This is probably the biggest scandal involving the US in Latin America since the abduction of Maduro in January.
As we have been warning for some time, Operation Condor 2.0 is now in full effect in Latin America, and Bolivia is currently at its epicentre.
On Wednesday (Sept. 30), the country’s Attorney General, Roger Mariaca, was abducted by security forces, apparently without any kind of judicial order or due process, in the eastern region of Santa Cruz. That was according to Bolivia’s Public Prosecutor’s Office, whose headquarters in the southern city of Sucre, Bolivia’s constitutional capital, has been taken over by masked police officers.
An official of the Prosecutor’s Office denounced in a live broadcast from Sucre the “kidnapping” of Mariaca, after local media reported that agents apprehended the attorney general at the Viru Viru International Airport, in Santa Cruz, on US government claims that he was involved in drug trafficking and corruption. As usual, no evidence was provided. In the video below (17 seconds in), you can see two of the masked agents that had taken over the Prosecutor’s Office.
The really crazy part, the part that is being systematically covered up the Western press, is that Mariaca had been leading investigations of Trump-linked figures accused of corruption, violent crimes and involvement in drug trafficking. They included, first and foremost, the Argentine political consultant Fernando Cerimedo, who faces drug-trafficking charges as well as the charge of attempted murder after allegedly ordering a hit on his former girlfriend Nadia Beller.
As Wyatt Reed reports, Cerimedo ordered that hit “on his pregnant mistress after she discovered he was raking in millions of dollars by covering up hundreds of flights by cartel-linked planes smuggling cocaine from Bolivia’s Beni province”:
When he realized she might turn him in, Cerimedo messaged Bolivia’s anti-drug intelligence chief to inform him that his mistress had “sold us out.”
“Either we eliminate her or we’re all fucked. Do you know anyone who can do the job?”
Two minutes after the hit was carried out, Paz’s intelligence chief texted Cerimedo: “Brother, they just shot her.”
“MAGA’s Man in Latin America”
A little blackground: Cerimedo is the co-owner of La Derecha Diario (“The Right-Wing Daily”), one of the main digital disseminators of far-right ideas in Latin America and Spain. He is also a political consultant and has served as advisor to almost all of the far-right leaders in Latin America, including Javier Milei in Argentina, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Nasry Asfura in Honduras and Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia.
He also collaborated very closely with the Trump administration. The Economist was first to call Cerimedo “MAGA’s man in LatAm” for helping to forge “close ties” between Trump’s right-wing movement and similar-minded politicians throughout the region. It is a label that appears to have stuck.
In February, Cerimedo was named 2025’s best Hispanic political consultant. He received the award at an event in Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate in Florida, from Eduardo Bolsonaro Jr, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro and brother of current presidential candidate, Flavio Bolsonaro, and was photographed with Donald Trump Jr.
Cerimedo also had business ties with Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale, who is now a registered foreign agent for Israel with major Israeli contracts. As the New York Times reported in 2025, their Buenos Aires-based consultancy had advised the political and social media campaigns of numerous Trump allies in the region (emphasis my own):
The two men have been partners for a couple of years in a political consultancy based in Buenos Aires called Numen.
The firm advised the campaigns of Trump allies, including President Javier Milei of Argentina, for whom Numen worked in 2023, according to a Justice Department filing, as well as this year’s successful campaign of President Rodrigo Paz of Bolivia.
Parscale collaborated in the Bolivian elections and traveled to the region during the campaign. He helped Numen’s team on the ground use data tools developed by their companies.
Parscale did not travel to the region during the Honduran elections, but advised Numen’s team on how to use the data to target voters, according to Cerimedo, who became a leading figure in Asfura’s campaign.
“Brad put all the infrastructure in place that I work with,” Cerimedo said in a text message. Parscale argued that Campaign Nucleus and EyesOver’s tools helped their clients in Bolivia and Honduras.
When Trump-endorsed Rodrigo Paz became president in November 2025, Cerimedo was given a senior, unofficial advisory role in his cabinet. According to Bolivia’s vice president, Edmand Lara, himself a former police officer now in direct conflict with President Paz, the Argentine had an office inside the Palacio de Gobierno close to the president’s own, was present in cabinet meetings, penned Paz’s speeches and instructed ministers on what they were to do and say.
“Ministers had to speak with Cerimedo before speaking with the president. Cerimedo was the bridge,” Lara said.
Following the attempt on Beller’s life, Cermimedo was arrested at Viru Viru Airport as he attempted to flee to Buenos Aires, and is being held at Palmasola prison, Bolivia’s largest and most dangerous detention centre.
