The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. This is your host, Michael Fox. Before I get started, I wanted to let you know that I have big news. First, this season of Under the Shadow has been nominated for three podcast Signal Awards. It’s really exciting, and you can help us by heading over to signalaward.com and voting for Under the Shadow. I’ll add direct links in the show notes that will take you straight there. Second, last week I launched a new website called Pan American Dispatch. It’s a project of the Real News. We’re translating daily articles from Portuguese and Spanish into English for a US audience. Over the next two months, we’ll be exclusively focused on covering the Brazilian elections and Trump’s attempts to sway them. That is what this entire episode is about. And if you want to get all of the news about what’s happening in real time, please consider subscribing to our Substack.

You can find us at panamericandispatch.org. We’re also on X, Blue Sky, Instagram, and TikTok. Our handle is @PAdispatch. Okay, that’s it. I hope you enjoy the show. On May 26th, 2026, a 45-year-old Brazilian senator named Flavio Bolsonado met with US President Donald Trump at the White House. Flavio is the presidential candidate for the far right in Brazil in the upcoming elections in October. This is what he had to say at the annual conservative political action committee meeting in Texas earlier this year.

Flávio Bolsonaro:

And let me look you in the eyes and tell you, we will win.

Michael Fox:

Flavio is the son and political heir of the former far right president Jair Bolsonado, a close ally of the US president. In the meeting at the Oval Office in May, Flavio Bolsonado reportedly asked Trump to designate the Brazilian drug gangs, Primero Commando de Capital and the Commando Vermelio as foreign terrorist organizations. After the meeting, Flavio spoke to the press.

He said, “I asked President Trump emphatically to designate as soon as possible the PCC and the Commando Vermelio as foreign terrorist organizations.” This might not seem like such a big deal, but it is. The United States has sometimes used that very designation as the pretext to invade or interfere in foreign countries. The US placed the Venezuelan gangs, Trende Aragua and Cartel de los Soles on the list back in 2025, and fighting those alleged terrorists was one of the excuses the United States used for invading Venezuela and kidnapping President Nicholas Maduro on January 3rd of this year. In other words, this designation carries weight.

Trump agreed to Flavio’s request. Just three days after meeting with Flavio Bolsonaro, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that those two Brazilian gangs would be added to the list of foreign terrorist organizations. Flavio responded in a letter to Rubio, thanking him for the classification and offering to place his transition team at the disposal of the White House if he’s elected. For months, the United States has been escalating the pressure on Brazil in the lead up to the presidential elections with the goal of helping to lift Flavio Bolsonaro to the top office. Just a few weeks after the State Department put the Brazilian gangs on the terrorist list, Trump shared an article on Truth Social that said Brazil was his next big challenge. Less than a month later in July, Trump imposed new 25% tariffs on Brazilian goods. In August, Trump revoked the US visa of the Brazilian ambassador.

It was an apparent tit for tat after Brazil denied visas to two US State Department officials who planned to travel to Brazil to meet with former President Jair Bolsonaro. I could go on. The point here, as many people have pointed out, is that there isn’t just one thing that Trump is doing to try and sway the vote in favor of Bolsonaro. It’s a whole combination of moves, like a jigsaw puzzle with many pieces taken alone, and it’s just a random assortment of colors and shapes. But when you start to put the pieces in place, a picture begins to emerge. See, Trump allies have won big elections across Latin America. In recent years, right-wing candidates have taken back or held onto power in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Bolivia, and Peru. And they’ve done so with the help of US President Donald Trump, who’s thrown his weight around to boost right-wing candidates, and also with the support of bot farms and shady electoral campaign practices linked to Washington and Mar-a-Lago, as we looked at in the last episode.

Donald Trump:

But on this historic day, we come together to announce a brand new military coalition to eradicate the criminal cartels plaguing our region.

Michael Fox:

Many of those countries have now joined forces in Trump’s shield of the America’s alliance, but there are a few holdouts, and Brazil is one of the most important.

Alexander Main:

The upcoming election in Brazil is really going to be extremely consequential for the entire region.

Michael Fox:

Alexander Main is the director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Alexander Main:

Brazil is the country with the largest economy, biggest population in Latin America, and it’s also one of the few countries that is still holding out against US pressure, pressure to align with the Trump administration’s agenda in the region.

Michael Fox:

The first round election is on October 4th in just a couple of days, and the runoff will take place three weeks later on October 25th. Bolsonaro is facing off against the longtime workers’ party icon, Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva. He’s the current president and he’s running for reelection. I have been covering the campaigns here in Brazil in recent weeks. I’ve attended rallies for both Lula and Bolsonaro. Today, I’m going to walk you through what’s at stake, and most importantly, how Trump is exerting underhanded pressure on the country ahead of the vote. As a leak document showed last week, the Brazilian Intelligence Agency has raised the risk of external influence and interference by the United States and Brazil’s 2026 elections to a “critical level.” According to the report, there is a trend of escalating pressure on Brazil and a quote, “selective intensification and reconfiguration of the pressure exerted by the United States.” It’s a textbook example of foreign election interference today, a multifaceted jigsaw.

People are concerned, but they’re also standing up, and that’s what makes this episode so interesting. It’s happening in real time. You have Trump attempting to sway the vote, and you also have people pushing back.

Like Lula’s recent speech at the United Nations where he told the US president that Brazil will not be the backyard of any country.

Or this woman, a small farmer who I spoke with at a Lula rally in Southern Brazil. “We’re not afraid of Trump, “she said. “We know what he wants to do and we’re not going to let him. We are the resistance. We’re not afraid of him, just like Lula isn’t afraid. Lula showed us that we are not less than any country,” she said. That and so much more in a minute. This is Under the Shadow, an investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad in the past and the very present. This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA. I’m your host, Michael Fox, longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist, the producer and host of the podcast’s Brazil on Fire: Stories of Resistance and my new series, The Battle for Free Speech. I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America.

I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad, and most often sadly, it is not for the better. Invasions, coup, sanctions, support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years. It still does. This is season two of Under the Shadow Trump’s attack. Episode 15, election meddling in Brazil.

Okay, before we dive into the allegations of election interference, let me set the scene. To do that, I want to take you back to a month and a half ago to the launch of the campaigns here in Brazil. I was in Sao Paulo covering Lula’s kickoff. Some of this section of the episode is based off of reporting I did at the time for the world and the real news. It’s August 16th, 2026. Tens of thousands of supporters of President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva are packed into May 1st stadium in Sao Paulo. Among them is Sida Maya. She’s the secretary of women’s public policies in the nearby municipality of Maua.

“This is living history,” she says. “I’m participating in a historic moment. It’s a great feeling and we’re going to elect Lula.” Next to her, her husband Valmirmaya holds back tears. “It’s emotional, “he says. Lula’s campaign chose this stadium to kick off his run for a fourth and final term as president. This is where Lula got his start. In 1979, Lula was a young leader at the ABC Medal Workers Union. He led an iconic strike and rally at this same stadium. The workers won and it marked the beginning of the end of the country’s military dictatorship. Valmir Maya was there then and he’s here now.

“We wanted what we got,” he says, “to transform Brazil into a democratic country. That was our struggle, and Lula was the expression of this.” Inside the stadium, President Lula strode onto a long stage wearing a Panama hat and a white shirt. From the bleachers, he seemed to float above the sea of supporters in red, the color of Lula’s workers’ party. Lula’s top campaign promise has always been about battling hunger. Over the years, he’s lifted millions from poverty, increased access to education, health, and infrastructure, in particular in impoverished Northeastern Brazil. Lula told the crowd that there was much work left to be done, that they had to think of the future. He said they had to invest even more in education, that he wanted to continue to develop jobs and industry for Brazil. 300 miles to the east, Lula’s challenger, Flavio Bolsonaro, launched his campaign on Copacabana Beach in his hometown of Rio de Janeiro.

“Come with me and rescue our nation,” he said, “God above everyone, Brazil above all.” Flavio Bolsonaro has attacked the left and promised to fight crime and insecurity, cut bureaucracy, promote private business and privatizations, and develop close ties with the United States. Much of his rhetoric and that of his supporters is wrapped in a religious language of good versus evil.

“You are the son of hope,” said a pastor at his campaign launch. “You are the first born. You received the legacy of representing your father, and now for everything that is sacred on the face of the earth, honor your father. “The savior trope goes over well with his evangelical supporters, an important base for Bolsonaro and other far-right politicians in Brazil, as we looked at in depth in my 2022 podcast, Brazil on Fire. Blase Narujo is a youth pastor at an evangelical church in a working class neighborhood of Sao Paulo. He joined others on the streets in mid-August to promote Bolsonaro and other far-right candidates running for local office.

He said,” I believe that Flavio Bolsonado is the only viable candidate who can beat Lula and the workers’ party. “I’m a Christian here,” he told me. “I behave as a Christian, but I’m also a political activist here on the streets to defend my beliefs,” he said. Flavio Bolsonado also has powerful support in high places, in particular, as we heard earlier from Donald Trump. If you remember, the US president is a longtime ally of Flavio’s father, Jair Bolsonado. Jair is currently on house arrest. He was first barred from running for office for spreading lies about the country’s electoral system. Last year, the Supreme Court convicted him of plotting a coup to return to power. Before his rise as the leader of Brazil’s far right, Jair Bolsonaro was a backbench congressman for decades, outlandish, but mostly obscure. And then he ran for president.

Speaker 5:

There are a few things that drew inspiration for you.

Jair Bolsonaro:

Very special guy. Turned out to be a great friend of mine.

Michael Fox:

Bolsonaro fashioned himself after Trump. In fact, in Jair Bolsonaro’s electoral campaign in 2018, international media often called him the Trump of the tropics. He and Trump met a number of times while they were both president.

Jair Bolsonaro:

And I think we can say that Brazil and the United States are as close or closer as they’ve ever been.

Michael Fox:

Last year, Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Brazil in part because of the country’s criminal trial against the former president.

Donald Trump:

They’re treating President Bolsonaro very unfairly. He’s a good man. I know him well. I negotiated with him.

Michael Fox:

And let me be honest, there are many supporters of Bolsonaro who look up to Trump and want him to use his leverage to help their candidate, Jair Bolsonaro’s son and protege Flavio Bolsonaro. On September 7th, members of the far right in Brazil hit the streets across the country to rally for Flavio. I covered the march in the southern Brazilian city of Florianopolis. There, numerous people told me how much they admired Trump and how grateful they were for his support. Adalberto Luis de Santos is marching with a blue hat with the insignia of the United States. He and his wife are draped in Brazilian flags. “We’re hoping for support from the United States,” he said. “I believe Trump can help us. All Brazilians need the support of someone from abroad. “. “Trump is really important,” another man in the march told me. “The external pressure is very important.

“. A woman in the march carrying a flag and a yellow hat told me,” Just the simple fact that Trump is in power and acts democratically in favor of freedom makes all of the difference for our people. “.

“We don’t want Brazil to turn into another Venezuela,” she said. “I’ve heard that narrative countless times in Brazil and during elections in countries across Latin America for years. It’s the ever-present boogeyman of so-called communist Venezuela, but fear of the Venezuelan fate took on an even more serious dimension after the US invasion of Caracas earlier this year. The sentiments of so many Bolsonaro supporters are a sign of just how polarized the political debate is and how much the far right in Brazil looks up to the US president. Two weeks later, I covered another rally in the same city, this one in support of President Lula.

