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.

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

Speaker 1:

A few weeks ago, the US State Department released this video over X.

Speaker 2:

It’s 1823. The map of the Americas is being redrawn. Spain has spent centuries amassing a new world empire stretching from Patagonia to California. Now their grip was slipping fast.

Speaker 1:

The video is narrated by Kevin Marino Cabrera, the US ambassador to Panama, and it’s highly polished with images, map graphics, animations, and dramatic music.

Speaker 2:

Monroe then declared a decree to Congress, among the boldest diplomatic statements in American history.

Speaker 3:

The American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintained, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.

Speaker 1:

The text of the post reads, “The Monroe Doctrine has shaped US foreign policy for over two centuries. American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

Speaker 2:

But these were defensive applications, keeping European powers out, not asserting American control over the hemisphere’s affairs. That changed in 1895 when Secretary of State Richard Olney invoked the doctrine, declaring that the United States was practically sovereign over the Western hemisphere and demanded for its submit to American arbitration. He had redefined the doctrine. It was no longer just a warning. It was now a claim to regional primacy.

Speaker 1:

The video is remarkable because it doesn’t mince words or attempt to paint a rosy picture of the United States. In five minutes and 31 seconds, it just lays out the justification for the US imperialism that has cast a shadow over the region for the last two centuries up until today.

Speaker 2:

Three years later, war with Spain erupted and when the smoke cleared, it transformed the hemisphere. The United States expelled Spain from Cuba, seized Puerto Rico, and stepped into the world stage as a genuine imperial power with dominance over the Caribbean. Just four years later, that dominance was tested again. German and British warships sailed into Venezuelan waters and blockaded its ports over unpaid debts. Roosevelt intervened and declared if a Latin American nation fell into chaos or instability, the US would step it and manage it. The doctrine has started as a shield. Roosevelt had just turned it into a mandate.

Speaker 1:

This was all a good thing, the video seems to say. A natural course of history that the US should be proud of and the rest of the region should just accept. And all this backstory is a lengthy setup for the video to then make the case that Trump’s actions in Latin America are nothing more than a continuation of the same model of imperialist intervention that the US has carried out since its inception, or at least since the beginning of the 20th century when Roosevelt declared his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

Speaker 2:

Fast-forward to the modern era where the doctrine has found its latest champion in President Trump. Through the execution of Operation Absolute Resolve, the United States seized Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, transporting him to American soil to answer for charges of narcoterrorism. This calculated maneuver delivered a resident signal across the hemisphere, punctuated by President Trump’s own declaration.

Speaker 4:

Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.

Speaker 1:

It’s a fascinating piece of propaganda that tries to place Trump’s actions as the logical next step in the long trajectory of US imperialism in the region.

Speaker 2:

Over two centuries, Monroe’s declaration had shaped US foreign policy across administrations and throughout fundamentally different geopolitical eras. Well, began as a warning to European powers evolved into a framework for regional dominance, one that remains the cornerstone of American strategy in the hemisphere today.

Speaker 5:

What is extraordinary about that video is that it says what has never really been said about the Monroe Doctrine by US officials, which is that the Monroe doctrine has served as a pretext for US intervention in the region and is essentially there to ensure that the US has a great deal of political influence and economic influence over the entire Latin America and Caribbean.

Speaker 1:

That is Alexander Main. I reached out to him to get his take on this video. He’s an old friend and the director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington DC.

Speaker 2:

When Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba in 1962, Kennedy didn’t need to invent a new framework. He simply invoked the doctrine. The weapons had to go.

Speaker 5:

This video is saying that there is such a thing as the US Empire, something that most US officials have never wanted to publicly recognize and saying that that is a good thing and that more needs to be done to ensure that the US can be an effective empire over the entire Western hemisphere.

Speaker 1:

Key to this video, Alex says, is the idea that brute military force must be deployed to achieve this imperialistic doctrine. And right now that is being done under the pretext of a new sort of war on terror. There’s no clear definition of exactly who or what narco-terrorist is, but that might be part of the point. Alex says that much like the Cold War’s fight against communism, the vague image of the narco-terrorist boogeyman allows US authorities and their allies to go after left-leaning opponents with force.

