Jean Wyllys
Eduardo Galeano wrote in 1971, “The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing. Our part of the world, known today as Latin America, was precocious: it has specialized in losing ever since those remote times when Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations.” Fifty-five years on, the spoils of empire have taken less tangible and even more dangerous forms because the economic battle is being fought over mind control—warping neural interfaces, conditioning voter and consumer behaviour, and cognitive shaping—or, in other words, it’s about information: Latin America’s data, its attention, its payments, and its digital infrastructure. This is where the interests of Big Tech companies align with Donald Trump’s foreign policy.
On 18 August 2026, when about to board a flight to Buenos Aires, Fernando Cerimedo was detained at the Viru Viru Airport in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, in connection with an attack on Bolivian lawyer and political analyst, Nadia Beller. Although she was shot three times by men posing as delivery drivers, she survived. Cerimedo denies any involvement, but the courts ordered his pre-trial detention for 180 days. On 8 September, he was transferred to La Paz and Chonchocoro, Bolivia’s only maximum security prison, for questioning in an investigation into alleged illicit enrichment.
When interests me here is not so much the issues of guilt or innocence in an ongoing judicial investigation as to look at who this man is, what he represents, and the power he wields.
An Argentine political consultant and digital strategist, Cerimedo gained prominence amongst the Latin American right and far right, working with the Bolsonaro organisation, the Argentine president, Javier Milei, as consultant to the Bolivian president Rodrigo Paz and, it is said, as “MAGA’s man in Latin America”. He is also founder of the online newspaper La Derecha Diario, a highly influential platform of the radical right in Argentina and Latin America in general. And he’s no mere propagandist mouthpiece. He specialises in smear campaigns, audience segmentation, the dark side of social media and, by his own account, troll networks.
On 4 November 2022, just a few days after Jair Bolsonaro’s electoral defeat by Lula, Cerimedo held a La Derecha Diario livestream in which he presented “Brazil Was Stolen”, a “report” based on material previously cooked up by Bolsonaro aides and military officers, which falsely claimed to demonstrate statistically anomalous behaviour in certain models of electronic voting machines and thus cast suspicion on the election results. Cerimedo was subsequently charged by federal police in their investigations into Bolsonaro’s coup attempt and dissemination of false information about the electoral system, but prosecutors, declined to bring charges against him.
The episode is the tip of the iceberg of internationalisation of digital techniques by the new far right in Latin America, which has its own operators, platforms, influencers, discourse, trolls, and models circulating mainly between Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and Chile. This month, September 2026, the Chilean Chamber of Deputies approved a committee of inquiry into Cerimedo’s activities and possible bot operations and digital manipulation affecting Chilean politics.
This system of distorting politics can be summed up as production of false or misleading narrative, its artificial and coordinated amplification, and transformation into political reality. It’s what I call falsolatry, the cult in which the lie is not only exalted as content but constituted as a whole political economy of mendacity where falsehood is produced, segmented, amplified, and monetised.
The system is well described by James Williams in Clics contra la humanidad (Gatopardo Ensayo, 2021). A former Google strategist who subsequently studied the ethics of persuasive technology at Oxford University, Williams shows how, in the age of information overload, attention has become a scarce resource, which is also a political problem because of the question of who manages to capture it and control it.
Disinformation is more than an epistemological or democratic problem as it is part and parcel of a highly concentrated economy of attention in which capturing and commercialising the attention of billions of people is now a huge source of private accumulation, as demonstrated by the Big Tech company Meta (CEO, Mark Zuckerberg). In 2025, Meta earnings were $200.97 billion with a net profit of $60.46 billion. No less than $196.18 billion, or 97.6% of its revenue, came from advertising.
Falsehoods don’t need to be directly monetised. They’re economically useful to a platform if fake content, indignation, conflict, and polarisation capture and achieve higher levels of attention, because dwell time and engagement then feed the advertising economy. This doesn’t mean that platforms produce and coordinate all the lies but rather that their economic model profits from propagating them to capture attention across massive networks.
It’s also an extremely concentrated economy. The UN Conference on Trade and Development estimates that the combined share of the sector’s sales of the five largest digital multinationals rose from 21% in 2017 to 48% in 2025. The 2026 World Inequality Report calculates that the richest 10% receives 53% of global income and possesses 75% of wealth while the poorest 50% receives 8% of income and possesses barely 2% of wealth. Data, infrastructure, intellectual property, capital, and market power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the same few players, which means that they also amass the power to manage information flows.
This is the context in which Trump’s foreign and trade policy towards Latin America should be viewed because it goes way beyond ideology and diplomacy. In its aim to seize control of the value of the digital economy, its data, payments, advertising, artificial intelligence, infrastructure, and markets, it also seeks to manipulate huge populations by means of generalised menticide, a most lucrative business.
Pix, Brazil’s instant electronic payment system created and managed by the Central Bank of Brazil, is a case in point. In 2026, after a Trump administration trade investigation, it was decided that Brazilian policies regarding electronic payment services, among them Pix, were possible barriers to US trade and the competitiveness of its companies. The discussion wasn’t specifically about Pix but it showed the broader logic, which was that Washington wanted to ensure that the market share of US companies wouldn’t be hindered by any national digital infrastructure.
Latin America is simultaneously a consumer market, data source, zone of expansion for digital infrastructure, and a geopolitical battleground in US rivalry with China because these two countries dominate creation and capture of value in the digital economy in an arena where the position of Latin America is tremendously vulnerable.
Galeano wrote about plunder of gold, silver, oil, iron, copper, meat, fruit, and coffee. Now we must add data, attention, payments, and information. The veins are still open. But the flows have changed and they’re aiming at minds.
Perhaps one of the most unnerving aspects of our times is that the very same private infrastructure that has commandeered and concentrated such enormous economic power has also commandeered and concentrated the power to govern the circulation of information. It’s their information that’s being dished out and that’s a sobering thought when (even ten years ago) a 2016 study by Bond University found that about 21% of corporate CEOs possess clinically significant psychopathic traits, which matches the prevalence of psychopathy found in prison populations. Economic power, technological power, and information power are fused in an ever smaller coterie, “the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class-relations and interests”, as Marx put it in Capital, Volume I. And more than 50% of Silicon Valley billionaires, these bearers of the new class interests, have “apocalypse insurance”, which shows they know how lethal their interests are. Cerimedo is just one operator in this system and he’s bad enough. But the problem he’s helped to reveal goes way beyond him.
*Jean Wyllys is a Brazilian lecturer, journalist, and politician.
Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/09/17/re-opened-veins-of-latin-america-this-time-the-algorithm/
