The 2017 State of Mexico gubernatorial election was one of the most contentious in recent memory. Then-President Enrique Peña Nieto was determined that his candidate must maintain control of the region — a longtime stronghold of his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). But with his popularity waning and the insurgent leftist National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) mounting a serious challenge, there was a real risk that the PRI could lose the state for the first time in modern history. For Peña Nieto, relinquishing one of the country’s most populous and politically significant states to his main political rival was not an option.
Ultimately, despite the PRI’s candidate losing over a million votes compared to the previous election, by the official count the party managed to claim victory by just under 3% of the vote. The result was later upheld by the courts, but the campaign’s tactics bore a striking resemblance to the PRI’s strategies during its decades-long grip on Mexican politics from 1946 to 2000. Allegations of vote-buying, coercion of state employees to campaign for the party, and threats to withhold social benefits if the PRI lost were widespread.1
But beyond these familiar forms of electoral manipulation, the 2017 campaign marked the escalation of a newer tactic: the use of bots and online disinformation to sway public opinion. MORENA’s candidate, Delfina Gómez Álvarez, faced a barrage of online attacks, many targeting her gender. Experts have argued that this digital harassment campaign may have been decisive in tipping the election in the PRI’s favour.2 In the years since such tactics have only grown more sophisticated—and more common—appearing in elections across the globe.
While social media companies once promised to democratize information and empower citizens, their platforms have been increasingly co-opted by right-wing actors pursuing anti-democratic agendas. These influence operations now often integrate pseudo-news sites, coordinated bot activity, and, at times, direct collaboration with state officials. Backed by vast resources and enabled by government inaction, these campaigns pose a growing threat to democratic processes. Understanding how these networks operate is now essential for any citizen hoping to resist their influence.
Isabel Díaz Ayuso, fake accounts, and judicial blindness in the Punica case
Today’s huge worldwide disinformation machine took some of its first baby steps in Spain more than a decade ago. October 27, 2014. The Spanish Civil Guard arrests fifty-one people in connection with “Operation Punica”: a case involving embezzlement, arbitrary no-bid contracting, misappropriation, kickbacks, and a long roster of corrupt practices that brought in an estimated total of at least €250 million, in a case not yet fully resolved even today.
The fifty or so people implicated included Alejandro de Pedro Llorca, 42, who did business as a kind of IT consultant. Branded by many media outlets as the “fixer” in this plot,3 De Pedro served as the trunk supporting one of the Punica scheme’s many branches. But not just any branch. If we look at the practices investigated under the conceptual heading “promotional or advertising campaigns on the Web, social networks, or social media,” we will glimpse, a decade in advance, the functioning of one of the weapons that far-right movements use in their attempt to impose their agenda and destroy democracies.
Astroturfing4 refers to a set of practices whose “goal (...) is to disguise a political or commercial organization’s actions as a spontaneous, independent, grassroots public reaction against some other organization, product, service, etc.” The public’s unawareness of the term is proportional to the ease with which its influence goes unnoticed, even as it rots the public sphere and the way politics is conducted. It has done so for many years.
“How do you say ‘thug’ in Italian? Say Parla. And in Greek? Say Móstoles.” [In Spain, Parla and Móstoles are two towns in the southern part of the Greater Madrid Region that are stigmatized as hubs of poverty.] Alejandro de Pedro was sent these classist jokes in March 2011 by a politician who is now the president of the Community of Madrid, and who is the leading representative of Trumpism in Spain: Isabel Díaz Ayuso. She sent this witticism in order to inform the IT guru about some Twitter accounts she herself had created, which were poisoning public discourse to favour the interests of the People’s Party (PP). Specifically, she mentions @tomasodiparla and @contigozp, as well as the hashtag #contigonobicho [#NotWithYouDude].
