The two previous installments of Cubadebate’s Media Observatory tracked Fernando Cerimedo. The first reconstructed his corporate base in Miami and the lobbying circuit connecting him—through Damián Merlo and the Latin America Advisory Group—to congressional offices, the US State Department, and the Marco Rubio network. The second examined the other end of the process: how each country incorporated MAGA ideology into its own national conflict when the operation burst into the Latin American public conversation via Cerimedo.

In that first piece, a US name appeared almost in passing: Brad Parscale, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager and Cerimedo’s technological partner in Latin America. This third installment is dedicated to him—because his trajectory allows us to answer a question the previous two left open: if Cerimedo bought political access in Miami and Washington, where did the technology he worked with come from?

The answer the documents offer is uncomfortable precisely because it is so prosaic. There is no conspiracy with a secret organizational chart. There is a business: a vendor who packaged software, databases, and political reputation and sold them—with the same commercial logic—to conservative US candidates, to Latin American campaigns, and to a foreign ministry.

Who is Brad Parscale? A US businessman, until 2015, he ran a small web design firm in San Antonio, Texas—Giles-Parscale. He led the digital operation of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and served as campaign manager for the 2020 reelection bid. Today he sells technology platforms for political campaigns and operates, through his company Clock Tower X, as a registered foreign agent.

Methodology: what this article measures and what it does notThis article draws on two types of material. The first is a quantitative database: 2,925 posts from public Facebook pages mentioning Brad Parscale between 2016 and 2026, filtered to exclude namesakes and incidental mentions, with 2,809,571 cumulative interactions—comments, reactions and shares. Two things were measured on this basis: (1) annual volume of posts and interactions and (2) frequency of co-mentions—how often each individual is named in the same post as Parscale—to observe his associations with US power and the Cerimedo network.

The second material consists of documentary sources: US Department of Justice Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings—in particular, Registration 7649, for Clock Tower X LLC, and 6898, for the Latin America Advisory Group—together with investigative reporting from The New York Times, Associated Press, Bloomberg, ProPublica, Drop Site News, El País de Bolivia, the Honduran daily Tiempo, and others.

What is FARA? The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires individuals and firms acting in the United States on behalf of foreign governments or entities to declare clients, contracts, activities, and payments. Being registered under FARA is not a crime and does not imply espionage—it is a transparency mechanism. Its journalistic value lies in the fact that it leaves a verifiable, signed and dated documentary trail.

A necessary caveat—the same one applied throughout this series, is recognition that the mention count is not a sentiment analysis. It measures the presence and association of names, not endorsement or rejection. Many of the posts mentioning Parscale are critical of him.

The three categories of evidence used by this Observatory were applied: demonstrated (direct primary source), contextual or inferred (consistent coincidences without bilateral proof), and uncorroborated (accusations without independent backing). In the annual chart, the 2020 values and totals are those explicitly recorded in the database; the rest of the annual series reproduces the distribution from that same source and should be read as approximate.

10 years compressed into a single yearThe first reading of the sample yields a clear pattern: Parscale’s public visibility did not grow steadily—it was concentrated almost entirely in 2020, the year he managed Trump’s reelection campaign and the year his political career collapsed.

That single year accounts for 1,616 posts—55.2% of the entire decade-long sample—and around 1.5 million interactions. Within 2020, the two peaks are telling: the highest volume of posts was recorded in September—the month of his personal crisis—and the highest volume of interactions was measured in July, when Trump removed him from the campaign leadership.

Between 2021 and 2024, the curve almost disappears, meaning Brad Parscale exits the public eye. It rises again, modestly, in 2025 and 2026, when his contracts with the Israeli entity and his Latin American alliance with Fernando Cerimedo became public.

It is worth repeating a distinction used in the second installment because it applies equally to Parscale: visibility is not activity. The four years of silence on Facebook are not years of inactivity—they are precisely the years in which he rebuilt his business away from the spotlight. The curve measures when people wrote about him, not when he worked.