People had a lot to say about Trump and his efforts to influence their presidential decisions. I asked them, “Are you afraid of what Trump and the United States could do during this election to try and support Bolsonaro?” “Yes, I’m really afraid of that, “said one man carrying a Lula flag. “They want to take away our sovereignty. They want to invade our lands. They want to take what is ours and let Brazil be a colony of another country.” “Of course we’re afraid, “said someone else,” but we believe that Lula is well ahead in the election and we won’t allow Trump to destroy the election. “What do you think about Trump and are you concerned that Trump might try and do something with the elections here in

Speaker 7:

Brazil? Yeah, we’ve seen a lot of his work here in Latin America that we are very scared. Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Argentina. So we are very scared because Latin America is being contaminated by him and his work, so it’s very scary and we don’t want him in here or anything with him.

Michael Fox:

People have a lot to be concerned about. When I was in Sao Paulo in August, I sat down with Igor Fusser at a cafe near Palista Avenue. We’ve known each other for years. He’s a professor of foreign relations at Brazil’s ABC Federal University. I asked him how he sees the US actions against Brazil at this moment.

He said, “This is not just about the United States trying to remove the government of a left-wing party, the workers’ party, or a left-wing leader, which is Lula. It’s about subjecting Brazil to the policies of the United States, and Brazil being the largest country in Latin America is precisely the biggest obstacle to the American project of global dominance of the Western hemisphere,” he said. Remember, over the last year, as we’ve looked at throughout this podcast, Trump has pushed the United States into a new era of dominance over Latin America, the likes of which the region has not seen in decades. Boat strikes in the Caribbean, the US invasion of Venezuela, and the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro, the oil blockade on Cuba, and Trump throwing his weight around and meddling in elections across Latin America. It’s all justified by a renewed Monroe doctrine. Here’s Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, underlining that point.

Pete Hegseth:

President Trump has established the Trump corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, the Don Roe doctrine, and the war department is implementing it as fast as we can.

Michael Fox:

Brazil is the latest battleground. It’s playing out in the open and behind the scenes. It’s early August. The Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism is meeting in Sao Paulo. At the meeting circulating in the crowd are staff from the US Consulate in Sao Paulo, their mission to woo Brazilian journalists into conversations about the country’s electoral process and the state of “freedom of expression” in the country. This was reported by several independent journalists at the conference and then published by independent journalist Leandro DeMori, the former executive editor of The Intercept Brazil. According to Demorti, three journalists at the event confirmed the actions of the consular officials. Two journalists said they were offered assistance with US visas if they needed them, even though the meetings with the officials about the country’s elections were to be held in Sao Paulo.

Washington has leaned on two key narratives to demonize Brazil in recent years. One, that freedom of expression is under attack in Brazil because of its attempts to reign in social media disinformation, and two, that the country’s electoral system is faulty and prone to errors. Both of those claims are false. Brazil has long held certified free and fair elections, and freedom of speech is alive and well, although Brazil embraces a more inclusive harmonious definition of how the freedom of speech fits into the country’s other laws. Episode 12 of this series goes deeper into those claims and their fallout. DiMorti’s reporting about the recent journalism forum brings up more questions than answers. What were the consular officials trying to achieve? Did some journalists take the bait? If so, how will this be weaponized? We don’t have answers, but it’s another piece of the scrambled jigsaw puzzle.

Here’s another, and it’s just one example of how the meddling campaign has been building. In mid-September, less than two weeks ago, Flavio Bolsonaro’s brother, Eduardo, met with President Donald Trump at the White House. As we looked at in the last episode, Eduardo is a former congressional representative who now lives in the United States. The Brazilian Supreme Court sentenced him earlier this year to four years in prison for his actions in the US, lobbying the Trump administration to intimidate the Brazilian judiciary amid the trial against his father. According to reports, Eduardo traveled to Washington to ask Trump to impose sanctions on members of the Lula government and the Supreme Court, including Justice Alexandre Morais. If you’ve been following Brazil or my reporting, you might remember that Morais was the justice that led the trials against the dissemination of fake news in the country and also against Jair Bolsonaro.

Jair Bolsonaro:

Also developing this morning, the Trump administration placing sanctions on a Brazilian Supreme Court justice over concerns of human rights violations and politicized prosecutions.

Michael Fox:

Last year, the US sanctioned Mordice for supposedly carrying out human rights abuse, including arbitrary detention. Those sanctions were lifted four months later, but they were a thinly veiled retaliation for the trial against Bolsonaro and also Morais’s fight with ex-owner Elon Musk, which we looked at in depth in episode 12. There is no question the battle over Brazil right now is also taking place online and Silicon Valley is playing its part.

On Wednesday, September 23rd, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, took down President Lula’s Facebook page and blocked his campaign from running political ads. The platform gave no justification for the move. Lula’s workers’ party and his electoral coalition demanded answers. Lula’s campaign asked for the immediate return of the account. The campaign’s lawyers told the platform that the restriction “poses a serious risk to the candidate’s level playing field in the election.” The head of the Workers’ Party national communications team, Eden Valadaris, said they hadn’t ruled out taking the case to the superior electoral court. He wrote on X, “Brazil’s electoral contest, its campaigns, and its vote cannot be left to the mercy of the political preferences of the big tech companies whose supposed programming errors only hit and harm one campaign and one candidate.” One candidate, meaning Lula. By the next morning, the page was back up, but Lula’s electoral coalition said Meta’s actions harm the presidential campaign.

Remember that Meta was founded and is run by Mark Zuckerberg. He’s a close ally of President Donald Trump.

Jair Bolsonaro:

Thank you very, very much.

Michael Fox:

In fact, he was at Trump’s inauguration for his second term alongside the heads of Apple, Google, Amazon, and of course, Tesla and ex – CEO, Elon Musk. I want to talk about something important today because it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. Zuckerberg got rid of fact-checking at Meta in early 2025, just before Trump came into power last year, and that’s important because there are now fewer constraints on the spread of fake news or misinformation on the platform. In late August, Amnesty International tested this lack of guardrails in Brazil. It sent 15 different AI-generated election-related political disinformation ads to Facebook to see if the platform could discern between truth and falsehood. Meta failed to block most of them. A similar test run by the eco movement in Brazil in mid-September showed that nearly 90% of the disinformation ads it attempted to run on Meta were approved, including “AI ads depicting execution style threats against lawmakers and calling for a stop the steal style coup.” And I want to say one more thing about the role of Silicon Valley’s big tech platforms.

They are paying attention to what’s happening in Brazil. Here’s just one example. Last year, lawmakers and a congressional committee in Brazilia were discussing a bill on AI regulation. According to the fact-checking agency, Ausfatos, big tech lobbyists visited committee members more than 80 times over a five-month period. The tech company that met with members in Brazilia the most was Meta, which made more than a third of those visits.

There’s another layer to all of this, another puzzle piece if you like. In the last episode of this podcast, I took an in-depth look at the work of the Argentine political strategist, Fernando Cerimedo. Remember, Serimedo has led right-wing digital campaigns across Latin America, and he did so with the help of Washington and Trump’s former campaign manager and digital strategist, Brad Parscali. This is what he had to say earlier this year in Mar-a-Lago when he was presented an award for best Hispanic Political Consultant of the Year.

Jair Bolsonaro:

I want to say something in English. Thank you to Brad Parscale for believing me all the time and give me your technology and Tim Don for the fighting in Latin America against socialism. Thank you, Brad.

Michael Fox:

Serimedo is now in prison on charges that he tried to kill his girlfriend. According to her, he hired the hitman to silence her. Serimedo also faces charges of illicit enrichment and other crimes, but his digital campaigning and the bot farms that he’s deployed in elections up and down the hemisphere haven’t necessarily gone away, nor have his deep ties to the right in the region. Remember who presented that award to Cerimedo? It was Eduardo Bolsonaro, the brother of Flavio Bolsonaro. They reportedly have known each other for more than 15 years. Now, just this week, Washington sanctioned Bolivian Attorney General Roher Mariaka, who is prosecuting the Serimero case,

He defended his country sovereignty and vowed to continue the investigation despite the apparent attempt to intimidate him. I mention all of this to say that just because Serimedo is now in jail, it doesn’t mean that these types of digital influence campaigns heavily fueled by an inter International far right aren’t happening. As I mentioned last time, Serimedo is just one piece in a puzzle, a cog and a wheel, albeit one very important cog. But actions pushing disinformation online are still happening. We just don’t necessarily know from who or where. Here’s one example. About a week ago, the Brazilian journalistic outlet Ajencia Publica reported in conjunction with Aos Fatos that AI farms were fueling the far right agenda in the lead up to the elections. The bots had created 255 profiles and made over a thousand posts. Agencia Publica reported that the network had “achieved 58 million views, expanding the reach of posts supporting the Bolsonaro family and attacking the Supreme Court.” It’s a strategy known as astroturfing, using artificial engagement to give the impression of a real surge in grassroots support.

All of this happened over one month between August and September. According to the investigation, one of the main nodes of this AI campaign was linked to the Instagram account Leo Indio Bolsonaro. That is managed by Leonardo Rodriguez de Jesus. He is Flavio and Eduardo Bolsonaro’s cousin. He was investigated by Brazilian officials for his role in the 2023 attempted coup. A warrant for his arrest was ordered in 2025. He fled the country. He’s reportedly now in Argentina. The point is this, these campaigns are happening. We often just don’t hear about them until after the fact.

Maria Marta Bruno:

Well, I’ve been voting since 1998 and I have never seen such level of interference of foreign interference in Brazilian elections.

Michael Fox:

Maria Marta Bruno is a journalist with Agencia Publica, the outlet I mentioned earlier. If you remember, I spoke with her in the last episode as well about Serimedo.

Maria Marta Bruno:

It reminds me a lot of what I have read in history books and what I have learned on the Brazilian dictatorship and the very clear role that the US developed from 1964 to 1985 when the military dictatorship in Brazil took place. There was never since the end of the dictatorship such open intervention.

Michael Fox:

Maria says there have been a lot of headlines lately mentioning diplomatic tension between Brazil and the United States, but she says what we’re seeing goes far beyond that.

Maria Marta Bruno:

Because given the gravity and the timing of the recent facts, I would say that it constitutes a clear interference in our process.

Michael Fox:

She highlights Trump’s tariffs on Brazil both last year and this year, which she says are wrapped into defending former President Jair Bolsonaro. She points to the numerous meetings between Flavio and Eduardo Bolsonaro with top officials in Washington over the last year, the US sanctions against Supreme Court Justice Alexandre Morais and so much more. And she says there are two other big reasons why the United States is so interested in Brazil. The first is China.

Maria Marta Bruno:

The US intentions to reduce China influence in Latin America. We all know that China, it’s a key partner for Brazil and for other countries in the region.

Michael Fox:

The second is rare earth minerals, stuff like neodymium, dysprosium, or terbium. Yeah, I don’t know what they look like either, but they’re used in EV motors, green energy technologies, military equipment, and other industries. Brazil is home to somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the total rare earth reserves in the world. It’s second only to China. In April, a US company bought up the Brazilian firm Ceja Vergi, which mines rare earth minerals in Brazil. After his meeting with Trump in May, Flavio Bolshinaro promised to work with the United States on mineral extraction. “We are the only real alternative to China for a free world,” Flavio Bolsonaro said. “Under my government, there will be long-term strategic partnership with the United States in this sector with protected investment and shared reindustrialization between the two countries. Flavio also promised that if he is elected in his first month, Brazil would join President Trump’s Shield of the America’s regional coalition.

Brazil will join the shield of the Americas together with the United States, “he said,” and countries across the region, forming a great hemispheric alliance against terrorism and organized and transnational crime. “This is Brazil’s place. It is the protagonist of the security of the Americas side by side with free and sovereign nations, he said.