That first account illustrates how astroturfing works. Set up in March 2011 at the height of campaigns for May’s regional elections, its name clearly referred to Tomás Gómez, candidate of the centre-progressive party, PSOE, and was devoted to posting tweets like this one: “My work experience? Lifeguard at the Parla public swimming pool. And I sucked at that.” After Gómez’s electoral defeat by the conservative PP candidate, the prolific daily posting by @tomasodiparla decreased, resurfacing sporadically to criticize Spain’s then-Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (PSOE), or to vilify Green Tide (Marea Verde), an activist movement defending public education, or to support the then president of the Community of Madrid, Esperanza Aguirre (PP), until the account stopped tweeting in November.
Six months later, in May 2012, it returned “in order to kill Rubalcaba” (the opposition leader and secretary general of PSOE at the time), and mentioned two accounts: @carnechacon and @rubalcabra. The first appears to no longer exist, but a quick search leads to @para_que_rias, an account linked to @carnechacon (the user name was probably changed at some point) which is already starting to reveal suspicious details. The entire profile, from the first visible tweet in June 2018 to the final one in November 2019, is split between support for an art account (@alvaraldiel) and the corniest of jokes. There is no other type of content. Nonetheless, its followers include major names in the political spectrum of the Spanish left, such as Yolanda Díaz, the current deputy prime minister, and Juan Carlos Monedero, founder of Podemos, one of the main leftist parties of recent years.
The other account mentioned, @rubalcabra, is the last missing piece of the puzzle. It is the same Twitter profile that Díaz Ayuso bragged about to De Pedro in 2011, @contigozp, but with the screen name changed. Its tweets closely resemble the rhetoric of the current Madrid regional president (and the account was, at the very least, created by her). It reveals a trail of what seems to be a large network of fake profiles coordinated to attack the PP's rivals. Naturally, the @contigozp/@rubalcabra account uses the #contigonobicho hashtag, the third element of which Díaz Ayuso was so proud. It shares this last trait with @octadia, whose profile photo is of Jane Deasy, an Irish doctor who died in a plane crash in 2009; it currently has 181 followers, among them Mariano Rajoy (former prime minister of Spain, affiliated with the PP) and @tomasodiparla. Another regular user of this hashtag is @Juan_Wayne, whose mere eighteen followers include Isabel Díaz Ayuso herself, the first person to follow the account.
The exact same pattern applies to dozens of profiles created in early 2011. Needless to say, in all cases, the content is limited to tweets and retweets supporting the PP and railing against the other parties.
A structure of fake accounts forming a swarm of organized astroturfing is known as a troll centre. And, as amply demonstrated, Isabel Díaz Ayuso ran one that was active mainly at the time of the crimes committed in the Punica plot. The most serious issue, though, is the close relationship with Alejandro de Pedro, since it is known that, in that era, this Basque entrepreneur made 45,000 Twitter profiles available to his clients.
A prominent figure noticed the effectiveness of the disinformation offensives launched under the corporate umbrella of Eico and Madiva, De Pedro's companies: someone whose name keeps cropping up when people discuss the media oligopoly and its anti-democratic manipulations. Businessman Florentino Pérez, president of the Real Madrid professional sports organisation, paid €300,000 to the Punica fixer to create a propaganda tool5 under the guise of a sports news outlet, diariobernabeu.com, through which his talking points were posted and then boosted quickly through De Pedro's labyrinth of fake accounts.
A decade later, the mud has engulfed everything
The justice system was on the verge of what could have been the first investigation into the disinformation industry, but it was all ignored. That is what was done then and what has been done systematically ever since, ensuring a total impunity that, a decade later, has made the outlook much worse.
Alongside the rise of all this disinformation machinery, the strategies deployed within it have also grown increasingly complex. Perhaps the most revealing proof of this evolution is the advent of bot farms: huge platforms of automated fake profiles, available to launch coordinated attacks and astroturfing campaigns that can skew the course of public conversation. Their reach has also grown exponentially, as they are now run by artificial intelligence.
The result, as Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez warned in his speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos this past January 22, is “that one-third of social media profiles are actually bots, and that nearly half of all internet traffic is driven by them.”