Since then Beller has accused Cerimedo of acts of corruption in Bolivia and Argentina, involvement in drug trafficking, running a scheme involving marked-up fuel distribution, an elite police unit that answered to him personally, and payments to legislators to secure votes on specific bills.
The Empire Strikes Back
The Argentine political operator is currently under investigation on four charges, including attempted femicide, money laundering and illicit enrichment. However, the plot thickened a few days ago when Bolivia’s vice president, Edmand Lara, released an audio recording that appears to back up Beller’s claims that Cerimedo was also involved in cocaine trafficking.
In the recording, a voice allegedly belonging to Cerimedo can be heard demanding payments of $15,000 for each drug plane that flew out of the region’s three small airports. At one point, Cerimedo says he has to talk about the deal with Colonel Cabrera, former head of the FELCN, an anti-narcotics agency. This is the same colonel who recently met in the US with the DEA to coordinate the fight against drug trafficking as part of Trump’s Shield of the Americas initiative.
Shortly after the release of that recording, the Attorney General Roger Mariaca’s name appeared on a US State Department list of senior officials from Bolivia, Colombia and Peru whose US visas had been revoked and whom the Trump administration accuses of being “corrupt” and “undermining democratically elected governments”. Interestingly, Cabrera is also on the same list.
Mariaca responded to the announcement by rejecting the White House’s accusation, demanding respect for Bolivian sovereignty and insisting that he will continue with the investigation into Cerimedo, despite the “discomfort” it may generate. The Prosecutor added that the US authorities will not prevent the whole truth about the cybercriminal who worked for Trump and Netanyahu — i.e. Cerimedo — from getting out.
On Tuesday, Beller upped the stakes by posting a photo of Cerimedo in a meeting with Donald Trump Jr on her Facebook page. Also in the photo are two of Cerimedo’s partners, Brad Parscale and Andy Rivas, and Dick Morris, a former Clinton advisor and political consultant who was recently linked to an Argentine campaign financing scandal involving Fred Machado, a businessman later arrested and accused of drug trafficking in the United States.
Beller also told the Mexican news outlet Sin Embargo that Cerimedo had build a network of political relationships that had brought him close to US institutions such as the State Department, the CIA and the DEA. She also claimed that she has photos of Cerimedo in the company of CIA Director Mark Radcliffe.
A day later, Mariaca was abducted at Viru Viru airport and the offices of three separate public prosecutors were seized by masked agents. The Bolivian government’s justification for the raids is that Mariaca had been moonlighting as the head of a “narco-structure” within the Public Prosecutor’s Office that protected organised crime bosses, a claim that was apparently based on a conveniently timed tip-off from the Uruguayan drug trafficker Sebastián Marset, who was extradited to the US in March.
Could it be true? Of course, it could. But the fact that the accusation came to light, or was acted upon, just as Mariaca’s investigation into Cerimedo appeared to be bearing fruit seems beyond coincidental. Tellingly, the US government warned Monday that Mariaca’s actions “jeopardise President Trump’s efforts to combat narco-terrorism, while undermining the very democratic institutions that Bolivia, as a participant in the Shield program, seeks to strengthen.”
There’s a lot of Orwellian speak to wade through in that sentence (e.g. combat narco-terrorism, strengthen democratic institutions) but the key section is the first four words: “jeopardise President Trump’s efforts”.
In the hours that followed Mariaca’s abduction, rumours began circulating that he had been arrested by the DEA and sent to Lima, from where he would be transported on to the US. Asked about the DEA’s rumoured involvement in the operation, Interior Minister Marco Antonio Oviedo said on Thursday that Mariaca’s arrest took place with the “cooperation of the U.S. government” as part of the “fight against terrorism”:
“This particular operation was carried out by the Bolivian Police; however, I must thank the help, the cooperation of the U.S. government, through its agencies that cooperate with us in the fight against narcoterrorism, the same with countries of the European Union and with countries that share a border.”
“The crime [the suspects] committed in the Prosecutor’s Office has been continuous and permanent. It was a criminal organisation that protected, participated in and enriched itself with the trafficking of controlled substances.”
Hours later, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio released the following statement on Twitter:
The rest of the text:
Last week, at the historic Shield of the Americas leaders meeting, the U.S. explicitly reaffirmed its unwavering commitment to safeguarding democratic governance and security in our region against the destabilizing influence of armed narco-terrorist networks.
Bolivia’s actions demonstrate the kind of leadership needed to make our hemisphere safer, stronger and more prosperous.
The real story, of course, is that Bolivia’s security forces just took “bold and decisive actions” against Bolivia’s attorney general because he was investigating “MAGA’s man” in Latin America for a host of crimes, including election interference on behalf of the US and Israel, attempted murder and cocaine trafficking, apparently in cahoots with the DEA. And with the possible involvement of the US president’s son…
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