On August 18, Fernando Cerimedo was arrested in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, for hiring hitmen to assassinate his ex-partner, Nadia Beller, who was pregnant at the time, after she threatened to go public about his large-scale illegal bot farm operations to throw elections for far-right candidates across Latin America. Still recovering from the multiple gunshot wounds she miraculously survived, she gave an interview this week on the Ventana al Mundo program on Mexico’s public television network, Channel 14. During the interview, she explained how Cerimedo and a member of the Bolsonaro family, who is assumed to be Flavio’s brother Eduardo, met with Meta officials to plot interference in Brazil’s presidential elections. She also said Cerimedo’s largest bot farms are still operating, and that his group is planning to interfere in the Claudia Sheinbaum administration in Mexico. You can watch her interview below. Beneath that, is a transcribed and translated excerpt from her interview.
“In early August, Fernando sent me a photo with one of the Bolsonaros in the United States. I can’t pin down the exact date right now, because, as I told you, my phone is with the public prosecutor’s office. But between the first and the fifth of that month, while he was in the United States, he sent me a photo and told me they were discussing the campaign, that he was going to seek financing and that he was going to take part in that campaign, in that election, one way or another. And what they did with Meta is straight out of a playbook. They have very good contacts at Meta. In fact, there was a journalist whose page they had taken down themselves, and Fernando stepped in to get it restored, and he told me at least three times that he had very good relationships at Meta and could get any page taken down or put back up. I have no doubt that his team, his group, intervened for this. I understand there are complaints about electoral violations by Meta, that some dirty war campaigns were allowed through, along with the suspension of Lula’s accounts. I have not the slightest doubt that this was part of a strategy by this team to strip away Lula’s visibility.
The bot farm they took down here is tiny, it’s minuscule. From the very first day I gave interviews, I said there was a much bigger one. I told them where it was. They never touched it. I imagine it’s still active. I don’t think it’s in the same location anymore. It was in the business district. They never touched it, and the same goes for Argentina. I know they have their own bot farms there too. I imagine Fernando’s arrest caused some disruption, and for a moment they went inactive, but they’re fully active now. I’m a victim of it myself, because it spreads lies. His lawyer goes out and says some outrageous thing, and it immediately gets amplified by their bots. So I myself am a victim of their farms, and they use them everywhere, in every single country, with exactly the same modus operandi.
He also told me he was going to get involved in the Mexican election and would have his own candidate, because they were extremely interested in removing her, the president, from office. How do they get involved in elections? As you mentioned before: by distorting public debate, through cognitive fraud, dirty war tactics, buying influencers, their coordinated bot farms that organize attacks, that manufacture trending topics. All of that, what does it do? It distorts public debate.”