Maria Marta Bruno:

And we know that the US is very interested in what we have and the reserves that we have. So it’s very significant, it’s very important, and we know that the US is following closely the development of the presidential elections here because they will certainly determine what will be the future of the diplomatic relation between US and Brazil in the upcoming years.

Michael Fox:

In the face of all of this, Brazilians are responding none louder than President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva.

Jair Bolsonaro:

The assembly will now hear and address by his excellency, Luis Inacio Lula Da Silva, president of the Federated Republic of Brazil.

Michael Fox:

The day is September 22nd, 2026, New York City. Brazilian President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva walks to the podium at the United Nations to kick off the 81st General Assembly meeting. Without mentioning him, Lula speaks directly to US President Donald Trump. “Brazil does not fit into anyone’s backyard,” he says. Lula denounces Trump for attacking democracy, interfering in elections and using military force to acquire material resources across Latin America. He closes his speech with a nod to the upcoming high stakes elections in Brazil. On October 4th, he says, “Millions of Brazilians go to the polls to decide their future. They will not just elect the president of the republic, state governors, and representatives of the legislative power. They will decide between democracy and denialism, between if Brazil is going to move toward a future of more opportunities or return to a past of exclusion.”. He says Brazil will have free and transparent elections as it always has with broad freedom of speech.

He denounces the spread of disinformation online, in particular coming from outside the country, which he says is an attempt to “disrupt the debate.”.

“We have a modern and robust electoral system,” he says. “We have a plural citizenship and a free press. We will not allow the enemies of democracy, both internal and external, to attack the popular will. Brazilian democracy belongs to Brazilians. Brazil will continue to be a sovereign country. No one, no one will take us away from this path, “he says. It’s Lula’s response to Trump and the world as the country faces incredibly important elections, elections that Trump and the United States have been attempting to influence. Brazilians have been vocal online and in the streets against Washington’s pressure, and recently they actually got some support from a group of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. On September 24th, just last week, Senator Bernie Sanders and 30 Democratic members of the US House of Representatives sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. They accused the Trump administration of waging a pressure campaign against Brazil ahead of the first round vote.

Illinois Congresswoman Delia Ramirez led the congressional effort. They write, “We are writing to express our grave concern regarding the administration’s coordinated effort to threaten our strategic alliance with Brazil and undermine the Western Hemisphere’s second largest democracy ahead of its upcoming presidential election in October 2026. Over the course of President Trump’s second term,” they write, “We have seen US officials engage in a sustained multifaceted campaign of interference and destabilization in Brazil. They point to the shocking 50% tariffs Trump levied on the country last year amid the country’s trial against Jair Bolsonaro. They also underscored Trump’s appointment last year of Darren Beattie as a senior advisor on Brazil issues in the State Department. Beattie, a noted far-right extremist and white supremacist,” they write, “came into this post with a clear record of public statements signaling an overt ideological commitment to undermining Brazil’s democratic institutions.” The congressional representative singled out Trump’s current tariffs, his meeting with Flavio Bolsonaro at the White House, and his designation of the Brazilian drug gangs as foreign terrorist organizations.

They write, “Given the Trump administration’s repeated military strikes in the region, justified in part by alleged foreign terrorist organization threats to US security, the designation has also fueled fears of potential US military intervention.” They recall comments from White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt last year that threatened Brazil could potentially face the United States’ military might.

US military action in Brazil isn’t likely, but it’s not out of the question. Nothing is under Trump’s Dunro doctrine. The lawmakers highlight that Brazil is just the latest in a quote, deeply troubling pattern of interference by the United States in foreign elections, including in Argentina, Honduras, and Columbia. Rather than helping defend democracy, they write, the United States is acting as an agent of interference and destabilization using diplomatic economic and political pressure in ways that risk weakening the country’s democratic institutions, undermining confidence in Brazil’s electoral process and inflicting further damage on our relationship with a strategic US ally and trading partner. They demand that Washington commit to recognizing the certified election results. Here’s the thing, the stakes are high. Remember Igor Fusser? He’s the professor I met at the Sao Paulo Cafe. He told me, “It’s clear that the United States is doing everything and will do everything possible to prevent the reelection of Lula in the next elections.” And Igor told me there was a reason for that, because if Flavio Bolsonaro wins, he will bow to Trump and the United States.

Igor says, “Brazil will become a country under the tutelage of the United States, a colony or almost a colony of the US as already happened with Argentina, Columbia, Venezuela, and many others. And if Lula is victorious in these elections, we will live a very intense period of confrontation between the two countries,” he says. And Igor has a really interesting analysis here. He says, “The US dominance over Latin America imposed by Trump is analogous to the control of the Soviet Union over the Eastern block countries during the Cold War under a Russian foreign policy imposed by Soviet leader Leonid Brezniv in 1968.” He says, “Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, all of those countries were formally independent nations with their own government, their own laws, their own representation in the United Nations, but these countries were not autonomous. They didn’t have sovereignty. Any movement that they made that clashed with the interests of the Soviet Union was repressed.

Some of them were even invaded,” he says. “So we’re living in Latin America, a Breznev doctrine, capitalist, imperialist, dictated by Donald Trump. “That is why this election is so important. Brazil is the outlier, the counterweight to the United States and the region, and the US is fighting hard to bring it to heel.

We’re going to see this all unfold not in a couple of months or weeks, but in just a few days. The first round of the election is on October 4th. Brazilians are voting for their president and vice president. They’re also voting for all of the country state governors, all 513 members of the Chamber of Deputies, two-thirds of senators, and more than a thousand state assembly seats. Lula is ahead in the race, but he appears shy of the 50% needed to win outright. If no presidential candidate wins more than half of the vote, it’ll go to a second round. There, polls show the margin between Lula and Bolsonaro even tighter, and it will undoubtedly be a tough campaign. The second round, if it’s needed, is on October 25th.

That is all for this episode of Under the Shadow. Things are going to get intense in the coming days. Please consider following our new website, Pan-American Dispatch and our social media accounts for ongoing reporting on Brazil and these elections. Some of the reporting in this episode was based off of stories I produced recently for the world and The Real News. Many thanks to those outlets for all that they do. Let me remind you that if you’re craving even more backstory here, you can always go back and listen to episode 12 of the second season of Under the Shadow about Brazil’s fight against fake news in the country and the US attempt to roll it back. And please also consider checking out my 2022 podcast about Brazil under Bolsonaro. It’s called Brazil on Fire. It’s still totally relevant today. You can find that wherever you listen.

As always, you can find me at patreon.com/mfox.

There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. You can find a ton of content there exclusively also for my supporters. If you’re looking for more information, news and reporting on Trump’s onslaught, both in communities within the United States and abroad, please check out The Real News and NACLA. Both of them are publishing daily indispensable reporting. The theme music is by my band, Monte Perdido. You can find us on Spotify or wherever you stream music. This closing song playing right now is off our 2024 album, Ofrenda. I hope you check it out. Under the shadows of co-production of The Real News and NACLA, it’s produced in partnership with Global Exchange. This episode was written, researched, reported, and produced by me, Michael Fox. The script was edited by Heather Geis.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Maximillian Alvarez:

I’m here at the Parkway Theater and I’m sitting with Mahmoud Khalil, freed political prisoner and former Columbia graduate student who was heavily involved in the student-led Justice for Palestine movement and who because of that was abducted by plainclothes ICE agents from his New York apartment building in March of 2025 and locked away in immigration jail for 104 days. But he’s here with us now. Brother Mahmoud, welcome home, man.

Mahmoud Khalil:

Thank you for having me, Max. Thank you so much.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It’s such an honor to be here with you in person. I don’t even know how you begin to answer this question, but I can’t begin without asking it. How are you and your family doing after enduring this horrific nightmare that is sadly still not over?

Mahmoud Khalil:

We’re doing all right and we’re taking it day by day, really sort of surviving under the threat of deportation at any second or worse than that, whatever this government may decide to do at any point. But our fear is part of the fear of so many families in this country who are now worried about sending their children to school. We are in September now and I know a lot of kids are worried about going to school because they’re either undocumented or their parents are undocumented. I’m thinking about just the families in Minnesota and in New York and in Texas who are now under the threat of being really deportation by this or ripping them apart. It’s not only deportation. Haitians

Maximillian Alvarez:

In

Mahmoud Khalil:

Ohio,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Latinos in

Mahmoud Khalil:

Southern California. Anyone who this administration sees as the other or sees as a threat to whatever plans they have. So in that bigger scheme of things also, at least I know my son will be fed tonight. There wouldn’t be a bomb being thrown on our house as happening in Gaza right now as we are speaking. So in the bigger scheme of things, we’re grateful. We’re grateful for the community that’s supporting us.That’s what’s keeping us going forward right now is just the level of support, the level of solidarity, the community that was built around us because of what this government has imposed on me and my family.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I didn’t plan to ask this, but as a father as well, I have to. What was it like to hold your kid that first time?

Mahmoud Khalil:

I don’t think anyone can describe that feeling. It’s just the first time I held Dean was in detention in a courtroom, in an immigration courtroom where verdicts of deportations happen, like rain daily in these rooms. So it was a little bit weird that I was able to reunite with my family in a place where families are being torn apart. But at the same time I felt victorious because that’s a moment that this government tried to steal from me. Although it was only for one hour, but felt the world to me. And of course now being with Dean, a lot of people ask me, “What gives you purpose?” And just seeing Dean and dreaming of a world where he can live in dignity and safety, inequality, just like anyone else, as an American citizen who has the same rights and responsibility as any other American citizen, regardless of his background, regardless of the ethnicity, regardless of anything, really it’s just like being a human.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And how could you not look at your kids and our children and not fight? We’re going to give this world over. We’re going to give their future over to these psychopaths, to these fascists, to these fanatical nut jobs? Of course not.That’s just not an option. But it’s really hard to put that into action on a day-to-day level when we’re being bombarded by so much terror and awfulness. I interviewed members of your former graduate student union at Columbia after you were taken. I’ve interviewed members of my former grad student union in Michigan where activists are having their homes raided by the FBI. I mean, students, community members, workers, people all over this country who are terrified to fight back or do anything because of what happened to you. But you continue to speak out. You wrote this book, No Land to Stand On. You’re here in Baltimore to speak to folks.

What do you and this book have to say to all of us out there about confronting that fear and not living in fear?

Mahmoud Khalil:

I think the fear is very real and I would be lying if I said I don’t have fear about myself, about my children, about my family. But courage is not the absence of fear. It is actually acting despite the fear. I would be lying if I said, “Oh, I’m not afraid.” Or when you are dealing with such injustice and as you’ve mentioned, just these fascist tactics and the way that they dehumanize us, whether as immigrants or whether as Palestinians or just as someone who does not agree with what this government is doing. So to take you back, I think a day after my release, I decided to go to a protest. And I usually am not that protest guy, although I was very heavily involved in the Columbia movement, but I decided to go mainly to give a message that despite all this violence inflicted upon me from the government, from the university, from the institutions and the establishment in this country, I refuse to be silent.

And now my book is out because the government tried to silence me. Or in essence, they tried to make an example out of me so you and others wouldn’t speak out. But to me, this book is a testament that I refuse to be silent. Now the government gave me a platform and they would take it with a grace and responsibility that I should take this platform to advocate for those who don’t have voices. At any moment now there’s over 70,000 immigrant in ICE detention. At every second, there’s at least 70,000 immigrants in detention. That we know

Maximillian Alvarez:

Of. Now they’re like, we don’t even know if they’re keeping proper track.