Speaker 5:

We’re seeing something similar now, and I think this is really what the US is going to be relying on under the Trump administration. They’re going to be relying more and more on military action and the threat of military action in order to advance this vision of complete political domination over the region.

Speaker 1:

In Brazil, high stakes elections are coming up in October. Advisors for leftist president Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva saw the timing and content of this video as a direct threat against the president’s reelection campaign, a sign that the Trump administration has its sights on Latin America’s largest country. According to Brazilian columnist Valdo Cruz, Lulu’s advisors compared Trump’s foreign policy team led by Cuban American Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Madagascar Penguins piloting Air Force One. It’s a reference to the Madagascar cartoon.

Speaker 6:

Attention, this is your captain speaking. I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is we’ll be landing immediately. Bad news is we’re crash landing.

Speaker 1:

That is where we are at, a new definitive Monroe doctrine for the Western hemisphere, and it’s being fueled by brute US military force in the region as we have already seen unfold in unprecedented terms over the last year. And the Trump administration isn’t just using those actions and threats abroad. They’re now going after progressive individuals and groups in the United States accusing them of being pawns of foreign nations. People have even been subpoenaed.

Speaker 7:

There’s nothing organic about it. It is funded, it is organized, and Cuba is a part of that network and in some cases a critical part of that network.

Speaker 1:

It’s like something out of the McCarthy era or the Cold War. It’s a fabricated witch hunt. And as we will look at today, it’s being supported by artificial intelligence, but people across Latin America are also organizing against the threats. 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’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, 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 13, American Dominance.

Okay, let me just first say that I’m so excited to be diving back into this season of Under the Shadow. If you have been following this podcast, you’ll know that I was largely absent this summer. I was busy cranking out my podcast about Trump’s attack on free speech rights today in the United States. It’s called The Battle for Free Speech. It’s now out completely. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I’ll add a link in the show notes. In July, we shared an episode from that podcast on the Under the Shadow feed about the battle underway in Brazil right now ahead of the general election in October. I think it’s really good. Before that, my last Under the Shadow episode was about Honduras Gate back in May, so it’s been a while. Today, I want to catch up on several important developments related to US intervention and the pushback against it in the region, including the latest boat strikes, the State Department’s war on Cuba, and the recent Pan-American Congress in Uruguay.

These all fall under the rubric of where we started at the top with the video about the Dunro Doctrine and Trump’s promise that American dominance in the Western hemisphere will “never be questioned again.” In this episode, I’ll look at ways that this is unfolding, both abroad and inside the United States, and also how progressive leaders in the region are very much continuing to question American dominance and organizing against Trump’s rhetoric and threats. Okay, we begin in the abnormally warm waters of the Caribbean and Pacific oceans.

These waters have been central to Trump’s military attack on the region, and this week marks a sad anniversary.

Speaker 8:

When you come out and when you leave the room, you’ll see that we just over the last few minutes literally shot out a boat, a drug carrying boat, a lot of drugs in that boat, and you’ll be seeing that and you’ll be reading about that. It just happened moments ago.

Speaker 1:

On September 2nd, 2025, one year ago this week, Donald Trump announced the first airstrike on a boat in the Caribbean. Trump said the boat allegedly carried drugs off the coast of Venezuela. He later posted on True Social a video of the airstrike, black and white labeled unclassified. A missile hits the boat and it explodes. The White House said without providing evidence that it killed 11 alleged narco terrorists. If you remember, this is where I began this podcast series, because for me, it marked a clear break with the decades of US foreign policy in the region. The US attack on that boat in early September was the very first time the United States had launched a unilateral airstrike or carried out a deadly military operation on its own in Latin America in nearly four decades, not since the 1989 invasion of Panama. According to Trump’s national security strategy published in December 2025, his administration was planning to ramp up US intervention in the Americas with his new Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

He has made good on that promise. With the US invasion of Venezuela, the oil blockade of Cuba, the shield of the America’s initiative and the boat strikes, the administration labeled those strikes Operation Southern Spear. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth joined Fox News Live to gush about the boat strike.

Speaker 9:

So we’ve got assets in the air, assets in the water, assets on ships, because this is a deadly serious mission for us, and it won’t stop with just this strike. Anyone else trafficking in those waters who we know is a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate, and it’s important for the American people to protect our homeland and protect our hemisphere.