The orbit of a single nameThe second measurement is more revealing than the first. Counting which other actors appear named alongside Parscale in those 2,925 posts, the result is overwhelmingly asymmetric.

Donald Trump and his family appear in 2,635 posts—90% of the sample. This is not anecdotal: it indicates that Parscale’s public existence is entirely derivative of US power. He is not talked about for his products but for his connection to a family. That connection is also his primary commercial asset: what he sells is not just software—it is the promise that this software won a presidential election.

At a considerable distance follow the Republican Party (310) and Bill Stepien (284).

Who is Bill Stepien? In Trump’s 2016 campaign, Stepien was national field director while Parscale led the digital operation—both belonging to the same electoral ecosystem but with different functions. After Trump’s victory, Stepien entered the White House as director of political affairs (2017–2018), before returning to Trump’s electoral network. In May 2020, Parscale—then campaign manager—announced Stepien’s promotion to deputy campaign manager. But less than two months later, the hierarchy was reversed: on July 15, 2020, Trump dismissed Parscale and placed Stepien in his position.

A second finding emerges from the same chart. The Israeli government appears in 90 posts; Fernando Cerimedo in just 16. The Middle Eastern state client has almost six times more public presence than the Latin American partner—which means the Latin American operation is the least visible part of his business and, for that very reason, the least scrutinized. Cambridge Analytica, the firm at the center of the world’s largest data and elections scandal in 2018, appears only 15 times.

From “campaign plumber” to machine ownerTo understand what was sold in Latin America, it is necessary to first understand what was built in the United States.

The relationship began as strictly commercial and private. In 2010, the firm Giles-Parscale obtained a contract to develop real estate websites for Trump family brands. The “Giles” in the company name comes from Jill Giles, a San Antonio designer and branding specialist who was Parscale’s partner—not a second surname of his or a family business.

This vendor relationship—predating any political function by several years—was what opened access to Trump. In December 2015, when the primary campaign’s digital infrastructure failed, political advisors proposed replacing Parscale, but the decision was vetoed by Michael Glassner—a veteran Republican strategist and political operator—and by members of the Trump family, who considered Parscale as part of the inner circle.

In 2016,  Parscale’s contribution was not strategic or scientific but operational. From a headquarters in San Antonio dubbed Project Alamo, he coordinated the mass purchase of cheap digital advertising, targeted ads, and digital micro-fundraising. He described himself as “the campaign’s plumber” and summarized his method in a phrase that became celebrated: “Twitter was how Trump talked to people, but Facebook was the vehicle that won him the election.”

It is worth emphasizing what that operation was actually made of—because it dismantles the myth of the lone genius. The voter database was provided by the Republican National Committee, Cambridge Analytica deployed 13 specialists under his supervision, and Facebook embedded its own technical staff in campaign offices to provide daily support. Political direction lay with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Steve Bannon—campaign chief and the person who connected Parscale with Cambridge Analytica.

Micro-targeting and “dark posts.” Targeting means dividing the population into small groups according to age, location, consumption habits, or interests and sending each group a different message. A dark post is an ad seen only by the chosen group and that is not published on the advertiser’s page—nobody outside that group knows it exists. Reports from Bloomberg and The Washington Post documented that the 2016 campaign used that format not to persuade but to demobilize, generating frustration and apathy among voters who might lean toward Hillary Clinton.

Parscale himself always denied using psychographics—the psychological profiling technique promoted by Cambridge Analytica—dismissing it as the same as what was already done in commercial marketing, “just with more sophisticated names.”

Psychographics was one of Cambridge Analytica’s main commercial promises, presented by its then-CEO Alexander Nix as a distinctive competitive edge: it was not enough to know who voters were or how they had previously voted—the ambition was to deduce their personality type and craft a message that could be psychologically more persuasive.