Mahmoud Khalil:

Exactly. I don’t know how many went through the administrative errors that this administration every now and then does. So really this administration tried to silence me and I refuse to be silent. And that’s why I want to give people not hope, but at least some sort of despite all this violence, you can still speak out because what we’re dealing with right now is this administration, they are bullies and what our parents teach us when a bully come to bully you, you should not – Stand up, baby. Exactly. So that’s what I’m doing right now. And part of my fight is not about staying in the US. It’s more around what happened to me is wrong and shouldn’t happen to anyone else. Even if I win my case tomorrow, I may decide to leave the day after, but that’s totally besides the main point, which is what’s happening is wrong and should be confronted.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I want to end on that note because ever since you were taken, one of the reasons that people found so much hope in your story was that you continued to use your voice to advocate for others who were locked away in immigration jail, people who couldn’t speak English, people who didn’t have access to lawyers and who could get contact with the outside world. And that meant so much to so many. And of course you ended up in that jail because you were speaking out and speaking up along with millions around the country and around the world against a genocide in Palestine funded by our tax dollars. So here we are in 2026 and I’m not going to say it doesn’t feel like we’re losing everything and that it was all for naught, but I know a lot of our viewers can feel that way when they look at what’s happening to the ruins of Gaza and to the continual onslaught to erase that people from that land while back home they’re using the same tech to disappear our neighbors and family members.

So how do you put all of this in perspective and how do we continue to fight even when it feels like all is lost?

Mahmoud Khalil:

I think hope and resistance is our only option right now because this administration wants us to feel defeated, want us to feel that nothing is working. And the moment that we succumb to that feeling is the moment that they win because even if we remain silent, because I know people who were targeted and remain silent, the administration did not stop going after them because their mere existence was a problem to this administration. And that’s why I’m hopeful because I don’t have any other option. And the fact that the president of the United States came after an unknown student speaks a lot to the successes of our movement because it was impactful. It was actually changing things on the ground. It was changing public opinion in droves. That’s why the president of the United States felt the need to go after a random student to make an example out of him so that others would fear speaking out.

And that’s I think my only message in terms of why we should be hopeful because the change doesn’t happen in a day and night. It is the persistence. It is the continued resistance against all odds when you see that nothing is happening, but you continue because you believe in that. And that’s the thing as Palestinians, why we continue resisting despite everything all odds against us is that we are righteous. We know that human beings, regardless of their faith and nationality, they can see that in us and they would support us. So that’s why we have a strong belief in our cause that it’s a righteous cause. We don’t need millions and billions of dollars to convince public opinion about the righteousness of our cause or not. It’s just like we need to present it and that’s it. And that’s what they are fearing right now.

That’s why you see the establishment in this country is scrambling to control the media, to buy TikTok and to buy CNN and all of these just because we are actually winning and they know they will not be able to stop us. That’s why they’re bringing these all new tactics about, in my case, they’re weaponizing the immigration law from 1952. And in other cases they’re bringing all these alien laws.

Maximillian Alvarez:

They’re

Mahmoud Khalil:

Reaching back to laws from centuries ago. Yeah, 1800 something because they’re looking for tools because we’re actually winning and the public is with us. But also with immigrants, an average American sees that an immigrant is a benefit to this country, whether it is through the work that they do, whether through the diversity they bring. And this country was built upon, I mean recently, I don’t want to stoke about the enslaved people and how this country was built on their shoulders, but recently also immigrants were part of this.

Maximillian Alvarez:

You and I wouldn’t be sitting here if that wasn’t true.

Mahmoud Khalil:

Absolutely. And we absolutely must be conscious of that. And that’s the other thing about why I’m writing the book now, not in five years, because this is urgent. A lot of people ask me, “How would you look at this moment in 20 years?” I don’t want to look at it in 20 years. I want to do what I can do right now to stop it because what’s happening right now is a stain on the constitution, is a stain on the American consciousness, is a stain on every human value that we stand or we say we stand for. And I don’t want to look in 20 years and say, “Oh, we should have done something because it’s happening now in our backyards. An ICE detention center is at least 30 minutes from any one of us right now. If you drive 30 minutes, you would find an ICE detention center.

There’s one

Maximillian Alvarez:

Five minutes that way. Thank you so much, bro.

Mahmoud Khalil:

No, thank you so much,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Max.

Mahmoud Khalil:

Appreciate it, man.

Suha Maqat, Palestinian Athlete: 

I’m in a wheelchair—how am I going to escape? 

Rabab Nawfal, Palestinian Athlete: 

There were days when we ate animal food, bird food. 

Suha Maqat, Palestinian Athlete: 

I lost my eye. What more do you want? 

Rabab Nawfal, Palestinian Athlete: 

My dreams have been shattered. 

Narrator: 

In Gaza, everyone is struggling to survive. But for people with disabilities, that struggle is multiplied. Rabab Nawfal and Suha Maqat – both wheelchair users – were champion athletes before this war. 

Rabab Nawfal, Palestinian Athlete: 

I’m one of those people who didn’t go to the south. I lived through famine twice. I lived it twice. No one asked after me. There were days when we didn’t eat anything. There were days when we ate animal food, bird food. We ate everything—animals, birds. Even those things were expensive, and then they were cut off. The day they were cut off, we stopped eating anything. 

Ramadan came during the famine. We didn’t eat anything. A long day passed, and we didn’t eat anything. We used to crave drinking water. We used to crave a piece of bread. We were hoping that the famine would never come back. But unfortunately, it did—and it’s still coming back. 

We’ve suffered a lot in life. I was abandoned. No one took responsibility for me. My mother and father used to take care of me, but they left. These days, my brother takes care of me—and he is injured. My life is ruined. No one is with me. No one cares. And the one person standing by me is injured. He can barely carry his own family. 

When we were displaced, he couldn’t help us. He wasn’t able. For people with disabilities like me, it’s been difficult to live through this war. Those who are not disabled can maybe manage their lives. They can move, walk long distances—but I can’t. 

Suha Maqat, Palestinian Athlete: 

The closest people to me abandoned me—they didn’t stand by me. They left me to fend for myself. I feel like I live in a forest with wolves and monsters. I can’t. I try to make things work,

but I can’t. I’m mentally exhausted. The circumstances of this war are incredibly difficult. Even the word displacement is difficult for the injured and disabled. 

When we left, my brother was injured and my sister was in a bad state. Even though he was injured, he was pushing my sister, as I pushed myself along. I got stuck in the sand, and they wanted to bomb the building next to us. It was the most difficult moment. I said to myself, now I’m going to be killed. It was the hardest moment of my life. 

I thought—how will I escape? How will I, in my wheelchair, escape? How am I going to get out? My brother was injured and couldn’t carry me. I thought, I’m done; there’s no life for me anymore. That’s it. I’m going to be killed. 

Rabab Nawfal, Palestinian Athlete: 

The hardest thing I’ve experienced in this war has been displacement. I woke up one day and saw the Israelis in front of us. I was all by myself. I rushed out, but I couldn’t continue. There was a lot of shelling, shooting, bombs. It was a miracle I got out alive. It happened again and again—the same scenario repeated a thousand times. 

Narrator: 

Both Suha and Rabab rely entirely on their wheelchairs to move. Without them, the most basic tasks become impossible. Israel’s blockade has meant that access to this crucial item has been cut off. 

Even with functioning wheelchairs, with 81% of roads in Gaza now damaged or destroyed, access and movement is extremely limited. 

Rabab Nawfal, Palestinian Athlete: 

There are no wheelchairs in Gaza. And without a wheelchair, I can’t move. The wheelchair takes me to my medicine, my food, my drink—I need it for everything. Right now, my chair is broken. I’ve lost all means of life. 

Suha Maqat, Palestinian Athlete: 

As you can see, my chair is broken. I push myself in it, I fall off all the time, I cut and bruise my legs. If someone kind is around, then I can move. Otherwise, I can’t. 

We requested wheelchairs, but it was no use. We asked and asked, and they said no. Rabab Nawfal, Palestinian Athlete: 

My life before the war was very beautiful. I was a champion of Palestine’s disabled national team for strength games—basketball, tennis. I used to do all kinds of sports that suited my disability. I was a success story. I was a hero. These days, I feel worthless. Nothing in life. I can’t even get from here to there. I can’t move from here to there in a wheelchair. My life is 

gone. There is no life.

These days, we only dream of having the most basic things: flour, water. The simplest things—we can’t get. Drinking water—we can’t get it. 

Suha Maqat, Palestinian Athlete: 

Suha before is different from Suha today. I used to be a champion of Palestine. Today, I’m nothing. Today, just a daughter who needs her mother—who needs her mother to help her. 

Rabab Nawfal, Palestinian Athlete: 

Two days before the war, we were playing qualifiers to represent Palestine internationally. But we didn’t manage it. On the day of the championship, the war erupted. So our dreams are gone. All our dreams are gone. My dreams have been shattered. 

I wanted to raise my son. I wanted to raise him well and teach him. Before the war, I wanted to enroll him in karate. I wanted him to become something. I couldn’t. I wanted him to be into sports like me—to become a doctor. I wanted him to grow up and help me in the future. But my dreams were shattered. I couldn’t do any of it. I can’t do anything. 

Narrator: 

According to the UN 4,800 amputations of limbs had been documented since the beginning of the war. Ten children were losing one or both legs every day. Gaza had become home to the largest group of child amputees in modern history. Not only is Israel making the lives of existing disabled people impossible, it is also creating an entirely new generation of people with disabilities. 

Suha Maqat, Palestinian Athlete: 

Gaza has become a city of ghosts. There is no life in Gaza. As you can see—look at how people are living. On sand! How can people live on sand? How can they occupy Gaza? How? 

We want peace of mind. We don’t want to lose any more loved ones. We’ve lost enough. Is it not enough that I lost my eye? What’s left? What more do you want? I lost my eye—what more do you want? What else should I lose? Nothing’s left. There’s nothing left in this world that I can lose. My family has left. I wish I could see my mother. See my father. 

Rabab Nawfal, Palestinian Athlete: 

Life has become unbearable. No matter how much I talk, I can’t describe what I am feeling or the life we are living. I used to be someone. Now I am nothing.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. I’m your co-host, Michael Fox. This is the Battle for Free Speech, and this is the third bonus episode in this series. So this one is particularly important and timely as Brazil is heading into high stakes presidential elections this October. The race is between current leftist president Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva and Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. If you have listened to episode six of this podcast series or my podcast series Brazil on Fire or the entire season two of my podcast Under the Shadow, then you know a little bit about where things are and where they’re headed. And this is another deep dive. Today, I’m bringing you my full conversation with Arturo Romeo. He’s a Brazilian journalist and the director for Latin America of the International NGO Reporters Without Borders. I spoke with him specifically for my episode about Brazil of the battle for free speech, but there was so much more from our conversation that I couldn’t fit into that episode.

In this conversation, Artur mentions a couple of things and I want to give you some context. First, Alexandre Morais is the Brazilian Supreme Court justice who led the investigations into fake news and Bolsonaro’s hate cabinet. He also oversaw the electoral court in the 2022 elections, and he was the guy who had the showdown with billionaire Elon Musk over Twitter back in 2024. In fact, Morais blocked the social media platform in Brazil for roughly two months after Musk refused to suspend a series of Brazilian accounts who were disseminating fake news. Then Musk pulled Twitter’s legal representation from the country. Musk later acquiesced and Twitter went back online. But that escapade has been used by the far right and even President Donald Trump to claim that Morais and the Lula government have been censoring free speech in the country. And in fact, that was one of the top reasons for the 50% tariff on Brazilian goods that Trump imposed last year on the country.

And it has been at the heart of Trump’s campaign against Brazil and Lula in an effort to influence the outcome of Brazil’s presidential elections this year. Okay, I think you are up to speed. Here is my full conversation with Artur Romeo in its entirety. We spoke last year, 2025, but it is more relevant than ever today. I hope you like it. Arturo, thank you so much for being with me today. Thank you so much for your availability. I really, really appreciate. Super excited to talk with you about all these things.