Porn bots and the business behind the bot farms
More specifically, the estimates say that around 40% of online activity consists of these automated and ultimately dishonest practices. It is impossible to picture how big half of the internet must be, but the scale of the industry that has successfully clogged that space can only be monstrous.
To grasp what is at stake, it is important to identify the dynamics that this is generating— in this case, with regard to the internal functioning of the swarms of fake accounts. There are different types, but perhaps the most illuminating is the porn bots, which point to the existence of companies dedicated to configuring and maintaining digital farms always ready to disinform. They play a key role in campaigns such as #SánchezVeteYa [#SánchezGoAwayNow] (a right-wing campaign demanding the prime minister's resignation).
The bots’ sexual content alternates with messages tailored precisely to the latest extremist narratives. It is as though they have two modes: the first, standby mode, with its sexual content, serves to attract real followers and generate profit through links driving traffic to porn sites; the second, attack mode, is activated when the hoax ecosystem orchestrates one of its disinformation campaigns and puts these tools at the service of the current lie or accusation (thanks to the reach it achieved through standby mode and other growth strategies).
The hoax-peddling international now controls national governments
Behind the giant morass of bots, we can quickly spot the international nature of this hoax industry. These fake accounts alternate between insulting Pedro Sánchez and providing massive support to the far right's candidate of choice in the 2024 Mexican elections, Xóchitl Gálvez, and always display a high degree of coordination. In other words, automation.
This supranationalism reaches its zenith in hate campaigns that cross borders, like the one mounted in Argentina against Begoña Gómez, wife of the Spanish prime minister, accusing her of corruption: In May 2024, Javier Milei retweeted 57 tweets with the hashtag #PedroVigilaATuEsposa [#PedroWatchYourWife], which trended in Spain, Argentina, Uruguay, and the United States. The methods they use align perfectly with the modus operandi of troll centres and other disinformation artillery, distinguished here by the alarming inclusion of troops belonging to Argentine government agencies.
This hashtag was first posted by Daniel Parisini, a far-right agitator with such close ties to President Milei that the president's chief of staff identified him as “a good candidate”6 for Congress. Parisini hosted a show on Madero Radio, an online broadcaster financed by the disinformation portal La Derecha Diario. Another Madero host was Juan Pablo Carreira (known online as Juan Doe), who is now the Milei administration's director of digital communication and also took part in the attacks on Begoña Gómez.
As for Agustín Romo, head of the Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances) bloc in the Buenos Aires provincial Congress, his use of this hashtag showed maximum coordination with these agitators and with La Derecha Diario, the media outlet that gives them a platform. Last summer, half of this fake news company was acquired by Javier Negre. He is one of Spain's most influential extreme-right agitators, the founder and head of the pseudo media outlet EDA TV, which receives generous government subsidies despite its ongoing reckless dissemination of hoaxes and disinformation. Negre was once fired and convicted in court for fabricating an interview in one of the country's most widely read newspapers.
Digital campaigns to undermine democracies
On August 24, 2024, in a speech at CPAC (Mexico’s Conservative Political Action Conference)—an event in Mexico that attracted some of the most recognizable far-right figures from around the world—Negre explicitly admitted that his business movement aims to “support the Javier Milei administration” and be a media tool “in lockstep with” the “cultural battle” waged by that right-wing extremist. Not journalism at all. This is something different.
In that same talk, the owner of EDA TV explained how he had devoted himself to “singling out” and pressuring business leaders and politicians to provide financial support for his demagogic propaganda in both Spain and Argentina: “You are complicit in the quarantining of ideas, in ideological discrimination, and you are therefore my enemy. They got the message real fast: They started helping us,” he said.
A successful coercion effort, judging from the amount of public funding7 pseudomedia outlets like EDA TV receive (though little is known about their private funding).