Parscale told a different story. In his interview with Lesley Stahl for CBS’s 60 Minutes, he said the campaign had not used psychographics because, simply, he did not believe it worked. When asked whether he had rejected it as manipulative or sinister, Parscale responded that he did not consider it sinister—he considered it ineffective: “I just don’t think it works.”

This refusal did not, however, mean Parscale rejected intensive voter segmentation. On the contrary. In the same interview he showed how his team could send virtually identical ads with variations in message, color, or subject line to different audiences and test which performed better. He explained, for example, that two neighbors on the same street could receive different ads because one had been classified in an audience interested in taxes and the other in one concerned with energy or infrastructure.

In other words, Parscale rejected the label and the specific scientific pretension of psychographics, not the general logic of identifying differences among individuals and adapting messages accordingly.

For Parscale, the 2016 victory multiplied the scale of his business: his firm channeled more than US $170 million of the electoral budget through opaque structures such as Red State Data & Digital. In 2018, he was named reelection campaign manager and declared: “The old Republican Party is gone. It is now the party of Trump.”

Parscale’s downfall began to become visible in June 2020, with Trump’s Tulsa, Oklahoma rally—conceived as the president’s grand return to mass events after months of pandemic restrictions. In the days beforehand, Parscale dramatically raised expectations, publicly announcing that the campaign had received more than a million ticket requests, with Trump speaking of record attendance. The campaign even prepared an outdoor stage for a second address to the crowd that, supposedly, would not fit inside the BOK Center, a venue with a capacity of close to 19,000. Reality was very different: the Tulsa fire department counted fewer than 6,200 attendees, with large sections of the stands empty, and the outdoor event had to be cancelled. The Washington Post later described the episode, by the campaign’s own established parameters, as a “debacle.”

It was a data modeling failure turned into public humiliation. On July 15, Trump dismissed him. On September 27, following an emergency call from his wife reporting domestic violence, Fort Lauderdale police intervened and he was admitted to a hospital for psychological evaluation. With that personal crisis, which explains the September peak in Figure 1, Parscale was removed from the campaign.

What came next is decisive. Parscale did not return as an advisor—he came back as a manufacturer. His product, Campaign Nucleus, was marketed as an integrated system combining automated email dispatch, social media sentiment analysis, predictive identification of persuadable voters, and mass generation of content and websites using artificial intelligence, with a sales pitch calibrated for his clientele: independence from major platforms and protection against “cancellation.”

In 2024, federal records showed payments of more than US $2.2 million to Nucleus from Republican political action committees.

The shift constitutes one of the central findings of this evolution: Parscale went from providing a service dependent on other people’s platforms to attempting to become the owner of the infrastructure from which campaigns are run.

In 2016, his competitive advantage lay fundamentally in knowing how to exploit tools belonging to third parties better than others. Facebook provided the advertising platform and its segmentation mechanisms; the RNC supplied a substantial portion of electoral data; Cambridge Analytica and other vendors provided analysis and modeling services; external firms supplied software, databases, and communication tools. Parscale integrated those pieces, administered enormous advertising budgets and converted available data into audiences, ads, fundraising, and mobilization. He was an extraordinarily important individual—but he operated on infrastructure he did not control.

Campaign Nucleus represents a change of model. Parscale no longer presents himself simply as the consultant capable of buying better Facebook advertising or combining data from various providers but as the founder of a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform that seeks to concentrate within a single ecosystem functions traditionally dispersed among numerous contractors: contact management, websites, email, SMS, fundraising, data analysis, voter identification and segmentation, and subsequently, artificial intelligence tools.

The Associated Press described Campaign Nucleus as a kind of “one-stop shop” seeking to automate tasks previously performed by workers, volunteers, and various campaign vendors.

That is why Parscale did not abandon the model that led him to success in 2016—he tried to internalize it. If, then, his power derived from knowing how to use other people’s platforms better than his rivals, with Campaign Nucleus, he sought to make candidates and organizations use his own. The leap was from digital operator to owner of the principal political infrastructure for right-wing network disinformation.