Artur Romeu:

Thank you, Michael. I’m also excited to talk about those issues with you. I

Michael Fox:

Say the same question to everybody. For you, what does free speech mean?

Artur Romeu:

It seems like a simple question, especially for an NGO working with press freedom for 40 years at the institution that I work for, the NGO, that I work for Reporters Without Borders, we have been working defending press freedom, not exactly free speech, but they kind of free speech and press freedom drink on the same fountain or same roots of freedom of expression more broadly. So free speech is the ability to essentially being able to impart ideas, opinions, views on the world around us without being harassed, persecuted, prosecuted, attacked by governments or other groups, can be religious groups, but also economic interests. So the ability to be able to, as an individual or a collective, to express yourself and your ideas and contribute to the public debate without fear for reprisal essentially.

Michael Fox:

And Artur, what is your analysis of the state of free speech today in the world in Brazil and the United States and elsewhere? Where are we?

Artur Romeu:

I think that there is a lot of confusion. Maybe I never saw as much confusion around those issues as we are seeing today. Basically, one of the things that scares me is the fact that free speech is being weaponized against press freedom, for example. Another issue is that we are focusing too much on the individualistic aspect of free speech, and we have to have this understanding that at least coming from a freedom of expression perspective, there are an individual dimension, but also a social and collective dimension of freedom of expression. It’s not just our ability to being able to express ourselves and to impart information and ideas, but also to receive those information and ideas from others. So the way we are talking about, or at least the way that some political groups and specifically the far right nowadays everywhere in the world, not specifically in the US, has been instrumentalizing the idea of free speech for their own political purpose and abandoning a key aspect, a key dimension of freedom of expression, which is this more social and collected dimension to receive plural, reliable, diverse and free information from others.

And a third issue, and I think that’s behind most of this confusion as well, is the role that big tech social media platforms are having on this discussion because we have the idea that regulating this economic activity sector would be the same as censorship, but actually better regulation, good regulation, democratic supervision, improve the condition for free speech and press freedom and the integrity of information in general. So this opposition between the ability to be able to impart your ideas and the need that governments have to find a way to regulate the digital sphere arena online is they are not opposed to each other, but it’s a complex discussion because emerging technology always poses new problems. And even if we are not saying that social media platforms are necessarily new to our political landscape, AI is becoming something more popularized and we don’t know the impact that AI will have in this cacophony, this, I don’t know, some people are calling it epidemics or this crisis of reliable information.

And the key problem here is all those things together are fragmenting public conversation, public debate, and public debate is at the core of our democracies. So there is a clear link between this fragmentation of public debate due to all this and the erosion of democracies everywhere.

Michael Fox:

Arturo, you’ve just mentioned everything you said, I was like, we need to talk more about that because this is at the root of all this is why it’s so important. Before we dive into more specifics of all those things that you just mentioned, I have this idea, this hypothesis, are we in a moment where the far right folks like Trump and Bolsonaro are trying to redefine free speech in their favor instead of what you mentioned, “Oh, we need actually some regulation so that we can have a field where we’re actually getting not just random information and fake lies and everything else for everybody else, but we’re actually getting information that is what we should be receiving.” Are we in a moment right now where certain groups are trying to redefine what free speech means so that they can use it to push their agenda?

Artur Romeu:

Of course, it’s very clear. It’s been happening for a while and it’s crazy how effective it is because I think people are very concerned with society in general every day on our daily lives, every citizen is concerned with their ability to basic freedom. And I think that for a very long time, at least in other democracies, this is something that was kind of taken for granted. And even if there were some complex discussions from time to time, there was at least this frame, this common ground, this common denominator where there were international standards in terms of human rights related to free speech, very clearly defined. But sometimes there is this complex issues where you have limits to free speech, right? It’s not an absolute right as a series of human rights. They are not absolute in themselves. There is a balance between rights. And for a long time, I think it generated some stress and tension, but it was kind of relevant discussions, philosophical discussions.

People may disagree, but still we had a common ground. And what we’ve been seeing lately for the past, I don’t know, 10 years at least, is that the way those limits are defined and their political appropriation is stressing this debate. And we are seeing a relevant debate for democracies and to ensure rights and public participation in general being distorted, inverted in a sense that a specific political group is using this to play the victims and saying that they are being oppressed by those ideas. And they made a political flag out of this, and it’s being very effective in terms of how this idea has permeated society and gaining capularity. And I think our field of organizations that are defending freedom of expression is having a lot of difficulty to fight back or reframe the debate. So we are talking about those issues from a rights-based approach and not from a political biased approach.

Just to give an example, specific example, in Brazil, there was a very important milestone march protest during the Independence Day of 2021 with Bolsonaro, thousands of people in the streets supporting Bolsonaro, supporters of Bolsonaro going to flooding the streets in every major capital. And researchers were the streets trying to survey why people were, in their views, going to protest. And one question was about what was their main motivation? And the first motivation was freedom of expression. So in theory, something good. But when they asked them, “And what are you fighting against?” And the first was the Supreme Court in Brazil, which is, I won’t go into the political context in Brazil, but a key issue here in terms of how the constitutional court and Supreme Court has been limiting transgressions and abuses of the executive branch. And the second was the press. So they were fighting against the press.

So they were defending press freedom by attacking the press. And so I think it’s a kind of a paradox where you see a very individualistic perspective. People want to be able to say whatever they want and less and less are accepting that the fact that we are living in a society, there are symmetries of powers, this speech has to be balanced with other rights. So this imbalance and the way it has been appropriated by and kind of really weaponized by the far right is having a major effect in creating this imbalance and making people forget why it’s important to balance a free speech, which is kind of incoherent, at least when you see what happened with Charlie Kirk and people were expressing their views on the fact that criticizing him some very harsh level and the same group that is defending that people should be able to speak wherever they want are doing their own witch hunt.

So you see how politically biased and how this weaponization appropriation of the idea of free speech or freedom of expression is a power struggle more than a philosophical and conceptual one.

Michael Fox:

Do you think that part of how we got to this point goes back to what you were mentioning before, the splintering of society. Now with social media, I get all of my news from here, you get all of your news from there, and so we’re allowed to attack the other because they’re the other rather than having this open debate. Is that part of what led us to this moment?

Artur Romeu:

Yeah. Social media had a major impact in the information ecosystem as a whole for better or for worse, kind of changed everything, how people are receiving, how we are less dependent of a few broadcasters. And now we feel that we are in this environment where we can speak freely. But actually what happened was the privatization of a public space, and you have this impression that you are in Agora, this public arena where there is this idealized perspective of the free flow of information, the free market of ideas, the better ideas will win. And actually this is happening in a specific space controlled by specific groups, interest groups, a very profit oriented perspective. No transparency at all on how those information are being moderated and gaining more or less reach. So yeah, definitely. I think the major shifts that those technologies had on our information space are partly not necessarily too blamed by their own, because I think also when we talk about censorship, it’s easier for us to think of a more classic censorship approach in the same way that when we think about a dictatorship or a coup d’etat, we have references from our past and we kind of compare what is happening now and our collective memory of what those words mean.

And freedom of expression was kind of invented to protect citizen rights, individual citizen rights to oppose all powerful state in a very different political landscape from centuries ago. And now censorship is not only having a propaganda ministry and having censors within newsrooms and journalists being detained and killed because of what they’re saying. Of course, it still happens a lot in several parts of the words, but censorship or at least freedom of expression and free speech is also eroded when not only the state. Because the idea behind this is that the state should restrain itself from any interference in the free flow of information. So any kind of interference equals bad, equals censorship. People should be able to speak freely without government or state interference, but that’s not enough. You also need positive obligation. And positive obligation means that the governments and states have to develop, establish public policies that will help the information space, the information ecosystem to balance assymetries.

For example, pluralism, diversity, reliability of information are key aspects of this, of a healthier information space. So for this to work, you need governments to create those policies, to establish these laws, policies, how antitrust policies, for example, to fight excessive media ownership concentration in the hands of few groups to help balance market asymmetries and to ensure that the rights of their citizens is assured also in terms of access to pluralistic and reliable information. With the social media and big text, what they are saying is that any regulation is bad, they are self-regulating by themselves, and they are at the end protecting their commercial interests and creating those regulatory backups where they can operate without accountability or any kind of accountability. And if we don’t do anything about it, we will keep seeing a disintegration of this information space.

Michael Fox:

Following from that point, can you talk a little bit about what we saw over the last year? For instance, this whole battle between Brazil, Aleshande Morais, Twitter, X, Musk, because I feel like that’s a perfect example of exactly what you’re talking about. And also these two visions where Brazil has this vision of saying, no, we’re going to regulate more because you can’t have just a get out of jail free card completely. And whereas the United States is much more laissez-fraire backed by Donald Trump and particularly now, but this was even before he came to office.

Artur Romeu:

First of all, you have different traditions, different countries, you have different traditions in terms of how you interpret law. Brazil’s approach to freedom of expression is closer to the European approach where there is a focus on this balance between rights than the US one where there is a broader, I don’t know, more elasticity when you are talking about freedom of expression. You have to have in mind that our legal tradition is closer to the European one in terms of philosophical, conceptual jurisprudence expiration. Within this context, have a very specific example. When former President Bolsonaro started saying that people should not trust on electoral results because digital ballot box are not reliable when he did not and still has not any kind of proof of this. And much on the contrary, by the way, the electoral system in Brazil is widely recognized and as a very strong electoral system.

When he started doing that, for example, calling a meeting with ambassadors from a bunch of different countries to give a press conference saying that before the election, one year before the elections, that people should not trust electoral results if we kept the system as it was. It’s very, very, very serious because he has a lot of supporters and echo chambers on social media, and this kind of information erodes trusts of society, on their political institutions and their electoral institutions. So basically you cannot argue that that’s within his absolute right of print of expression because it has very serious impact for democracy and it’s not because you are the president that you can say whatever you want without any kind of accountability. But from there, what happened is that this idea was widely spread by his supporters and political groups, and the social media had a huge impact on this.

So this is clearly organized, this information, casebook. It’s pretty straightforward. And this information in the sense that it has a set of cogs in the machines, and it’s not just one person saying something false, it’s how this information is being spread and the structure of this information, the different levels, actors, stakeholders involved in this, financed with public money, public funds, and social media companies within their codes of conduct, you cannot just let this level of disinformation spread, including the reach they’re having without, again, any accountabilities, they could have acted to limit the reach, not necessarily censoring the presidential Twitter account or something, but at least putting contextual information, whatever those links, I don’t know. But there are several possible strategies for those social media to limit those kinds of harmful disinformation. But since we did not have a regulatory framework for this, the Supreme Court took the responsibility to act and to investigate this fake news industry or disinformation industry, how it was being structured and its impact.

And by doing that, said explicitly that, I don’t know, judges could not be threatened, basic stuff. And starting, for example, Alishanj Morais, which is at the epicenter of all this, even if he’s, and I think this is a parenthesis here, Morais was very important within all this, but he himself, I mean as an individual judge, but we have to take into account always that his decision were being systematically validated by the other judges of the Supreme Court. So even if he was the one being more visible on all this, and even though that there were tensions between and discussions between the judges, the vast majority of all those decisions went through the plenary, all the judges. So we talk a lot about him, but it’s more like the Supreme Court itself. I think he’s the image of these fights in a way, but he wasn’t alone doing that.