Speaker 1:

Hegseth was right about one thing. That strike was just the beginning. They’ve been ongoing since last year. There was a two-month lull, which miraculously coincided with the World Cup competition in the United States and Trump’s grand 4th of July 250th anniversary celebration. But in recent weeks, the US military has kickstarted the strikes again. This news report is from August 26th this year.

Speaker 10:

The human rights groups are condemning the latest round of US military attacks on a high speed boat in the Caribbean, which the Pentagon says killed four narco-terrorists. This is now the second strike this week as the White House targets vessels accused of transporting deadly drugs into the US for the past year.

Speaker 1:

But the whole justification for the first strike last September and everyone sense that they’re fighting drug trafficking is just false. This has never been about fighting drug trafficking. Most of the cocaine trafficked into the United States doesn’t come from Venezuela and it doesn’t travel across the Caribbean, but the Pacific. Fentanyl’s the same thing. It’s not made in nor trafficked from Venezuela despite Trump’s discourse.

Trump’s campaign has been about sending a message, even if it means carrying out extra judicial killings in international waters against innocent people, because it’s become clear that many of the boats they’ve hit haven’t been operated by narco terrorists, but fishermen. And contrary to Trump and Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s claims, other Trump administration officials admit that the strikes haven’t decreased the amount of drugs being run into the United States. In late July, the Washington Post reported that both Pentagon and DEA officials had said the boat strikes hadn’t impacted the supply of cocaine in the United States. Drug traffickers just developed new strategies. They were taking different routes, bigger boats, or relying more on planes from clandestine airstrips. One DEA official who asked to remain anonymous told the Post, “When you squeeze the balloon on one side, it always expands on the other side. They always find the weak spots and exploit them.” Nevertheless, the boat strikes have continued.

Welcome to the closing session, hosted by the Secretary of War and Chairman of the America’s Counter-Cartel Coalition, the Honorable Pete Hegseth. Pete Hegseth spoke about this during a Counter-Cartel Coalition conference in Panama City on August 12th.

Speaker 9:

We have knocked the narco terrorists and the maritime domain on their heels. We forced them to adjust their tactics, techniques, and procedures, their TTPs, and operate outside of their comfort zones. We are retaking the open seas and our maritime borders. This is a bad time to get in a drug boat in the Western Hemisphere.

Speaker 11:

In one year now, at least 68 publicly acknowledged strikes on alleged drug trafficking vessels right in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, extraditionally killing over 228 civilians.

Speaker 1:

Jake Johnston is the director of international research at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. He also runs SIEPR’s US Escalation in Latin America Tracker, which he has updated almost daily since last year. I just want to pause here for a moment to underscore that number. More than 228 civilians, and that is a number that’s likely to only continue to grow. Just to put that into context, before the September 11th attacks, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was the deadliest terror attack in the history of the United States.

Speaker 12:

If it seemed like war yesterday, the reinforcement showed up tonight. At the center of it all, of course, is the bombed out shell of the federal office building, and in its shadow, the exhausted, who for a day and a half now have sifted through its debris and counted its dead and seen up close why they call it terror.

Speaker 1:

168 people were killed in that bombing on the Alfred P. Murrow Federal Building. It shocked the nation. Yet the United States has unleashed a round of terror attacks over the last year in international waters in the Caribbean and Pacific, which have killed far more people than the second most deadly terror attack in the history of the US. In fact, the US drug boat terror campaign is deadlier than both the Oklahoma City bombing and the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting combined. Now, it might seem strange that I’m making this comparison. The US government has carried out the boat strikes, individual perpetrators carried out these other attacks, but I think it’s an important comparison to make. All are acts of terror, all are illegitimate uses of violence without any legal founding. The US boat strikes aren’t operations against enemy combatants in a time of war. The US government hasn’t carried out a trial against the victims or offered any proof that the people killed in these raids are actually drug traffickers.

Their actions are illegal under international law, and the result in all cases is the same, the extra judicial killing of innocent people, which undermines the basis of the rule of law in the United States, the United Nations, and most democratic countries around the world, that you are innocent until proven guilty. Jake Johnston.

