Bolivian police arrest the man known as the Steve Bannon of South America. Credit: Getty
Juan David Rojas
9 Sep 2026 - 12:00am 5 mins
It was an episode straight out of a hit narconovela (the subgenre of Latin-American telenovelas that feature gangland violence in addition to the usual raunchy romance). Nadia, an expectant mother, leaves the comfort of her hotel in an unnamed South American country. Two hitmen approach her, shooting her three times at the behest of a powerful and psychotic lover. Miraculously, the victim not only survives the assassination attempt, but goes on to reveal untold corruption perpetrated by her lover and an international cabal of political elites. A montage ensues of the would-be killer’s interdiction while attempting to flee via the local airport. Cut to black, roll credits, thanks for tuning into the latest from El amor político — “Political Love.”
Except, the episode was no soap opera. All this unfolded in real life: a set of convoluted events following the August 17 attempted assassination of Nadia Beller, a renowned lawyer and activist in the Andean nation of Bolivia. Her lover, now facing attempted murder charges for allegedly trying to have her killed? Fernando Cerimedo, 45, an Argentine political operative with close ties to some of the hemisphere’s most prominent Right-wing leaders — including Donald Trump. Since 2023, Right-wing parties and leaders have clinched 12 out of 15 elections in the Americas, with Cerimedo playing a decisive role in at least three of them.
The rise and spectacular fall of Cerimedo — dubbed “MAGA’s man in Latin America” and “the Steve Bannon of South America” — shed a cold light on the powerful networks driving the region’s “New Right.”
It was an episode straight out of a hit narconovela (the subgenre of Latin-American telenovelas that feature gangland violence in addition to the usual raunchy romance). Nadia, an expectant mother, leaves the comfort of her hotel in an unnamed South American country. Two hitmen approach her, shooting her three times at the behest of a powerful and psychotic lover. Miraculously, the victim not only survives the assassination attempt, but goes on to reveal untold corruption perpetrated by her lover and an international cabal of political elites. A montage ensues of the would-be killer’s interdiction while attempting to flee via the local airport. Cut to black, roll credits, thanks for tuning into the latest from El amor político — “Political Love.”
Except, the episode was no soap opera. All this unfolded in real life: a set of convoluted events following the August 17 attempted assassination of Nadia Beller, a renowned lawyer and activist in the Andean nation of Bolivia. Her lover, now facing attempted murder charges for allegedly trying to have her killed? Fernando Cerimedo, 45, an Argentine political operative with close ties to some of the hemisphere’s most prominent Right-wing leaders — including Donald Trump. Since 2023, Right-wing parties and leaders have clinched 12 out of 15 elections in the Americas, with Cerimedo playing a decisive role in at least three of them.
The rise and spectacular fall of Cerimedo — dubbed “MAGA’s man in Latin America” and “the Steve Bannon of South America” — shed a cold light on the powerful networks driving the region’s “New Right.”
Born in the Atlantic resort city of Mar del Plata, Argentina, Cerimedo’s biography reads much like that of other archetypical political grifters such as, say, George Santos. At various times, the now criminal defendant worked as a taxi driver, an insurance agent, and a high-school teacher. Less plausibly, he claims to have won a scholarship as a triathlete to attend Harvard, where he trained alongside Navy SEALs. And similarly, he’s claimed to have worked for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign after obtaining a degree in marketing from the University of Phoenix, making him perhaps the only person to have attended both Harvard and the online for-profit university.
In the event, after some time spent abroad, Cerimedo returned to Argentina and began working for the marketing firm McCann. In 2016, he was convicted of selling the same apartment in Mar del Plata to two separate buyers.
Three years later, Cerimedo and the Spanish commentator Javier Negre founded the popular social-media account La Derecha Diario, or “The Daily Right,” which they transformed into a formal news publication of the same name in 2021. Much of La Derecha Diario’s content is poorly sourced, if not outright deceptive, resembling the rage-baiting disinfo mills that now dominate X (formerly Twitter). Likewise through his parallel firm Numen Publicidad, Cerimedo turned troll farms and political AI slop into an exportable product — one he marketed to Right-wing leaders in Brazil, Argentina, Honduras, and Bolivia.