It’s not all powerful judge that is doing that as a rogue mode and acting on his own. We had strong institutions and it worked in the sense that we had the highest body in the judiciary power acting on this and investigating those issues, how they were spreading and taking harsh measures to prevent the impact of what everything was happening be even higher. For example, closing, requesting for the suppression of individual accounts on social media, and that’s something that led to the blockage of acts here in Brazil because what happened is that Elon Musk decided that he would not accept sovereign decision from the Brazilian highest court. He just moved his policy team away from Brazil. There was no legal representation as a way clearly to escape Brazilian jurisdiction in a clearly politically motivated move. And what the court said is that you cannot do that if you are operating You have to operate within our laws.

So if you don’t have a legal representation here in Brazil, and if you do not accept court orders related to several specific measures to mitigate the impact of this information of what was happening, you could not operate. And he was not blaffing. I think for, I don’t know, 50 days, it took a while. And there was a lot of support because you could imagine that this kind of decision, it’s very unpopular. You have tons, millions of social media users, including a lot of journalists using those tools for their daily work. But the way it was done showed that there was at least an understanding from Brazilian society that it was a fair fight, that it was something legitimate. And you can go even backwards with the pandemic. I won’t go all the way there, but the way that Bolsonaro governed during the pandemic was a big disasters for several reasons, but also in terms of access to reliable information on health issues and the way that false information was spreading for, again, politically biased moves.

And I think he had a bet in the sense that he thought that by going this way, he would show a different path than other global leaders, but it was a big disaster, no surprise. And there was a lot of discussion around this time about disinformation as well. So it’s a discussion that has been going on in Brazil on how public and democratic institutions have to respond to widespread disinformation strategy, especially those coming from the highest ranking officials. It’s gained a lot of track and legitimacy. And I would dare even to say that we have now more than other countries an awareness about those issues where, for example, there was a, I don’t know if it’s very recent survey, I have to double check the numbers, but what I know for sure is that most of Brazilian society, a survey showed is in favor of regulating social media.

So you have this support, even of course, if it’s not, if you have clearly political groups which are very strong and a lot of debate on how you do it. I think the major question is how you do it because it’s not that the fact that you have to act, I think that’s pretty clear here and from every perspective. What is more difficult is how you do it to avoid a very obvious trap where by doing this, you are creating a censorship mechanism and more control over those tools, those technologies. So this should be actually the discussion, how you do it and not if you have to do it or not, why it’s important. I think we are well over the time where those discussions should have passed and now, I don’t know. I really don’t know. I feel that we are living parallel universes sometimes.

When you see, for example, Trump’s speech on the UN and Lula’s speech in the UN, we feel that we are living in parallel universes. So different periods of time. I think it’s clear for, there is a consensus among digital rights activists, organizations, even a part of mainstream progressive groups, NGOs working with freedom of expression that you have to create mechanisms to improve democratic supervisions of how those emerging technologies, especially social media, are creating those rifts in our democratic systems.

Michael Fox:

Artu, thank you so much. I just have two more really quick questions. And this is so important, this last point that you touched on, because particularly in the United States, even amongst folks on the left, because historically, obviously censorship has been used against usually marginalized communities, minority communities. And so the discourse is always, well, once you start to say, well, you can’t say this and these people can’t say that, well then that’s going to be used against always, eventually it’s going to be used against and particularly against minority communities and marginalized communities. The people with the least amount of voice are the ones that are going to have their voice taken away completely. And yet this question no one meant, I feel like this huge elephant in the room is always this question of fake news. I can believe what I want to believe, you can believe what you want to believe.

More or less we can talk, but you still can’t be spreading just complete disinformation and lies and yet that’s what we’re seeing. And unless you actually take that on and say, okay, well this is here and how do we try and roll this back? But I feel like so many people or organizations or individuals, it’s just kind of give it, well, no, we don’t want to do that because then that’s stopping people. But no, there are lies. There are people trying to manipulate this. And so it’s a huge, it’s a complicated debate to ask that question of even how do we do this? But I think that is the question of saying, no, we absolutely have to. We can’t even be discussing if we are going to or not. We need to be talking about how we do it in the most democratic way possible or else we’re just going to see more and more of our rights willed away and more and more of our ability to communicate as a people whittled away.

So it’s crazy.

Artur Romeu:

Yeah. Talking about more on journalism and how specifically on journalism, the way things are told nowadays, I mean in terms of how all this has been appropriated by this fear of censorship or by saying that any kind of regulation is censorship is creating this environment of a crisis of trust and polluting democratic public debate, but also it’s creating something that science and journalism are put in the same level as any other opinion. So this is my opinion. So I can say it because it’s my opinion. And if you have 30 pages special dossier done by one of the journalists working that biggest newsroom in the country and you take this and you say, “Well, they can say wherever they want, that’s my opinion and I’m against this.” Same thing with, I don’t know, climate denialism just to keep one specific issue related to science. So when you put everything, conspiracy theories, opinions, ideas at the same level of other kinds of expressions, they should not be able to say to disagree, of course, or to question, this is healthy for democratic debate, but you cannot dismiss investigative journalistic piece on a very key issue and that had multiple sources done in journalistic processes.

You have a process to doing journalism. It’s not ChatGPT, it’s those investigations in the same way that science has its processes of verification, experimentation, peer review, et cetera. Journalism has its own. And if this is not recognized as a positive incentive, a society to receive this information and to criticize or to discuss what is being said in a different way than just someone saying what they think, journalism have foundations in terms of what is being said. And ideas can have more or less, opinions can have more or less depending from if it’s coming from someone that has studied all his life, all her life about the specific issue and then is expressing of course an idea, a different idea or a position on this topic. But if we put everything at the same level, we won’t have a real conversation. We will be just everyone saying what they want.

And for democracies to work, we have to find commonplaces and those commonplaces have to be based on some kind of logic or some kind of method or some kind of common ground. And so this is a problem right now with journalism because it’s being treated as just another opinion.

And on our newsfeed on social media, it’s being treated as just another opinion. Even sometimes even dismissed or the reach of news articles and links are having a worse reach than other kinds of videos posted by influencers. But there’s no due prominence of journalistic content or scientific content. So the conversation

Is becoming more and more based on the rule of the stronger. If you appear to be stronger than others, your position can overlap all the others because you say so. That’s extremely dangerous for the kind of democracy we have been building. So this is a specific issue with journalism. And the other issue is media sustainability and news deserts and how those new technologies have shifted completely the business model of the media industry in just a few years. And it’s creating more fusions, less pluralism. You have this illusion of pluralism because you feel that there’s more people speaking than before where you have the gatekeepers and all this, but it’s noise. So there’s a lot of noise happening and noise is not necessarily pluralism because pluralism needs some kind of framework to be effective for a democratic debate. If it’s just a bunch of people in a room saying what they think about the problem, not necessarily the best idea or the idea that has the stronger chance to work will win.

So also this idea of a free market of ideas, we don’t live in a political vacuum. So a free market of ideas is completely dependent on the correlations of force between the different stakeholders in the ecosystem, the political landscape. You have a lot of social and economic inequalities. So talking about a free market of ideas with no kinds of balancing this just don’t work because ideas will step on others anyway. When we talk about AI regulation or digital service acts to regulate the social media and the whole industry behind it, you need to have some kind of how you can create mechanisms to create financial compensation for media. And there are a lot of taxating profits from big tech revenue, advertisement revenue of big tax, for example, and creating a fund and this fund being. I don’t know. There are several ideas going on, bargaining codes.

But the point is if we do nothing, what we are seeing is that the economic pressure on journalism, on public interest journalism is becoming asphyxiating. And what we will see soon is an environment, a media landscape with a lot of concentration of power and local news markets disappearing and being replaced by, we don’t really know, but what we’ve been seeing is that when a local news media disappear, there’s no empty space. This space is immediately occupied by propaganda, by this information, by other interests. So preserving journalism, especially local journalism, is a democratic imperative. And we have to understand how we can do this when discussing democratic regulations for social media and AI.

Michael Fox:

Artur, so great. My last really quick question is you mentioned toward the beginning something I thought was really important, you want to forget it, free speech being weaponized against press freedoms. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Where are we seeing that? What does that look like?

Artur Romeu:

We are seeing that in a daily basis in the US for sure. And I have very specific example. When Trump wrote a letter to President Lula to justify the tariffs, the letter mentioned Bolsonaro, the prosecution of Bolsonaro in Brazil, mentioned big tax and the fact that the rights of American citizens was being violated and companies was being violated by the judiciary in Brazil. And just after the letter itself, there was some kind of, I don’t know the name of it, but an order where there were more explanations of the reasons. It was like a one and a half page document and the expression like freedom of speech or free speech or freedom of expression or censorship was repeated at least 10 times in a letter basically saying that the US was imposing tariffs on Brazil because Brazil was promoting censorship. So when I say that free speech is being weaponized against freedom of expression, in parts it connects to this example where you make yourself look like as a free press paladin, but actually what your distorted vision of free speech is doing is fragmenting the idea, the different ideas behind what freedom of expression really is, and mostly the social and collective dimension of freedom of expression.

You are only saying that people should say whatever they want without any kind of interference. If that’s the case, you are basically ignoring completely the fact that people live in a society and part of the freedom of expression right is related to receive pluralistic, diverse, reliable information. When we see these kinds of marches that I’ve talked about in Brazil as well where you say you are there to defend freedom of expression, but actually your enemy is press freedom, you are again weaponizing this idea because what you are really interested in is being able to express your ideas without any kind of repercussions, any kind of accountability, because it’s a very empowering feeling. So I think what those leaders, Bolsonaro, Trump, Edogan, Obam, and others, Milei have been doing the media bashing and fueling general hostility towards journalism and not just journalists, but journalism, like the ideal of journalism, again, not just against the press, but the idea really of journalism is at the core of their political strategy.

It’s not isolated. It’s not something that’s part of their personality. It’s really something that has the ability to keep their electoral basis very mobilized. It’s a very effective way to polarize public debate. And those leaders, they are dependent on polarizations. They cannot leave, have a political career without these kinds of systematic polarization and attacking the press systematically. The press, the media institutions, journalism in general is very effective for your strategy and that’s why they keep doing. In Argentina, for example, recently Mile said, “The problem is we don’t hate journalists enough.” So these kind of ideas, Bukele in El Salvador, it’s really at the core of the political strategy. So again, instrumentalizing, weaponizing free speech to erode press freedom, to have more control over the public debate and less scrutiny in society. It’s much easier to kill the messenger than have to deal with whatever the report or the news article is discussing.

Michael Fox:

Artur, incredible. Thank you so, so much. I really appreciate your time. I know we went over a little bit, but I really appreciate it.

Artur Romeu:

Thank you, Michael.

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. I hope you enjoyed our conversation. As I mentioned before, this is the third bonus episode of this series. There are more on the way. Please watch out for those in your feed. This is the battle for free speech. This podcast is co-hosted by myself and Mark Steiner. This show is produced by The Real News. You can find out more about my work and this show on my Patreon. That’s www.patreon.com/mfox. As always, please make sure to sign up for the Real News Network’s newsletter so you never miss an episode. You can find that at therealnews.com. Thanks so much again for listening to this podcast. See you next time.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Michael Fox:

Fernando Cerimedo, a name that unless you follow Latin America closely, you likely have never heard. He’s been called MAGA’s man in Latin America, and he’s at the heart of a shocking scandal that includes election rigging, fake news, disinformation, and powerful political ties to far right presidents across Latin America, and even the White House under Donald Trump. It’s big news in Latin America, even though it’s been largely under the radar in the United States until now. The scandal has dire implications for the legitimacy of elections up and down the Americas, including elections where US President Donald Trump has been throwing his weight around over the last year. Elections where right-wingers have won close but shocking victories. Like Lawyer Abelardo de la Estrella’s right-wing defeat of the leftist candidate Ivan Cepeda in Columbia in June, he won by less than 1% of the vote.