Speaker 11:

What is the sort of takeaway after a year? I mean, this is an assault on the rule of law. This is assault on international law. And I think you can see over the course of the year how these strikes serve this broader purpose of normalizing, rationalizing and sort of gaining at least some public acceptance of just the sort of trampling of international law. And now we have transitioned, or at least the US is saying they’re transitioning from these boat strikes to land strikes. It’s there. We’ve already seen, in fact, some strikes on land in Ecuador, or hitting a dairy farm, reports of torture of the farm workers who were there. And so you can see how this can extend and expand. You can see how the erosion of international law comes right back here to home, and you have ICE agents killing US citizens in the streets with impunity, and these things are connected.

These developments are connected, and they certainly mutually reinforce each other through this administration’s policies.

Speaker 1:

Ecuador has been collaborating with the US military under the Counter Cartel Coalition, which I looked at in episode eight of this series, and not just on that dairy farm strike. The United States has also taken some concerning actions against boats off the Ecuadorian coast.

Speaker 11:

This started earlier this year, the bombing of at least three fishing vessels off the coast of Ecuador, which took place in a very different manner than these other boat strikes we were talking about where SOUTCOM was posting smut on the internet about them blowing up boats. These ones were totally unacknowledged, and the reports that we’ve had from investigative outlets that have looked into it, local press in Ecuador, human rights organizations, et cetera, one of the boats first off is still missing and all the crew members are still missing.

Speaker 1:

People from some of those boats were killed and others have been returned to the country, but that was only after being abducted on the high seas.

Speaker 11:

Onto a nondescript boat in the middle of the ocean with gringo looking guys with US flags on their uniforms and being taken to El Salvador of all places before facing torture and abuse and then eventually being released back to Ecuador where they face no charges, it should be noted. And you mentioned in each of these cases, the reporting indicates that Ecuador and Coast Guards actually stopped the vessels and cleared them prior to them being bombed, right? Obviously, there’s been reporting, the Washington Post reported a few weeks ago that this was part of a clandestine CIA operation. The New York Times has come out with reports suggesting that the potential involvement of private military contractors. So there’s tremendous questions that remain exactly about who is responsible, who is involved, why this was happening. But what seems quite clear is that US intelligence is operating out of El Salvador, a CIA base that was white active during the Dirty Wars in the ’80s.

Speaker 1:

Jack here is referring to what we learned from reporting in the Washington Post in mid-August, which broke the news that a covert CIA program based in El Salvador was likely behind the Ecuadorian boat attacks. According to the Post, a plane operating out of El Salvador’s small Ilopango International Airport was likely responsible for the attacks during the 1980s. This airport was also a launching pad for US operations in nearby Nicaragua.

Speaker 11:

This didn’t come out of nowhere, right? I mean, it is really based in the past, and a lot of the people who are involved in this are really rooted in those previous episodes of right-wing dictatorship and US interventionism in the region. And so in a lot of ways, it is a return to that earlier period.

Speaker 1:

There is another country in the region whose conflict with the United States hearkens back to US intervention of the past, Cuba. So back in episode seven, we looked in depth into the US actions against Cuba, and in particular, the devastating oil blockade which is strangling the country, and it’s still ongoing. The situation in the country has only deteriorated. It’s ironic because the United States brags about how they’re sending aid to the country, and yet the US is solely to blame for the crisis. The US government could fix the problem almost overnight by just lifting the embargo, both the oil blockade and the larger embargo that the US has had in place in some shape or form for more than 65 years. Belly of the Beast is a Cuban investigative journalism outlet based in Havana. I spoke with Belly of the Beast Liz Fernandez in my previous Cuba episode of this series.

A couple of weeks ago, they released this great video report titled Helping Cuba While Destroying Its Economy. The word helping is in quotes. Here’s a clip. It starts with Belly of the Beast journalist Johan Rodriguez standing on a Cuban street.

Speaker 13:

Good news for us here in Cuba. The United States is here to help.

Speaker 1:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio appears on screen. In Spanish, he says, “I want to tell you that we in the United States offer to help you not only alleviate the current crisis, but also to build a better future.”

Speaker 13:

A better future deliver in cardboard boxes.