The Latin American arm: what each partner contributesThat infrastructure is what reached Latin America. The alliance with Fernando Cerimedo became public in December 2025, when the Honduran daily Tiempo detailed the cooperation between the two. The clearest description came from Cerimedo himself, in writing, to The New York Times: “Brad built all the infrastructure I work with.”

The division of functions is textbook. Parscale provided the engineering: software support, Campaign Nucleus and EyesOver monitoring tool licenses, the predictive segmentation methodology, and the prestige of the Trump brand. Cerimedo provided the ground: local political knowledge, his own network of right-wing media—La Derecha Diario and its satellites, including UHNPlus, sustained by rabid anti-communist Cubans—and the capacity to carry out campaigns.

There is also a financial trail. Annexes submitted to the FARA registry, reported by various outlets, including Realpolitik and Informador Público, show that the Clock Tower X campaign for the Israeli entity subcontracted operations in Argentina and the region and transferred combined payments of US $702,002.50 to firms associated with Cerimedo under the heading of “global content production.” This is a figure worth reading twice: money from an Israeli public diplomacy contract financing content production in the Southern Cone of South America.

Rigor, however, demands that levels of evidence be distinguished country by country.

Honduras: Provided infrastructure and direct remote advisory services to the campaign team of candidate Nasry Asfura (The New York Times, December 2025). Demonstrated.

Bolivia: Technological advisory services to the Rodrigo Paz campaign and coordination visits; deployment of “mini bot farms” was reported (El País de Bolivia). Demonstrated.

Argentina: FARA registry 6898 for LAAG declares the Numen consultancy’s collaboration in Milei’s 2023 presidential campaign. Documented in official registry.

Brazil: Federal Police complaints and reports on electoral disinformation attributed to Cerimedo; Parscale appears in press reports as a technical provider.

Project 545: when the target is no longer the voterOne of the most significant documents in the entire file has nothing to do with Latin America. In September 2025, Parscale’s company Clock Tower X LLC formally registered with the US Department of Justice, number 7649, as a foreign agent of the state of Israel, acting as a subcontractor for the advertising giant Havas Media.

The contract, initially US $6 million, expanded to US $9 million via a December 26, 2025, annex, corresponds to a digital campaign named Project 545, operationally directed by the chief of staff of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Eran Shayovich. Its goals are written into the file: at least 100 pieces of content monthly, 80% targeting young people on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and 50 million impressions per month.

To that point, it would be an aggressive but conventional public diplomacy campaign. What is truly new is the mechanism.

The contract provides for the creation of an ecosystem of front news outlets—including Factsignal.org, Cognitura, and the video portal “Allies for Peace”—that do not present themselves for what they are: pieces of a campaign paid for by the state of Israel. These sites publish content optimized with advanced search engine positioning tools and artificial intelligence.

What is a “scraper”? Search engines and artificial intelligence systems do not know the world. They read the internet. Automatic programs called scrapers traverse millions of pages and incorporate them as sources, both to answer searches and to train the models—to teach them what is said about each topic. If someone mass-produces well-structured texts on a given subject, the probability increases that those texts will be collected and repeated.

That is exactly the purpose described by specialized outlets such as Drop Site News and the Quincy Institute, which situated these sites in relation to a larger contract worth US  $46.5 million: generating a massive volume of texts favorable to one party in a conflict so that they are indexed by search engines and absorbed by artificial intelligence systems—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity. This means that when someone asks a question about the conflict in Gaza, the default response incorporates that version.

Here lies the qualitative leap of this entire story.

In 2016, the target was the voter — to convince or demobilize them. In 2026, the target is the source: the material from which the machines learn that millions of people consult as though they were neutral. It is no longer about winning an argument—it is about writing the dictionary in which the argument will be conducted.