It is vital not to forget that all of the disinformation industry's strategies described in this series of articles8 would fail without the support of a simultaneous media offensive. Pseudo news websites such as La Derecha Diario, HerQles, OkDiario, and EDA TV not only parrot and amplify the lies but lend them credibility with their journalistic facade and even manage to slide them into the information flows of some traditional media. That is in addition to participating directly in information poisoning campaigns. All of it is awash in public funds.
Back to Negre: His arrival across the Pond presented him with a whole range of democracies to potentially muddy with his fascist-loving agitation. In Uruguay, for instance, he accused the Frente Amplio coalition's leftist candidate, Yamandú Orsi, of having an “army of bots” at the service of his campaign in October 2024; as proof, he published a list of supposedly fake profiles that had spread Orsi's messages, but he was forced to delete the claim when hundreds of people complained publicly that their perfectly normal accounts were on the list.
Not satisfied with that, during the campaign blackout days just before the election, Negre flaunted all democratic decorum by posting a claim from someone he had met on the street who, without offering any evidence, linked Orsi to drug trafficking. La Derecha Diario turned that assertion into news.
This attack on Uruguay's Frente Amplio had cooperation from a troll centre also devoted to promoting the right-wing candidate in that election, Andrés Ojeda, who was, curiously enough, also the person who Javier Negre wanted to see as president of Uruguay. This feedback loop becomes obvious when we realize that Ojeda built part of his campaign on the EDA TV owner's accusations, painting himself as the victim of Orsi's supposed fake news and bot campaign against him. One of the fake profiles from that troll centre posted a video of Ojeda stating that the first country he would visit if he became president would be Israel, and the online interactions speak for themselves: nearly 100% of the retweets came from nonhuman accounts.
The mention of Israel was not random. For many years, the country responsible for the genocide in Palestine has had a starring role in the disinformation offensive against democracies worldwide, as we will reveal later and as shown in another article from Reactionary International here.
Javier Negre's involvement in La Derecha Diario leads us to the identity of another key player in this game: Fernando Cerimedo, who owns the other half of the company. Recognized as Milei's digital strategist, Cerimedo (who boasts publicly of having 50,000 fake Twitter accounts) has been investigated for his role in the attempted coup in Brazil against Lula da Silva.
Through the #BrazilWasStolen online campaign, thousands of bots spread disinformation and false accusations to stir up social unrest culminating in the storming of the buildings housing the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of the national government on January 8, 2023. This is explored in more detail in Code Word: “Selma’s Party”.
In the “digital militias” case,9 Cerimedo is accused of being one of the organization's “core figures,” linked more specifically to the “centre of disinformation and attacks on the electoral system.” La Derecha Diario, incidentally, is also mentioned in the official investigation of that frontal assault on Brazilian democracy.
Discussing hashtags, and fake accounts, and even paying attention to places like Twitter at a time like the present might seem naive or even cynical. But the point of this series of articles is to show that the disinformation industry's tentacles reach well beyond the trending topic lists on social media. They are targeting democratic structures as a whole.
From “OkDiario” to Israeli intelligence: the transnational hoax network
It is autumn of 2015 and the room is dominated by a large round table. It is the office of Eugenio Pino, deputy director of operations (DoO) for Spain's national police. To his left are, in this order, Bonifacio Díez Sevillano (chief inspector of police), José María Catalán (chief commissioner of the Financial and Fiscal Crimes Unit), two other national law enforcement officials, and José Aliste, a lawyer with a criminal past, convicted of fraud in the 1990s. Aliste is not alone: Next to him is his client José Alvarado Ochoa, the central figure of this meeting, who was Venezuela's former deputy minister of electrical development under Hugo Chávez. The account of what happened there is his10, by the way, and was presented in court.
Alvarado takes the floor and identifies himself to those present. He explains who he is and where he comes from, reviews his career in the Venezuelan government, and summarizes some of his links to the country's intelligence operations; this is the prelude to a presentation of some 300 pages that keep them occupied for approximately four hours. There are contracts, Chávez's financial transactions, names of companies, and so on. This large amount of sensitive information becomes irrelevant when Eugenio Pino asks the question that harbours the true reason for this gathering:
“Do you have anything on Podemos?” Alvarado says no, as he has said the other times he faced this same question.
