina, El Salvador, and Haiti. He is documented as providing “Public relations and communications advice and support to, and outreach to the federal executive branch and Congress on behalf of the foreign principal.” Merlo is recorded as a representative for the Embassy of the Republic of Haiti, the Office of the President of El Salvador, and Milei.
Merlo’s links to the U.S. government are vast. FARA filings dating back years show Merlo contacting then-Senator Marco Rubio’s advisor, Viviana Bovo, and former advisor to Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Ricardo Pita, who is now a senior advisor for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department. The filings also show Merlo communicating with Florida Reps. Maria Elvira Salazar and Mario Diaz-Balart, along with Mauricio Claver-Carone, who was president of the Inter-American Development Bank at the time. Claver-Carone is now serving as a Special Envoy to Latin America and coordinating the exploitation of Venezuela’s vast resources.
A FARA filing in 2025 shows Merlo meeting with or communicating via email or text message with dozens of lawmakers. His history within the U.S. government is extensive. In 1997, he was contracted by the State Department as a screening officer, conducting interviews with Cubans requesting to immigrate to the U.S. Between 2002 and 2007, he was a program officer at the International Republican Institute through a sub-grant to the Miami-based Directorio Revolutionario. In that role, he reportedly helped “develop international solidarity committees in Latin America and Europe – providing material, moral, and ideological support for Cuban democratic activists.”
Merlo then went to work at Otto Reich Associates as its Vice President. The firm, founded by Cuban American hardliner Otto Reich, plays on Reich’s extensive experience in government and as an Ambassador. Reich was implicated alongside Elliot Abrams in helping organize the 2002 coup against democratically elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. At the time, the Guardian referred to Reich as the “key policy-maker for Latin America” for then-President George W. Bush. Like Abrams, Reich has extensive ties to the “dirty wars” in Latin America, including the Iran-Contra affair, which led to CIA-backed drug smuggling to fund conflicts.
Connecting them all is the right-wing “digital consulting” apparatus that Merlo, Parscale, and Cerimedo have established across Latin America to elect far-right leaders. Merlo opens doors in Washington, D.C.; Parscale builds the infrastructure through his Campaign Nucleus and EyesOver platforms; Cerimedo acts as a more localized on-the-ground strategist managing the rollout of messaging through vast troll farms.
Campaign Nucleus and EyesOver were developed using code from Cambridge Analytica that provides AI-written emails, data to gauge voter sentiment, and the amplification of influencers who support right-wing ideas. Cerimedo was the sole licensee of both products in Latin America. In the aforementioned 2023 interview, Cerimedo explained how those platforms were used in conjunction with his troll farm of 50,000 accounts to help Milei win the presidency.
“People need to understand that trolls work and that not everything about them is bad,” said Cerimedo. “It’s a service that all politicians want and pay for. But today we don’t offer troll farms. It’s a different concept. We create AI-powered accounts with a certain volume and credibility, which we then use in a defined strategy, with diverse content, to generate influence,” continued Cerimedo. Based on our experience, we realized that everything changed after 2020. After the pandemic, social media went crazy, innovating in the algorithm, realizing that there was a massive volume of people connected, so they changed the rules of the game that existed until 2019.”
Merlo and Parscale integrated Cerimedo into a massive U.S.-based conservative network that is centered in Miami, Florida. This network allowed Cerimedo to back right-wing movements and candidates in several countries in the region. In addition to Milei and Paz, Cerimedo and Merlo also have ties to former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is now jailed due to a failed coup (largely promoted with the propaganda spread by Cerimedo’s outlet, La Derecha Diario), Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, Honduran President Nasry Asfura, and Chilean President José Antonio Kast, whose digital media strategies for their respective presidential campaigns were run by Cerimedo.
While the focus on Cerimedo has been centered on his Latin American disinformation networks, what is more broadly overlooked are this group’s ties to another deceptive media outlet, UHN Plus. UHN Plus was founded in 2023 to spread right-wing propaganda in Latin America with a hyperfocus on Cuba. Cerimedo and his partner in La Derecha Diario, Javier Negre, bought into UHN Plus, thus obscuring their presence and expanding their partnerships with Merlo, Parscale, and others.
While UHN Plus addressed some of the recent allegations made against it, it did not deny them and instead focused on “the contradiction of Castro’s censorship.” What’s impossible to deny are the U.S. Department of Justice FARA filings that lay out the pattern described here. While Cerimedo’s arrest will undoubtedly disrupt this network, there are still many very wealthy and powerful players on the field. Those players are actively recruiting other media outlets in specific countries to help drive a U.S.-corporate-friendly far-right agenda.
Recently, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum highlighted La Derecha Diraio’s partnership with Mexican businessman Ricardo Salinas Pliego, who financially and logistically backed the outlet’s expansion into Mexico in 2024 to promote right-wing narratives. Cerimedo might be out of the picture, and presidents and high-ranking government officials may have tried to distance themselves from him, but the people pushing the agenda are very much in the game and are likely prepared to exploit the infrastructure they’ve built over the last decade.
Watch Nadia Beller’s Interview From Her Hospital Bed
“I’m alive. I don’t trust the press or the police, who are the ones most interested in getting rid of me,” said Beller. “The only one who has treated me well so far has been the prosecutor, because he is the one who has given me the guarantees to have a reasonable level of security. I’m coordinating with the doctors, but I don’t even have police protection. Thank God.”
Discover more from The Antagonist Magazine
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.