Speaker 10:

This is the first of a hundred million dollar humanitarian aid package promised by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Speaker 13:

The US government is donating 700 boxes of food and hygiene products. Each one is supposed to last 10 days. That’s nice, although it might be even nicer if they had simply lifted the oil blockade.

Speaker 1:

The video cuts to numerous Cubans who are suffering. “They give us 20, 24 hours without electricity,” says one elderly resident. “It’s the whole day cooking with coals, “says a woman. “I haven’t had water for three and a half months,” says another woman.

Speaker 13:

The boxes of aid are welcome because people here are desperate. If someone breaks your legs and offers you an aspirin, you’ll take aspirin, but when you wear soft, your legs are still broken.

Speaker 1:

That is the state in Cuba right now, a country on life support. The United States could fix it, but it doesn’t want to. It wants the people to suffer an indirect way to try and force regime change, or at least that has been the stated policy since the beginning of the embargo in the 1960s. And the Trump administration is blatant about its motives. On July 20th, the US State Department released a 100-page report titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. It essentially accused Cuba of infiltrating the US left over the last half century and being behind a host of progressive organizing, everything from Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests to pro-Palestine encampments on university campuses and “the rise of Antifa.” It’s incredible because it makes the United States look like it’s in the crosshairs of this tiny Caribbean country, the US, a country that is nearly 90 times larger than Cuba and has a GDP that is more than 300 times the size of the islands.

The report makes no mention of the countless US attempts to overthrow or assassinate Fidel Castro, undo the Cuban Revolution, and above all, the decades long US blockade on the country. Instead, the document paints the United States as the victim of a Cuban plot to overthrow US capitalism and Western society.

The summary for the report reads, “Cuba’s assault on the United States was never at root a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory. It was a revolution against Western civilization itself, waged in part via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.” Let me just repeat that. Persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance. I’m not exactly sure what that inheritance is, but the report paints activist and leftist organizations in the United States as willing pawns in Cuba’s evil plans to subvert the United States. The document reads, “Through its cultivation of American activists, its infiltration of American universities, its sprawling influence and espionage networks, and its position as the spiritual hub of the Third World Revolution, becoming a pilgrimage destination for generations of new left activists and intellectuals, Cuba has played an instrumental role in shaping America’s radical left from the 1960s through to today.” It singles out organizations like the Vencerimos Brigade, Pastors for Peace and the Anti-War Group Code Pink as essentially Cuban front groups.

It’s a ridiculous claim because these are solidarity organizations that literally carry humanitarian aid to countries harmed by US policies. And this idea in the Cuban report assumes that everyone in the United States should just be on board with US administrations that punish other countries and peoples for not bowing to Uncle Sam. The document also accuses the New York Political Education and Community Center at the People’s Forum and the National Lawyers Guild of being influenced by Cuba. The document states, “From its very first years of existence, the National Lawyers Guild operated as a defacto communist front group designed to organize and agitate for revolution in the United States. It’s interesting that the document also spends three and a half pages discussing the Democratic socialists of America’s support for Cuba. At a time when DSA is growing and actually winning primaries ahead of the US November midterm elections, it’s clear that Marco Rubio’s State Department is interested in doing all it can to paint that group as Cuban influenced.

The document sums up all of this by saying, “These groups collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history.” Too bad that statement is not only totally conspiratorial, it is also not based on reality.

Speaker 14:

And it was shocking on every page to see the way in which the State Department’s report was reiterating the same claims, and many of them very fraudulent claims, that had been leveled against American solidarity activists in the 1960s and 1970s.

Speaker 1:

Bailey of the Beast recently interviewed historian Tayshon Latner about this report in his 2018 book, Cuban Revolution in America. Latner writes about how generations of activists in the United States have found inspiration in Cuba, but he says that if State Department officials were reading his book, they completely missed the point and blew it out of context.

Speaker 14:

But in reading Rubio’s report, it was enormously clear that they were reiterating, you could almost say regurgitating the same claims and some of the same material that had been circulating in the 1960s and 1970s. The FBI and the CIA both produced copious reports that claimed to, let’s not say prove, because I don’t know if even they themselves would’ve used that terminology, but they tried to demonstrate a linkage between American solidarity movements and the Cuban revolution.

