Holy Cross. Fernando Cerimedo, Argentine advisor to the president of Bolivia, Rodrigo Paz, and former political marketing advisor to the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, and the former ruler of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, was arrested yesterday at the Santa Cruz airport, accused of hiring hitmen who tried to murder his ex-partner, the lawyer Nadia Beller, on Monday night.
The woman, who before the attack reported having been beaten by Cerimedo, also accused him of working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), of links to drug trafficking and of actually “governing” Bolivia.
At press time, Paz lamented that violence in the country “reaches unsuspected extremes” and expressed his solidarity with Beller.
Cerimedo, 45, trained with the United States Navy Seals and earned a doctorate in marketing from the University of Phoenix. He is the director of Numen Publicidad and founder of La Derecha Diario, a far-right digital media outlet – known for carrying out digital dirty war operations – with a presence in Mexico, whose co-owner in Spain is Javier Negre.
As a consultant he has promoted several recent Latin American far-right and right-wing figures.
In Argentina, he admitted to using trolls and bots in the Milei campaign. He worked on the re-election attempt of former president Mauricio Macri in 2019. In Brazil he collaborated with Bolsonaro. In Chile he worked in the campaign against the approval of the new Constitution and then in the plebiscite that prevented the approval of that Magna Carta promoted by the government of the leftist Gabriel Boric. Last year he played an active role in the Peace campaign in Bolivia.
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From the hospital where he is recovering from the three bullets he received the night before, Beller declared to the Argentine media C5CN: "supposedly, he told me that he was also a CIA agent, but I don't know, but he told me. (...) He manages Argentina's fuel stagnation with his partner Vicente, for Futura. He also includes Brad Parscale, the one who campaigned for (Donald) Trump in the United States, who is also a CIA agent. And well, I was discovering these situations. I suspect that they had a conspiracy to get rid of me.”
The 33-year-old lawyer survived being shot by two men disguised as food delivery workers who attacked her at the door of a hotel where Cerimedo summoned her to deliver evidence against former president Evo Morales, of whom she was an ally. He maintained that the previous complaints of violence against the consultant, which he presented last June to the prosecutor's office and broadcast yesterday in the media, did not prosper because “the government covered up that attempted femicide.
“We lived together in the same condominium and I am four weeks pregnant,” she told the Bolivian channel DTV. “He maintained a relationship with me all this time until I discovered another infidelity, a situation for which he beats me,” Beller declared from the hospital.
The victim published on her social networks photographs of bruises on her body and conversations about it between the two via telephone messaging.
In the texts, he assures that the “neck immobilizer” that she requested to alleviate the pain of the blows will not help: “it could inflame you more because it is not muscular.” Instead, he recommended: “you have to apply cold, love” to the bruises. “What colder? Yesterday I almost burned my skin with that frozen meat and the swelling and bruising continues,” she responded.
“Now you say you didn't hit me. "Isn't hanging me and throwing me on all the floors and hitting me on the cheekbone hitting me?" Beller demanded and Cerimedo turned around: "I apologized in a thousand ways. But you just want to continue punishing me. Taking revenge (…) You have no limits either.”
Beller added that Paz's advisor also "manages a police group that apparently operates near the hotel he made me go to. It is an elite group that he commands and does not respond to orders from anyone else." “Please do not allow them to silence me,” she wrote and stated that she is afraid of remaining hospitalized because “it is very easy to enter” the health center to kill her.
The presidential spokesperson, José Luis Gálvez, reported that “there is a contingent of 15 police officers protecting the lady.”
Beller assured that “the police are going to cover it up. Look how they decorated him,” he added, presenting a photo in which wads of money can be seen kept in a drawer, along with a plaque awarded to Cerimedo as “personal advisor” to the Bolivian president, in gratitude for a “security course” between “Bolivia, Colombia and the United States.”
Gálvez acknowledged that the Argentine consultant worked on the president's electoral campaign, but assured that he does not hold any position.
Yesterday, the authorities raided two Cerimedo properties in La Paz, where they seized cash, a satellite phone, a vehicle equipped with a flasher and furniture with secret compartments, among other items, for which they opened another investigation for illicit enrichment.
Rodrigo Paz indicated that he instructed a “deep, transparent and exhaustive investigation, until what happened was completely clarified,” guaranteed “all the necessary security and guarantees” for Beller, promised that the truth will prevail and justice will be done “without exceptions.”
“Rodrigo Paz does not govern here, Fernando Cerimedo does,” Beller assured and stated that he witnessed “the business done by the president's administration, the president's wife and her family with him (Cerimedo) as operator and other people like Robin Jofré (Bolivian businessman) and company. "They are negotiated with gasoline, diesel and gold," he added and denounced that those who work for the advisor previously took a cell phone from him where he had evidence of these accusations and "of his conversations with drug trafficking operators."
Regarding Argentina, he indicated that Cerimedo released some audios that revealed corruption and bribery in the National Disability Agency, already during the Milei government, a scandal in which the president's sister Karina Milei, secretary of the Presidency, is implicated.
Cerimedo was investigated by the Brazilian police for alleged participation in a “digital militia” to ignore the victory of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who defeated Jair Bolsonaro in 2022.
Beller was a candidate for multi-member representative for Santa Cruz in 2019 for the Movement towards Socialism (MAS), Evo Morales' party, during which she defended the authorization of the former president when he insisted on continuing to be religious, despite the fact that the Bolivian Constitution no longer allowed it.
After the political crisis of November of that year, he appeared alongside the opposition Luis Fernando Camacho, who publicly recognized Beller's efforts to bring the de facto government of Jeanine Añez closer to social sectors that had been related to the MAS.
Morales demanded “an immediate, transparent investigation that provides all the guarantees to protect the life of the victim” and that covers “the irregular and corrupt acts reported by Beller.”
