By Libio Pérez Zúñiga – Aug 27, 2026
The first trace of the disgraced ultra-right strategist Fernando Cerimedo in Chile dates back to 2020, when the country was beginning a path of constitutional change as a result of the popular uprising in October 2019. The agreement to change the Constitution created by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1980 brought together a broad spectrum of political forces, with the exception of the far-right, which called upon the people to “reject” the end of the Pinochet constitution and the drafting of a new one. Amidst that struggle, the first digital actions of “black propaganda,” fake news, disinformation, and the massive intervention of bots and trolls as a form of political communication emerged. It was the debut of the “King of Trolls” in Chile.
For just over a week ago, Cerimedo has been in preventive detention in Bolivia, charged with the attempted femicide of his ex-partner Nadia Beller, and since then, abundant information has begun to flow about the strategist’s involvement in elections that have favored the far-right, through campaigns based on misinformation. The attempt to murder Beller, carried out by hitmen hired by Cerimedo, was aimed at silencing her—as she herself said from the hospital where she is recovering from three bullet wounds—so that she could not make public information about the campaigns that Cerimedo was preparing for the elections in Brazil and the destabilization of Mexico.
In the raid on an apartment where Cerimedo stayed in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, the police found a “bot farm” with thousands of accounts, and about $50,000 in cash. The Bolivian Attorney General’s office has initiated an investigation that will include several countries in the continent to investigate the main accusation made by Cerimedo’s ex-partner: that she was going to expose the destabilization plans, as well as the financing mechanisms of the publicist’s extensive network of contacts, starting with those to whom he has provided direct service, such as Javier Milei in Argentina, the Bolsonaro family in Brazil, and Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia. His contacts, networks, and clients from his company Numen—which has commercial registrations in Argentina, Chile, and Miami—have expanded across the continent and have conducted business with sectors other than the far right. The scope also includes emerging populisms.
In Chile, Cerimedo’s debut in the 2020 constitutional plebiscite was alongside a group of business owners and high-level executives who financed the campaign against the end of the Pinochet-era Constitution, during when he met Alejandro Irarrázabal, who is now the powerful head of advisors to Chilean President José Antonio Kast. He also got involved in the “Common House for Rejection” with Felipe Costabal, now director of the Communications Secretariat of Kast’s government, the department from where government campaigns are crafted. In the same group was Ignacio Dülger, a member of the Chilean president’s advisory team.
According to some reports published by Chilean press, Cerimedo came to Chile to advise the “Common House” group due to the efforts made by Costabal, who had references about the publicist and his work with Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. Once settled in Chile, Cerimedo organized three telephone surveys that predicted that the “Reject” option would win in the first plebiscite. However, in reality, the “Approve” option received more than 75% of the votes. Since then, some right-wing figures have lost confidence in “The King of Trolls.” Gerardo Jofré, who was the president of the board of the Copper Corporation (CODELCO) between 2010 and 2014, admitted that Cerimedo’s polls, published by the mainstream Chilean newspaper El Mercurio, “were wrong” and that they were not even close to reality. Others were less delicate and described the polls as “farces” and said that Cerimedo “was selling snake oil.”
In 2021, Cerimedo reappeared in Chile. He supported the presidential candidacy of the economist Franco Parisi, who campaigned from Alabama, United States, as he was unable to set foot on Chilean soil due to a lawsuit against him for a million-dollar child support debt. Parisi’s digital campaign was so intense that he was able to reach third place with almost 13% of the votes, behind Kast and Gabriel Boric.
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The following year, on September 4, 2022, the constitutional exit plebiscite was held, to vote on the draft constitution created by the Constitutional Convention with a progressive majority. There, Cerimedo and his team worked to secure a victory for the right. The results were catastrophic for the left and progressivism, obtaining just over 35% of the votes in support of the new constitution, compared to the 65% that the right got. “We are celebrating. Very tough work,” Cerimedo posted that night.
There is no record of Cerimedo being directly hired in the 2025 presidential campaign, which Kast won, but there is confirmation that the far right intensely used “bot farms” and aggressive actions against its rivals. There were not only campaigns like “the left will take your house” or “the left will take your job to give it to migrants,” but also direct attacks against center-right candidate Evelyn Matthei, who was shown in a manipulated video as a Parkinson’s patient.
Whether Cerimedo was in the last presidential election campaign or not will be clarified by institutional bodies, such as the Electoral Service and the government itself, which are already being scrutinized by progressive parliamentarians. What is clear is that Cerimedo’s lessons on conducting aggressive disinformation campaigns and deploying thousands of bots have already been learned by the Chilean right.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
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