Speaker 1:

That is what they’re doing now. Even before the report came out, the Trump administration was already investigating activists for traveling to Cuba in March for the Nuestra America convoy. Their solidarity groups brought 20 tons of humanitarian aid to the Caribbean Island. In May, roughly 40 US activists were subpoenaed, including progressive influencer Hassan Peiker and Code Pink founder Mydia Benjamin, who I’ve spoken with in this podcast. In the days following this Cuba Reports release, several groups that were mentioned in the document were also subpoenaed to testify before Congress, including the People’s Forum, Breakthrough News, and the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research.

Speaker 5:

Are you agents of foreign influence?

Speaker 7:

I’m an agent of my own conscience.

Speaker 1:

Manolo de Los Santos is the director of the People’s Forum. He responded to the Trump administration’s allegations against his organization on MS Now in late July.

Speaker 7:

I’ve been moved constantly by the belief that the United States has to do better and that we can change the reality in this country. If we were to accept what this committee is demanding from us, it essentially would be to accept that people in the United States have no right to protest, no right to organize, no right to express their differences with the US government. The Trump administration is mired in a series of failures. It has been incapable of convincing the American people that deporting millions of immigrants is the right thing to do. And therefore it goes after the people who organize the defense of immigrant families. The fact that we stand with the Palestinian people, that we say no to a blockade against Cuba, these are not fringe positions. These are the positions of majority of Americans right now. It’s our consciousness that’s moving us to say that these things are wrong in our society.

Speaker 1:

Jake Johnston.

Speaker 11:

Yeah, it’s a great example of our interventionist foreign policy blowing back at home and seeing these connections. I mean, this is pretty clearly for the Trump administration, part of going after its domestic opposition ahead of midterm elections, consolidating its own political power, but of course at the same time, justifying its illegal blockade and siege of Cuba in doing so.

Speaker 1:

Here’s the thing. I read through the report shortly after it was released and one thing stood out for me above everything else. It was like the report was grasping at straws, like it was trying to string together a random hodgepodge of people and groups to make the case that Cuba had infiltrated the United States and was responsible for leftist descent going back decades. It seemed like it was generated with artificial intelligence. So I tested it. I ran it through some of those sites online where you can see how much a document was likely created using AI. One of the results came back with a 96% chance that it was made with artificial intelligence. ChatGPT told me the likelihood that “AI was substantially involved in producing or editing this report was high, roughly 80 to 90%.” Now, I’m not saying that it was completely AI generated.

I don’t believe that, but the State Department did likely use substantial artificial intelligence in research gathering, writing, and editing. Okay, you might be saying so what? A lot of people are using artificial intelligence today. Well, here’s the problem. AI we know has the tendency not to argue with us, but to give us back what we want to hear. It helps us to find information that will support our beliefs or our objective regardless of if they’re based on fact or not. It’s called AI bias. And look, it’s one thing if AI is being used to write an email to a friend or to help me pick out my clothes. I think I look good in blue. Thank you. Those have very little, if any, geopolitical implications. It’s another entirely, however, if you’re using this to develop an official government document that will guide public policy and which will be used to attack your political opponents, that is dangerous and it means that AI is being weaponized to benefit a certain political class and silence dissent.

In other words, government censorship. There has been limited discussion about the possibility that Marco Rubio’s Cuba document was likely created with the help of AI, and I wanted to get a deeper sense of the implications. What does that actually mean? So I reached out to Tal Hagen.

Speaker 15:

There we go.

Speaker 1:

All right, fantastic. Okay, so Tal, this is what I’m trying to figure out today. You might remember him from my episode about disinformation and deep fakes on Venezuela earlier this year. He is an online AI watchdog. He’s now the director of Otis, which provides human-run intelligence services. Anyway, he’s an expert on artificial intelligence, and I wanted to get his analysis of what it means when AI is being used to develop policy like this. And let me just say that I didn’t ask him specifically about the Cuba document because I wanted his objective opinion about the concerns over the use of AI in these circumstances. Because we know that if you go on a ChatGPT and you’re chatting with ChatGP and you’re saying, oftentimes it’s going to give you back what you want. Do we see the same thing in reports and documents where if you’re looking for something, if you’re trying to find something, the document that is produced through AI has the possibility of also giving you what you’re looking for because you’re asking it to go out there and find stuff that would make your statement true.