Donald Trump:

He called me at 8:30 in the evening just to thank me very much. And I said, “You ran a great campaign?” He’s LT Gray, right?

Journalist:

And what do you anticipate for the relation with Colombia? Good,

Donald Trump:

Much better. It’ll be better. He’s going to be a great president.

Michael Fox:

And big elections are coming up in Brazil and elsewhere. We begin here. That’s him, Fernando Cerimedo, walking down a hallway lined with people ahead of Chile’s new far right president, Antonio Cast. Cerimedo puts a hand on his back and ushers him into a side room to meet with a group of men in suits. Cerimedo is a 45-year-old strategist and publicist from Argentina. He’s a co-founder of the right-wing Argentine outlet, La Dereche Diario. And in recent years, he’s become perhaps the most prominent political consultant for the far right in Latin America. But as we will see in this episode, he’s much more than a consultant. I think you could call him an election fixer and not in a democratic way.

Jake Johnston:

So you’ve had this sort of network of far right leaders who’ve shown a lot of affinity for one another, traveling to each other’s countries, supporting each other, this sort of broad network. And behind that, there’s been this sort of digital infrastructure that is built out to support this sort of new wave of far right leaders in Latin America.

Michael Fox:

I asked Jake Johnston from the Center for Economic and Policy Research to set the scene here.

Jake Johnston:

I mean, if you’ve spent any time on social media, you have seen the bots, you’ve potentially been attacked by the bots. You see this happening every day and you’ve seen it in all of these elections, many of which it should be noted were extraordinarily close elections. I mean, less than one percentage point separating the winner from the loser. And throughout this last year, year and a half, there has been one very prominent person sort of parading around the hemisphere and claiming credit for a lot of these electoral wins. And it’s just this guy, an Argentine political consultant that apparently used to drive a taxi in Argentina and has sort of risen to the top of the food chain in Latin American politics is Fernando Serimedo.

Michael Fox:

Here is the reason why we’re all talking about him right now.

Last month on August 18th, 2026, Cerimedo was arrested at Bolivia’s Viru Vero Airport after attempting to board a flight to Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was accused of ordering a hit on his pregnant girlfriend. Her name is Nadia Bayer. She’s a Bolivian lawyer and a political analyst. She’s a former supporter of leftist president Eva Morales, turned staunch critic. She was shot three times by two armed gunmen the day before outside of a hotel in the Bolivian lowland capital city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. That’s the heart of Bolivia’s agricultural heartland and one of the most conservative regions in the country. She survived. From her hospital room, she asked to speak to press.

This is the video. You can find it online. She’s laying in a hospital bed, the back slightly raised, so she’s kind of sitting up. She wears a white and gray striped hospital gown. She has several bandages and she’s attached to some machines. She sounds exhausted. “I’ve requested the presence of DTV to make a live statement because they tried to silence me,” she says. “And I’m absolutely sure that if I don’t speak out to the Bolivian people, they’re going to finish what they tried to do today. They’re going to end my life.” She speaks for 15 minutes about her relationship with Fernando Cerimedo, about his physical abuse, his cheating on her and others, and then she reveals dirt on Cerimedo and his underhanded political dealings across the region, including in high, high places.

She discusses Cerimedo’s ties to Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Pascali, referring to Parscale as a member of the CIA. She describes her personal knowledge of corruption committed by Cerimedo and Bolivia’s new right-wing president, Rodrigo Pas and his family. Pas is the eldest son of the former Bolivian president, Jaime Pasamora. He was born in Spain, went to college in the United States, and Fernando Cerimedo helped to lift him into the presidency last year. “The government is the main one interested in silencing me,” she says. Rodrigo Pas, his wife, his family, they make the biggest deals with the brokers, with all of the insurance companies of all the state companies. They are the ones who negotiate the broker’s commission. “Do you have proof of all that?” Asked the man interviewing her behind the camera. “I have proof of many extremes,” she says. She also details Cerimedo’s power in Bolivia and abroad.

“Rodrigo Pas does not govern here,” she says. Fernando Cerimedo governs and they will absolutely cover it. He manages a group of the police that supposedly operates around the hotel where he made me go. That was the hotel where she was shot. All of this is just the tip of the iceberg about Cerimedo, the disinformation campaign he concocted, and the right-wing election wins he had a large hand in securing across the region.

Jake Johnston:

This is a door that is opening to a world that has largely been closed. I think that’s the interesting part about this. It’s what does this tell us about the broader infrastructure that exists in the region and likely elsewhere across the globe that is using digital sort of shock troops, bots, disinformation, media polarization to try and skew electoral outcomes, even at the margins where it might have a tremendously large impact, even if the operation itself seems sort of small.

Michael Fox:

All of that in a minute. This is Under the Shadow, an investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad in the past and the very present. This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA. I’m your host, Michael Fox, longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist, the producer and host of the podcast, Brazil on Fire: Stories of Resistance, and my new series, The Battle for Free Speech. I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America. I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad, and most often sadly, it is not for the better. Invasions, coups, sanctions, support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years. It still does. This is season two of Under the Shadow: Trump’s attack, episode 14, Fernando Cerimedo.

It’s February 10th this year. A passionate man is speaking in Spanish on a stage in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. This is Trump’s Hispanic prosperity gala. The back wall of the stage is plastered with a logo of a bull’s head and the words Latino Wall Street, Spanish language financial website. The name of the man on stage is Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, and brother of the current far right presidential candidate, Flavio Bolsonaro. Eduardo resigned as a member of Congress in 2025 and moved to the United States after he came under investigation for trying to pressure the Supreme Court in defense of his father, who is now on house arrest for couplotting. The Bolsonaro family are close allies of President Trump, and Eduardo Bolsonaro has close ties with Trump’s former campaign manager, Steve Bannon. On stage, Eduardo Bolsonaro is praising Fernando Cerimedo. They’ve reportedly known each other for years, since 2010 when they met in the United States.

Eduardo invites Cerimedo to the podium. So I have the great pleasure, a great honor, he says, to call here on the stage Fernando Cerimedo, a brave Argentine who had the courage to denounce the bad things that happen in the world.

Eduardo Bolsonaro presents Fernando Cerimedo with the award for Best Hispanic Political Consultant of the Year. Cerimedo is wearing a black suit, white shirt, black tie. He has a bald head. Fernando and Eduardo embrace, and then they pose for the cameras with a tiny statue. Then Cerimedo walks to the podium. 2025 was a very good year for us. Together with our team, we won two elections, he says, Bolivia and Honduras. Serimedo also gives a shout out to the Bolivian First Lady and her daughter who he says are in the audience. Serimedo then turns and thanks his connection with the Trump administration.

Fernando Cerimedo:

I want to say something in English. Thank you to Brad Parscale for believing me all the time and give me your technology and Tim Dunn for do the fighting in Latin America against socialism. Thank you, Brad.

Michael Fox:

Tim Dunn is a Trump allied businessman from Texas. He’s in oil and gas, and he’s a big financial supporter of conservative causes. As for Brad Parscale, if you remember, Serimedo’s girlfriend mentioned him in her hospital interview. She said he was tied to US intelligence. He is a digital consultant with deep ties to the White House and Mar-a-Lago. He ran digital media for both Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns. Since 2025, he’s been the chief strategy officer at the right-wing Christian Conservative Media Corporation, Salem Media Group. In May, The Intercept reported that he had been hired by the Israeli government to push pro-Israeli views over conservative media. Serimedo closes his acceptance speech.

“The message I want to give you is that it’s not about winning elections,” he told the audience. “That can even seem easy. If we don’t help our candidates govern so that the left never returns to those governments, our work will never be finished. So let’s keep fighting the cultural battle. That’s not just winning elections and taking positions. It’s battling every day to be able to regain freedom in Latin America. Thank you all very much and goodnight, “he said. Fernando Cerimedo. This guy is no ordinary political consultant. The things he has done that helped him win that award presented by Trump allies and Mar-a-Lago have included using underhanded, dirty, and other illegal means to help his candidates win elections, candidates who are all right-wing or far-right Trump allies. And look, he allegedly even tried to kill his own girlfriend to silence her. Cerimedo is just one man, but he’s part of a much broader network.

And for them, pushing their agenda is not politics as usual within democratic systems. As Cerimedo mentioned at that award ceremony, this is a culture war and they are fighting to win by any means necessary. It all calls into question many of these victories that the right has been winning across Latin America in recent years. Jake Johnston.

Jake Johnston:

But of course he’s not operating alone and his business partner in his company, Neumann Advisors, which was actually first registered in Florida, is Brad Parscale, who is Trump’s former campaign manager. And the way that it has been described, and Saramedo has given some interviews on this in the past, is that Parscale provides a sort of digital infrastructure that was implemented in the United States during Trump’s election and is sort of exporting that to the region. And the connection to all of these far right Latin American leaders in these networks between Parscale and them is Fernando Ceramedo.

Michael Fox:

Jake says that a key mouthpiece of this right-wing network has been La Derecho Diario, a right-wing news and opinion site founded by Serimedo and two of his colleagues around the year 2020. La Derecho Diario is now partially owned by Javier Negre, a Spanish right-wing media entrepreneur and disinformation broker.

Jake Johnston:

Now, in parallel to this, you’ve had this sort of digital media outlet, Ladarecho Diario, that has sort of risen to prominence as big promoters of the new far right in Latin America, sort of classic disinformation campaigns and things like this, but always sort of in support of these candidates and have been extremely active in a number of these electoral races and have sort of begun to expand both in Mexico and certainly are looking at Brazil, and Sarameto was also a partial owner of that operation. And of course, this is nothing new, right? I mean, this network of right-wing political operatives has been extremely active in Spain and Europe, but also in Latin America for any number of years, going back decades and following a lot of these folks’ work. What’s changed is that they now have an administration in Washington that is directly supporting the same agenda.

Donald Trump:

Found out in Chile, the person I endorsed who was not leading ended up winning quite easily, so I look forward to paying my respects to him. I hear he’s a very good person.

Jake Johnston:

And so that has sort of elevated it to a different level and certainly sort of just put a lot of money in the pockets of a lot of people who have an interest in promoting this new far right in Latin America.

Michael Fox:

The other thing is that we don’t actually know the true extent of everything. We have clues. Many are really concerning, but not all the dots connect. Just remember that as we continue. It’s been reported that Serimedo has had a role in the political victories of the right and far right in at least seven countries over the last four years, including Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Polivia, and Peru. That is not a bad record. The first place I want to visit though, came before all of those in Brazil in late 2022. It’s election night, October 30th, 2022. Former Brazilian President Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva wins the vote by a slim margin, defeating Trump ally and incumbent far-right President Jair Bolsonaro in a huge victory for the left. But the next morning. Bolsonaro supporters hit the streets in protest, claiming the election was stolen. A claim Bolsonaro himself had spread ahead of the vote.

They shut down highways. They set up vigils in front of military barracks demanding the country’s armed forces rise up to overturn the results.

Amid this chaos, Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who we heard from earlier, is interviewed by a right-wing Argentine media outlet where he spreads lies about Brazil’s electoral system. The interview was aired just three days before the vote. According to news reports at the time, the video had a live audience of more than 400,000 viewers. I remember this. It was a big deal because what Eduardo Bolsonaro did was actually illegal in Brazil. You can’t disparage the country’s electoral system, particularly just days before the vote. That’s why Eduardo Bolsonaro did the live in Argentina. Anyway, what most of us only realized recently is that the guy who interviewed Eduardo Bolsonaro during that live was Fernando Cerimero, and that outlet was Cerimedo’s La Derechediario. You can think of it as something akin to the bright part of Argentina. That live, I’ve been looking for it to play a clip here, but it was taken down shortly afterwards in Brazil.