From cultural imperialism to cultural absolutismThe second installment of this series drew on the work of Olga Rosa González Martín and Hilda Saladrigas Medina, of the Center for Hemispheric and US Studies at the University of Havana, and their notion of cultural absolutism: a phase in which not cultural products, but the very frameworks through which a society interprets reality, are colonized. Unlike classic cultural imperialism—where a center that produces and a periphery that receives are clearly distinguishable—here, the periphery reproduces, adapts, and legitimizes the center’s codes by itself.

The Parscale case adds a material layer to that hypothesis. If the second installment showed that a single political repertoire could speak with an Argentinian, Bolivian, or Honduran accent, this one shows who manufactures and rents the tools through which that repertoire circulates: the software, the contact databases, the segmentation systems, the monitoring, the automated content generation.

Cultural absolutism does not need an office in every country. It needs a vendor, local clients who translate, and a common technical layer. Ideology travels on an invoice.

Three consequences follow from the documentation examined.

The first is that the infrastructure is indifferent to content. The same company that provides tools to conservative candidates in the United States rents them to a Honduran campaign and invoices a foreign ministry. The ideological cause provides clients, and that doctrinal alignment is precisely what makes it exportable to any national scenario.

The second is that power has shifted from the platform to the vendor. In 2016, Parscale depended entirely on Facebook. In 2026, he owns his own systems, his own databases and contacts, and his own publishing platforms. When someone owns the infrastructure, they cease to be subject to the moderation rules of the platforms.

The third is the most important for Cuban and Latin American readers. As we noted in the first installment of this series, Miami and Washington are not the periphery of these operations—they are one of its centers. Parscale’s trajectory confirms that this center does not only provide political access and lobbying but also the technology and the method. And there exists a fully legal and registered market where both are sold.

What the data do not allow us to claimThis Observatory has maintained throughout all three installments that the strength of an investigation lies as much in what it proves as in what it refuses to assert without evidence.

The documents do not demonstrate that Brad Parscale personally directed day-to-day operations in Buenos Aires, La Paz, or Tegucigalpa. They do not demonstrate a direct causal relationship between the tools sold and the outcome of any election—establishing that would require access to effective segmentation databases, server logs, source code, and private contracts that form no part of the public filings.

What the documents do establish is sufficiently significant and requires no exaggeration whatsoever: there exists a US company that sells political influence infrastructure, that has sold it simultaneously to Latin American campaigns and to Israel, and whose most recent contract explicitly proposes to shape how search engines and artificial intelligence systems respond regarding an ongoing conflict.

ConclusionsThe Cerimedo series began by asking how an Argentine consultant came to reach the offices of power in Washington. It ends, provisionally, in a different place from where it was expected: not in a conspiracy, but in a product catalog.

Brad Parscale represents the professionalization of a trade. He transformed his proximity to a presidential family into a brand, that brand into a software product, and that product into an exportable service that today invoices governments. The digital database confirms it with bluntness: 90% of the posts that mention him do so alongside Trump.

For Latin America, the lesson is concrete. The campaigns of the new regional right do not improvise their tools. They rent them, and they rent them from a vendor based in the United States who also works for Israel. When Cerimedo said “Brad built all the infrastructure I work with,” he described with precision the international division of political labor: the engineering in the north, the execution and the local face in the south.

And for the public debate more broadly, there is a warning that transcends any single country. For 20 years, we debated whether social media manipulated voters. The Project 545 file shows that the dispute has moved one level higher—toward the sources from which the systems learn, which increasing numbers of people consult as though they were neutral.

If cultural imperialism explained how ideas travel and cultural absolutism explains how they cease to appear imported, this third installment points toward an additional phase: one in which ideas no longer need to convince anyone because they arrive embedded in the response of a machine presumed to be impartial.

5 Damning Revelations in Cerimedo Mexico Elections Interference Plot

(Cuba Debate)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

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