By 2022, Cerimedo had joined the re-election campaign of former Right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, whose son Eduardo he claimed to have met at Harvard. His dissemination of false claims regarding Brazil’s voting machines helped mobilize mobs who stormed Brazil’s capital in January 2023 following Bolsonaro’s defeat at the hands of the Left’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known as Lula. Later that year, Cerimedo secured a role as communications chief for Argentine President Javier Milei’s successful 2023 campaign; the operative reportedly played a key role in landing Milei an interview with Tucker Carlson.
It was through this ecosystem that Cerimedo became connected with a Who’s Who of the hemispheric Right, which has now blended with MAGA and has its unofficial headquarters in Miami. There, Latin-American exiles from places like Cuba and Venezuela promote an omni-hawkish worldview that also encompasses escalating against Russia in Ukraine, efforts to weaken the pro-Palestinian government in Spain, and regime change in Iran.
Cerimedo’s presence at the heart of these circles is now an embarrassment for the movement across the region, what with the alleged killer’s numerous photo-ops with the likes of the Bolsonaros, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the Miami Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart. But by far his most influential American patron was Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale.
Parscale and Cerimedo subsequently collaborated on Bolivia’s 2025 election, most notably in the successful campaign of President Rodrigo Paz. Parscale has recently come under fire for a $46.5 million Israeli-financed international communications operation aimed at shaping how AI systems frame responses about Israel via text messages to US citizens. Unsurprisingly, a core feature of the pair’s activities in Latin America has been to lobby in favor of closer relations with the governments of Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Later that year, Cerimedo reportedly helped conservative candidate Nasry Asfura secure a crucial endorsement from Trump in the Honduran presidential election. Asfura, from the right-wing National Party, narrowly won the presidency and Trump went on to pardon the new president’s close ally and convicted predecessor, Juan Orlando Hernandez — who’d been sentenced to 45 years in prison by a George W. Bush-nominated judge for funneling 500 tons of cocaine into the US homeland.
Cerimedo followed Rodrigo Paz into the Bolivian government, where he assumed the role of “chief adviser to the president” per his own business cards. It was during this period that the married Cerimedo began a relationship with Beller, the lawyer and political analyst from Santa Cruz, the country’s lowland metropolis. Ironically, Beller previously won election in 2019 as a lawmaker for the Left-wing Movement Towards Socialism but was prevented from assuming office due to a coup against then-President Evo Morales; at the time, Cerimedo celebrated the coup against Morales, whom he labeled a “narcodictator.”
Prior to the shooting, Beller had accused Cerimedo of domestic violence, publishing photographs of bruises and private messages apparently substantiating the alleged abuse. The day of her attempted murder, Beller claims, she was heading to meet with sources promising damaging information on former President Morales. The gunmen shot her three times at close range, though she survived, in her telling, by playing dead. Cerimedo was arrested hours later at Viru Viru airport, trying to board a flight to Buenos Aires. Four days later, a Bolivian judge charged him as the mastermind of an attempted “femicide” against Beller; his defense floated a theory of self-inflicted injury.
But the true-crime story has turned into a political earthquake. Speaking from her hospital bed, Beller has made a mix of credible and outlandish claims about her lover’s ties to the CIA; kickbacks from the Paz administration; and involvement in the Bolivian drug trade.
That last claim tracks with two separate investigations against Cerimedo. Searches of two properties tied to Cerimedo in La Paz turned up cash stuffed into drawers, a satellite phone, a vehicle modified to resemble an official government car, and furniture built with concealed compartments. Bolivian prosecutors have since raided what the local media have described as a bot farm on another property linked to him. Adding fuel to the fire, Vice President Edmand Lara seized on the opportunity to fuel an ongoing feud with President Paz, claiming that Cerimedo was the most powerful person in the country after the president.
Cerimedo has denied all accusations against him from his cell, and he should be entitled to a presumption of innocence unless and until he is proved guilty. It’s salutary that the dirt dished by his lover will be tested in court — and equally that some of his past, proven skullduggery is coming to light, to the great embarrassment of the hard Right in Latin America. It’s certainly poetic that the operative who made his career trafficking in the scandals and hypocrisy of his Left-wing opponents now faces life behind bars for the attempted murder of his extramarital partner.
In an official statement, La Derecha Diario announced that the publication was severing ties with its disgraced cofounder and denied involvement in Beller’s attempted killing. Will all this foreshadow the end, and perhaps the reversal, of the region’s shift to the Right in recent years? The answer remains to be seen. Certainly, it’s a dark omen for Milei & co, and the real-life narconovela is far from over.