It still had a wide reach though. It was shared across WhatsApp groups and far right media spheres. It reportedly played a significant role in undermining the election result and intensifying the widespread protests by Bolsonaro supporters in the wake of the 2022 elections.

All of this stoking of Bolsonaro’s base would of course culminate in the January 8th, 2023 invasion of Brazil’s capital by Bolsonaro supporters. They wreaked havoc, causing millions of dollars of property damage in Congress and the Supreme Court in a copycat performance of the January 6th US Capitol invasion in 2021. There was pushback against Laderecha Diario in Brazil.

Maria Martha Bruno:

And because of that live broadcasting and because of Cerimero’s intervention after Lula has won, actually the Brazilian electoral justice decided to suspend Laderecha Diario’s account in social media because it identified that it was a source of falsehoods and rumors that had been extensively dismissed by the Brazilian authorities.

Michael Fox:

Maria Marta Bruno is a journalist at Ajin Shepublica, the largest nonprofit investigative newsroom in Brazil. That outlet did an in-depth investigation in 2023 into the so-called digital militias and the use of internet, bots, disinformation, fake news, and media manipulation to sway opinions and elections across Latin America.

Maria Martha Bruno:

And the investigation is named the digital mercenaries. And Fernando Serimero is a core figure in this ecosystem because he orbited between Brazil, Argentina, and more recently we knew that he was also participating in the electoral process in Honduras in 2025.

Michael Fox:

Maria Marta actually spoke with Serimero for their report.

Maria Martha Bruno:

But Fernando Serimedo, when he talked to and to our partners at the Central Latin American he actually admitted in some of the interviews that he twisted and that he put many informations out of context just to make the case that he want to make the case. He admitted that that was sort of his strategy.

Michael Fox:

It’s a strategy that has been deployed across the region. Last month, Brazil’s Folio de Sao Paulo newspaper interviewed Nalia Bayer about Fernando Serimedo’s work fixing elections around Latin America. Remember, Bayer is Serimero’s ex-girlfriend who he allegedly tried to kill. This video was published eight days after the attempt on her life. She’s laying in bed and looking up at a cell phone through which she’s doing the interview. She spoke about the cases that she remembers where Serimedo used bots to sway public opinion online ahead of the election.

“I knew that in Honduras,” she says. “I knew that in Chile, in the constitutional assembly vote. I knew that in Brazil, in Bolivia, obviously in Argentina, in Columbia, they were going to do it, but I think they didn’t get to do it. I don’t know why. I think maybe it was because of economic agreements that weren’t closed or unless they had told me later that they had done it. But there were some negotiations with Spain as well, she says. I don’t know if you caught that, but she just said that he was even supporting Jair Bolsonaro’s digital campaign in Brazil in 2022. Maria Marta Bruno.

Maria Martha Bruno:

Fernando Serimedo, it’s a very key example of a core figure that get all those notes together, all those wires together across Latin America and help to boost this very successful digital communication ecosystem that has been helping the right and the far right in the past eight or so years.

Michael Fox:

The Brazilian outlet released the Fordham has reported that during an investigation into Serimedo’s properties, investigators discovered a mini bot farm worth more than $40,000 with a digital infrastructure to coordinate campaigns over social media. Jake Johnston.

Jake Johnston:

There’ve been a lot of allegations around. I mean, he’s even bragged around his control of hundreds of thousands of bots and things like this. And I think we do have to take a second to think like, okay, putting aside any legality or anything like this, or whether this is electoral interference or electoral fraud or anything, just put it aside. I mean, could this have had an effect on these elections? And I think you start to look at that, you say, “Well, these elections where there’s less than 1% difference between a winner and a loser, yeah, these sorts of interventions may have had a really profound effect in shaping this narrative that we have today of this rightward shift in Latin America, and how much of that narrative is really the product of a sort of digital army of folks all associated in one way or another with Serameto and with connections right back to the Trump.

Donald Trump:

When people like me, I like them. It’s very simple. It’s a very simple formula, and I like him. He said really nice things about me and the job we’ve done in the United States, and very, very powerful.

Michael Fox:

Here’s the thing, and Jake mentioned this earlier, this Cerimeto scandal has opened a window into the underhanded or dirty maneuvers one man has taken, in part on behalf of the Trump administration, to win elections for the far right in Brazil, but we don’t really know the full extent of what was done behind the scenes to sway the vote.

Jake Johnston:

It is important to note, we really don’t know much of what these people were doing, right? I mean, that is, I think, hopefully what we can learn through these investigations that are happening in Bolivia, through what I think should be far greater attention from the US media about the role of Brad Parscale and Trump connected officials with him and what they’re actually doing. What is the gangway? How have they helped these campaigns or interacted with these campaigns?

Michael Fox:

We do have a glimpse into actions that Serimeto took to allegedly help the right return to power in Honduras last year, and it is extremely concerning. Honduras. It’s just after the country’s election on November 30th, 2025. The race was so close the winner won’t be announced for weeks.

The conservative candidate Nazri Asfurda has faced off against leftist Rixi Muncada and Centris Salvador Nasraya. The leftist Libre Party has run the country for the previous four years. Before then, the US back right-wing national party held onto the presidency through violence, repression, and fraudulent elections. They took power after the 2009 coup. The president who ruled the country for much of that time with an iron fist was named Juan Orlando Hernandez. At that point last year, he was in a West Virginia prison serving a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking. We looked at a bunch of this in episode 12 about Honduras Gate. If you miss that, you can go back and listen. But here’s the thing. There’s a new audio clip about Honduras that was only released last month. It’s a one-minute, 30-second voice message from political consultant Fernando Serimedo to a member of the electoral campaign of Nasri Asfura.

He’s the right-wing candidate, Trump ally, and the man who would be declared president in late December after a protracted recount. I just have to tell you, this voice message gives me the chills. In it, Serimedo says not to worry that they’ve rigged the election, stuffed ballot boxes where necessary, and removed votes elsewhere, all with the support of members of the armed forces who are stationed at polling stations. Serimedo is confident about their victory.

“Yes, from all of this, the only thing we can learn is that the area where the votes are coming in right now is where Tito wins, “says Serimedo. Tito is the nickname of Nasri Asfura, the national party candidate who is now president. “In the second place, the locations where more national party votes are going to come in, if there were votes from somebody else, those were taken out. Those are being fixed,” he says. “We already have the numbers. According to what I’m seeing, we already have people aligned in the armed forces. It seems that everything is going well, “he says. “If we have the votes and we know where we lost the election, that’s where we place more votes, and they talk to everyone at each polling station. “That’s all that matters. We don’t have to worry,” he says.

This audio was released publicly last month by Marlon Ochoa. He’s a former member of the country’s electoral court who had to flee Honduras over death threats against him. He said he handed over the audio evidence in December 2025 before the election results were finalized, but investigations didn’t move forward and election authorities rubber stamped Asfura’s win. Ochoa did not reveal how he obtained the damning audio. I’m left with so many questions. Did Seri Medo really rig the elections for Nasre Asfura? If so, did the United States know? Did Israel? Both of them are staunch allies of former right-wing president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was sentenced to decades in a US prison for drug trafficking and who Trump pardoned just after last year’s vote. Most importantly, if Seri Maedo rigged the elections in Honduras, did he also do it elsewhere? In Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru?

Even if he didn’t stuff ballots everywhere, it’s clear he was willing to use whatever means necessary to get his candidate elected, including spreading disinformation or fake news during the campaigns and even about the country’s electoral system. And this is “MAGA’s man in Latin America. Democracy itself is at risk.” Serimado is now in custody. He’s being investigated for attempted femicide. Many of his former staunch allies are trying to distance themselves. Jake Johnston.

Jake Johnston:

And so this has been a huge scandal and the investigation in Bolivia has expanded to move from femicide to illicit enrichment to the protection of drug traffickers. And so there’s at least three now investigations taking place in Bolivia. And one of the most shocking things is just the way in which all of the politicians who just a few months ago were working quite closely with Sarameta. Now totally wash their hands. I don’t know who this guy is. Rodrigo Paz, the new president in Bolivia says, “Oh, he was involved a little bit in the campaign, but I don’t know who he is.” There are photos of him meeting with Marco Rubio and the Bolivian president from just a couple months ago. So this is a total sort of hand wash. You saw the same thing in Argentina where Sarameto was very involved in the campaign of Javier Millet.

Now Miley said, “Oh no, he has nothing to do with us. Of course, it just came out that he visited the Casa Rosada 14 times last year.” So you see this all over the hemisphere. He was obviously very involved in Honduras and very publicly involved in Honduras and that electoral process. Again, another razor thin electoral margin there. I mean, obviously this fits into a much broader conversation around social media disinformation and what its effect is on democracy, on political processes more broadly. It’s certainly a conversation that has been quite prevalent in the United States for a long time now that is extremely relevant for the upcoming election in Brazil.

Michael Fox:

Jake says it’s not just about what Serimedo has or hasn’t done in these other elections. It’s about what underhanded tactics may still be used in future elections with or without Serimedo, and not just in Latin America, but in Spain and elsewhere where right-wing parties are gaining ground.

Jake Johnston:

There is a lot of people who are looking to make money off the political changes that are happening in Latin America, and they can sell their access to the Trump administration, their access to this legislator, this lobbyist, this business, and they play up those connections to get a contract, to get a consulting gig. And this is sort of the brave new world of the Don Roe doctrine in Latin America where it’s not just Sara Mato, it’s not just Brad Parscali and Javier Negre and Londoreche Diario. I mean, this is happening all over the place. You can see these lobbying filings that are coming in every day with different people hiring Trump connected folks. And so they’re all sort of competing for this space and to influence pedal and make money doing so in the region and take advantage of the sort of political interventionism and rightborn shift that we’re seeing.

And so this is just one piece of it.

Michael Fox:

In other words, this doesn’t begin or end with Serimado, but as Jake Johnston said in the beginning, this is a door that is opening to a world that has largely been closed. And there is so much more we need to understand and consider about how US President Donald Trump is using his power to influence elections around the region. This is where we’re headed next time. In the lead up to high stakes elections in Brazil in October where Trump is vying to help the son of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro win the election. Trump has levied tariffs and revoked the visa of the Brazilian ambassador to the United States and state department officials are allegedly courting journalists in order to spread the US narrative around the country’s elections. That is next time on Under the Shadow.

Folks, first off, I have big news. I’ve just launched a new website called Pan-American Dispatch. It’s a project of The Real News. We are translating daily articles from Portuguese and Spanish into English for a US audience. Over the next two months, we’re exclusively focused on the Brazilian election and Trump’s attempts to influence it. Please check it out. You can find us at panamericandispatch.org. As always, you can find me at patreon.com/mfox. There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. You can find a ton of content there exclusively for my supporters. Many, many thanks to SIEPR’s Jake Johnston and Ajin Shepublica’s Maria Marta Bruno. It was a pleasure to speak with you. I’ll add links to some of the reporting from their outlets in the show notes.

As always, if you’re looking for more information, news and reporting on Trump’s onslaught, both on communities within the United States and abroad, please check out The Real News and NACLA. Both of them are publishing daily indispensable reporting. The theme music is by my band, Monte Perdido. You can find us on Spotify or wherever you stream music. This closing music playing right now is off our 2024 album, Ofrenda. I hope you check it out. Under the Shadow is a co-production of The Real News and NACLA, it’s produced in partnership with Global Exchange. This episode was written, researched, reported, and produced by me, Michael Fox. The script was edited by Heather Geis. Thanks for listening. See you next time.