That make sense?

Speaker 15:

Yeah. At the end of the day, something that we need to understand with AI is that AI always agrees with us. It always wants to give you a simple, fast answer as quick as it doesn’t argue with you.

Speaker 1:

Tao says that you can test this by asking AI something in two different ways. One where you’re trying to get it to agree with you about something and the other where you’re playing a devil’s advocate and you’re trying to get it to agree with you about the exact opposite thing. Depending on how you phrase your question, you can get either result.

Speaker 15:

But AI almost always will give you what you want.

Speaker 1:

But Tao says that doesn’t necessarily make it untrue or false.

Speaker 15:

For example, maybe I’ve collected all the evidence and then I’ve asked AI to compile that into a comprehensive report for me. It’s still my information. I just asked AI to help me build it. So it’s not an AI made report, it’s an AI enhanced report. So that also complicates things because just because it was AI generated doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.

Speaker 1:

It also doesn’t mean that it was. For instance, Tao says, “It all depends on the input or information that you give the AI tool.”

Speaker 15:

Sometimes it also has access to the web, but it doesn’t actually understand what’s true, what’s false, and especially in evolving crises when things are just happening right now, whatever is on the web, that becomes the truth. And I’ve seen AI mess this up a lot. And so the bias is from what information you even provided in those documentations because when you provide me with documentation, I will ask you, “How do you know this is true? How do you know this is true? Where’s this from?” The AI doesn’t ask you that. It just assumes that everything you’ve given it is correct. It doesn’t start refuting your sources.

Speaker 1:

Tao says many officials and government departments, not just in the United States, are now using AI.

Speaker 15:

A lot of the governments, agencies, and individuals are using AI now to craft their official responses. We know there was some government official on Twitter who put out a post and he accidentally left in the prompt of making it sound better.

Speaker 6:

Madam Speaker, another concern relates to expectations.

Speaker 1:

There was also this Canadian politician who read an AI prompt in the New Brunswick legislature.

Speaker 6:

Here’s a more natural flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points. Madam Speaker –

Speaker 15:

The US government released photos of their war room and you could see them using AI, like writing different types of prompts.

Speaker 1:

Should we be concerned about governments, entities that are creating policy and an increasing use of AI and what that might mean for the policies that they’re creating?

Speaker 15:

Even when you’re writing in the Chachemia and you’re creating what you want or you’re creating a policy decision with AI, you are creating the report. But the problem is that your critical thinking skills are diluted because you are asking AI simple questions, you’re asking it to do the heavy labor. And if you say, “Find me an issue, find me an issue and then solve that issue,” you’re not the one solving that issue and it’s solving an issue just based on general information from the public. The problem with AI when it’s used by many different individuals is it replaces your own critical thinking where you no longer are researching the work, you are just editing it.That’s essentially what it becomes. You become an editor, you stop being a researcher. And so instead of you looking at all these different sources, trying to understand what the truth is here, what’s the facts and what’s the narrative being driven, you’re allowing the AI to just compile random pieces of information through its token generation and that’s the result that you’re

Speaker 4:

Getting. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again and we will make America great again. Thank you. God bless you. Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 15:

It’s why we like things that rhyme. The reason that a lot of political slogans are rhymes is because things that sound good are right. If it sounds good, it’s right. It’s why when you look at the comment section of a right-wing activist or a left-wing activist, all of its supporters say, “This sounds amazing. This is so good because they’re hearing what they want to hear.” And so even though the policy that they’re writing or they’re talking about might be complete and utter bullshit, it sounds good, but it’s not based on factual information. The same thing is happening with AI where it sounds good to the user, but they don’t actually know what it’s based on. And so they’re essentially being driven by just a random algorithm.

Speaker 1:

In other words, ask AI to give you a report that says Cuba has infiltrated the US left and is behind protest movements in the United States going back decades and it will do your bidding. We can’t know for sure, but that likely sums up Marco Rubio’s Cuba report. With or without AI, this Cuba report is a dangerous weapon that is now being deployed against progressives and opponents of the Trump administration. Jake Johnston.