In the autumn of 2015, the popularity of Podemos—a new antiausterity leftist political party in Spain—was growing swiftly. Its relative success in the previous year's European elections now seemed poised to become absolute. The party was, in fact, polling ahead of PSOE. Podemos had a good chance of becoming the ruling party and striking a destructive blow from the left at the political consensus achieved in 1978 with the Constitution, which had culminated in the post-dictatorship period known as the Transition.
That autumn of 2015 also brought the founding of OkDiario, a web portal with the look and feel of a news site, run by the pseudojournalist Eduardo Inda.
The timing could not be less coincidental. OkDiario was conceived specifically as a political tool to dynamite the promising rise of Podemos and destroy the Catalan independence movement, which was also growing at that time. The portal emerged from the activities of a group of corrupt senior officers in the national security forces under Jorge Fernández Díaz, minister of the interior under the then prime minister, Mariano Rajoy of the PP, Spain's main right-wing party. These corrupt officers came to be known as the “patriotic police.” Inda's propaganda machine would be its media arm. Eugenio Pino and Bonifacio Díez were core members of the patriotic police, a fact that finally ties together these three events that occurred in the autumn of 2015.
The long reach and nearness of the disinformation industry
This article has focused on the digital world, explaining the functioning of strategies like astroturfing11: manipulating the social media conversation through bot farms and disinformation campaigns12 and/or harassment carried out online. This was a purely utilitarian decision: especially on the commercial platforms, the online world is where it is easiest to track the activities of the hoax-peddling international. First, because they have become the prime discussion space for a large percentage of people and institutions; second, because the platforms' design encourages the type of communication (perhaps more accurately called anti communication) in which the disinformation mercenaries thrive best, and even the platforms' owners have goals in common with the extremist international behind this consortium of lies.
The disinformation industry, however, reaches far beyond that. Much closer to home, in fact. Its tentacles reach, for instance, into the depths of the Spanish state. Into the highest reaches of law enforcement and the Ministry of the Interior. Even into the administration itself. And most importantly, this antidemocracy activity in Spain is connected with the whole international network. OkDiario is a useful case study.
“Eduardo” and the fake DEA report
“Eduardo [Inda], this is very serious. I’m going with it. But it’s very sensitive and this is too awkward.” Antonio García Ferreras, head of the television network La Sexta and host of one of its top-rated programs, is, by his own admission, a disinformation mercenary. That quotation comes from a conversation with José Manuel Villarejo, former police commissioner and the prime figure in multiple corruption cases that point to the existence of a Deep State in Spain operating outside of democracy. Villarejo was the chief architect of that cesspool of police corruption and media manipulation, earning him convictions for bribery of public officials, leaking classified information, and document forgery.
In that conversation, Ferreras asked him about the source of the fabricated report on the funding of Podemos, which Ferreras had disseminated with the professionalism of a journalistic hitman: “The story was planted by the deputy director of operations... [Eugenio] Pino. It was planted by Pino, who in turn got it from the guys at the DEA.” “The Americans,” the TV host is heard saying before Villarejo can utter the word “DEA.” He already knew, because from inside the disinformation industry, the threads of the scheme were much more plainly visible.
Behind “the DEA” and “the Americans,” one name stands out from the rest: Martín Rodil,13 a key figure at the hub of a crushing international campaign to manipulate democracies. This Venezuelan, whose citizenship had been revoked (due to his intense cooperation with US efforts to destabilize his native country), had been adopted by Israel, which maintained a close relationship with the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
An investigation by the 29th Magistrate Court in Madrid placed Rodil at the head of a “criminal organization devoted to fraud, extortion, and influence peddling.” And José Alvarado Ochoa, in fact, attended that clandestine meeting as a victim of that same criminal network, which specialized in contacting individuals with backgrounds like his to offer them protection from potential legal proceedings, in exchange for favours and payoffs that, as we can see, were not always just monetary.
Rodil’s criminal history is vast, much like that of the organization he led, but what is relevant here is his direct role in the Rajoy administration’s disinformation campaign against the left and against the nationalists, because it shows how far the international disinformation network’s offline reach extends.
Numerous documents have been published about this dirty war, but one of the most striking is the audio recording of a conversation14 between the then chief inspector of the Spanish national police, José Ángel Fuentes Gago, and Rafael Isea, Venezuela’s former minister of finance under Chávez. In the conversation, Fuentes Gago promises him protection and a “new identity” in Spain for anyone Isea wants, if he supplies information to use against Podemos. The promise had solid backing behind it: “I’ve spoken with the Spanish minister of the interior, and the Spanish minister of the interior spoke with the Spanish prime minister,” the inspector assures him.
Martín Rodil was present at that meeting which later gave rise to another of the countless hoaxes OkDiario published as “exclusives.” That indicates the website’s direct connection to this international network. Ferreras and his “brother” Eduardo are the puppets, expendable pawns, no different from the digital hordes (whether real or bots). The disinformation flows from a much deeper source.
Soft coups orchestrated from Israel
“An operator can manage 300 profiles so that in two hours, the whole country will be repeating whatever messages or narrative we want.” The person speaking is associated with the mysterious Israeli organisation known as Team Jorge, whose inner workings were uncovered15 by the international investigative journalism consortium Forbidden Stories. Thanks to them, we now know what is behind Team Jorge: the company Demoman International, funded and run by Tal Hanan, a former operative of the Israeli army’s special forces. They have direct ties to the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad, but not only the Mossad: an informational brochure about the company describes a team made up of people who have belonged to intelligence services and special forces in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Russia.
In 2022, during the period when the Forbidden Stories team infiltrated them, members of Team Jorge boasted of having played a role in “thirty-three presidential campaigns, twenty-seven of them successful.” The method, cloaked in the euphemism “primarily intelligence and influence,” is much more serious than it sounds. For instance, as proof of their power, Hanan and his people showed the undercover journalists how they had gotten a presenter on BFM TV—the highest-rated news channel in France—to read a news item they had designed. And this was no gullible intern: it was Rachid M’Barki, who had been with the channel for almost twenty years.
Besides influential journalists who are willing to slip fake items into the mainstream media, the company also has a tool that can generate avatars, names, and social media messages on demand. They have used this tool to build a veritable army of automated fake profiles (the last known count, from 2022, was over 30,000) with which it intervenes in public discourse from the digital sphere.
In addition to the tactics explained in previous articles,16 they claimed to have even shipped sex toys, bought on Amazon through a bot account, to the home of a rival candidate, triggering a personal and political crisis that “turned the election around.”
Their lack of scruples goes further still. In one of the meetings with the team of journalists, members of Team Jorge bragged about their ability to hack their targets’ accounts and devices. In that instance, they had taken over the email accounts and messaging apps, such as Telegram, belonging to high-level government officials of African countries.
At that point, the line between manipulation and a covert coup becomes blurred. Understanding this—and recognizing the scope of Team Jorge as a specific example—is essential. The disinformation industry is launching grave assaults on democracies.
One important missing detail: Martín Rodil, the illustrious source of “exclusives” for OkDiario, is one of Tal Hanan’s main associates in Team Jorge.
Spanish weapons in the war against democracies
Rachid M’Barki was immediately suspended and later fired17 by BFM TV. Antonio García Ferreras was not suspended. In fact, that is a tremendous understatement. Nothing happened to him at all, though his misdeeds were more severe18 than M’Barki’s given the scale of the lie and its aims and because García Ferreras was the head of a television network. Florentino Pérez’s media point19 man did not even have to deny or cover up the leaked evidence in which he admitted to knowingly publishing a lie, made up with the specific intent of swaying a general election.
At that moment it became clear that impunity, in Spain, is absolute. In an enterprise like the disinformation industry, few assets are as valuable as a tool entirely exempt from criminal liability. So OkDiario began to roam the world.
In late 2019, Bolivia suffered a coup d’état20 that culminated with President Evo Morales fleeing amid riots and killings by police, which we discuss here. The assault was preceded by an intense disinformation campaign and challenges to the election results, which had given Morales a narrow victory. Nearly a year later, in August 2020, Facebook dismantled a network of fake profiles, both on that social platform and on Instagram, whose posts focused on supporting the Bolivian coup and on other far-right campaigns in Mexico and Venezuela.
On Twitter, the operation was obscene: More than 200,000 fake accounts were identified in November 2019 alone, many of them recently created. That month, coinciding with the coup in Bolivia, the profiles21 of its key participants grew by 50,000 to 200,000 followers. Coup leader Marco Pumari, for example, went from 48 followers to 67,000 in a matter of weeks.
The company responsible for these disinformation practices was CLS Strategies, linked to key elements of the international far-right such as the Atlantic Council (an organization that includes former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar [PP] and Rafael Bardají,22 an ideologist and prominent figure in the far-right party Vox) and the Atlas Network, besides US government agencies. One of the workers CLS has turned to for such antidemocracy actions in Latin America is Roger Noriega, a former assistant secretary of state under George Bush and associate of Martín Rodil’s and Tal Hanan’s in the activities of Team Jorge. The connections are becoming increasingly visible.
The contract23 between CLS and President Jeanine Áñez’s coup government was signed by the ministry headed by Arturo Murillo, her second-in-command. Today, Murillo is serving a five-year, ten-month prison sentence24 for receiving more than half a million dollars from a US company in 2019. This was paid in exchange for government contracts to supply tear gas and nonlethal equipment to the Ministry of Defense.
Between embezzling funds and manipulating the Bolivian people, Murillo found time to play host to the Spanish contingent that came to support the coup. For instance, Hermann Tertsch, a member of the European Parliament from the Vox party, even took part in an official press conference held by the Áñez administration. Hardly surprising, since this contingent included a high-calibre disinformation weapon. We mean, of course, OkDiario.
Inda sent Alejandro Entrambasaguas as his special correspondent. Under the protective wing of a government minister no less, this fake-news mercenary made the rounds of multiple television studios to spread his lies in prime time. He mainly focused on defaming Lorgia Fuentes, a Bolivian private citizen already persecuted by the Áñez regime, to the point where she was kidnapped and tortured with electric shocks that caused her to have a stroke (her second, as she had suffered another stroke months earlier).
While recovering, she was chained to her hospital bed for more than a hundred days and guarded by police. An investigation by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (abbreviated GIEI in Spanish)25 found that Fuentes was subjected to “cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment.” OkDiario, through Entrambasaguas, played a central role in that. The outcome was the same as always: all charges against her were dismissed due to lack of evidence. It is a revolting story.26
OkDiario’s radical freedom to commit every type of outrage against the right to truthful information was thoroughly exploited by Bolivia’s coup government. It was also a mutually beneficial collaboration. Legitimizing the coup through relentless repetition of its smear campaigns against Evo Morales was accompanied by disinformation against the Spanish left. Bolivian authorities went so far as to leak photos, names, and accommodation details about international observers so that OkDiario could publish them, since doing so through a Bolivian media outlet would have had legal consequences. Entrambasaguas was also given access to Bolivia’s central bank,27 accompanied by people from Arturo Murillo’s inner circle.
Two private firms—one American, the other Israeli—devoted to carrying out disinformation campaigns to destabilize whole countries; corrupt police leadership closely tied to the Spanish government; a former upper-echelon official of the US government; someone who used to work with the US DEA; a former Israeli army operative; a Spanish fake-news website put at the service of a Bolivian coup d’état… The disinformation industry’s reach extends unimaginably far beyond social media. So does the sheer number of overlapping ties among them, making this a deeply shadowy secret network. It is vital not to underestimate the danger they pose, and it is essential to take measures to contain the threat.