Speaker 11:

I mean, I think just about everybody who read it laughed, but it is serious because this is about justifying war crimes. I mean, what we’re doing to Cuba right now is an active war. It is illegal and is an act of war. And yet here we are justifying it and at the same time sort of demonizing the opposition, the domestic opposition to those very actions.

Speaker 1:

The opposition to Trump’s policies has also been organizing abroad. On August 21st, 150 leaders from 15 countries from across the hemisphere and Europe met in Montevideo Uruguay for this year’s Pan-American Congress. It’s an event founded three years ago with the stated goal of fostering “solidarity among peoples and sovereignty among nations.” It’s been an important event for organizing the left in the region. The first two summits were held in Columbia and Mexico, both then countries run by progressive governments. SIEPR’s Alex Main, who I spoke with at the top, attended the conference.

Speaker 5:

The bulk of the people that were there are lawmakers who are doing their best to try to push forward progressive policies despite often being the minority and despite dealing with increasingly authoritarian right-wing governments. So they had a lot to share.

Speaker 16:

Good afternoon everybody. I’m Congresswoman Primila Jayapal. I represent the great state of Washington in the United States. I’m the first Indian American woman in the United States Congress. We are here, my esteemed colleague, Chuy Garcia and I, because we want to be very clear about two things. Number one, we oppose the Trump administration’s Don Roe foreign policy doctrine. We oppose the unilateral executive actions that Donald Trump has been taking without our congressional authority for both strikes, extra judicial killings in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean. We oppose the use of military might, of economic tariffs to try to bully and coerce nations into actions that do not benefit the people of those sovereign nations. And we oppose the election interference of the United States in other nations’ elections.

Speaker 1:

Talk of President Donald Trump’s onslaught on the region was front and center, as were discussions about how to push back. Uruguayan Congresswoman Ines Cortez spoke to the press.

Speaker 16:

She said,

Speaker 1:

“Above all, the issue that cuts across the different workshops and debates is the current situation in which we still have the United States interfering in the local politics of each of our countries more than ever.”.

The former Honduran Minister of Defense and the former presidential candidate for Honduras’ leftist Libre Party, Rixi Moncada, said they must stand for national sovereignty and a multipolar world. She said, “The United States is a military technological and financial power, but the world is no longer unipolar. China, India, Brazil, Russia, the BRICS, they’re all participating in defining the new international order. Multipolarity is a reality and our stance must not be to trade one form of subordination for another. The Latin American dilemma is not Washington versus Beijing. We want relations with all the nations and peoples of the planet to engage with everyone, to submit to no one. There were also discussions among progressive leaders from Trump allied countries where democracy is being rolled back and there’s a breakdown of the rule of law and respect for institutions. Alex Main said the meeting went a long way in helping to build solidarity between progressive leaders from across the region and leftist leaders in the United States.

Speaker 5:

For instance, in Ecuador, and we’re beginning to see this in Columbia and also in Honduras, both those countries of course are now governed by right-wing governments since quite recently. So yeah, I think it was important for the US delegates to be hearing from these other countries in the region. They’re all impacted in different ways by the Trump administration’s policy, by the so-called Don Roe doctrine, which is really very heavily interventionist. And they heard about US electoral interference. They heard about the US support for the expansion of militarization in the region and this pretext of a war on so-called narco-terrorism to, in a lot of places, bend the laws or declare sort of states of emergency and deploy the military and engage in egregious violations of human rights. So there was a lot to take away for these US delegates.

Speaker 1:

Alex explained that on top of the Congress people who were in attendance, you had staffers for Senator Bernie Sanders and Chicago Congressman Jonathan Jackson, as well as a number of delegates who won primaries and who will likely be elected to Congress in November.

Speaker 5:

Three of them belonging to the Democratic Socialists of America, the other one supported by the Democratic Socialists of America. I think it was very productive, and I think certainly the US delegates left Montevideo with commitments to themselves to do a lot more on Latin America that is of course suffering a new era of extremely aggressive interventionism from the current Trump administration.

Speaker 1:

But it wasn’t all about the United States. Alex says there were meetings about the impact of artificial intelligence on these countries, a session about green industrial development, multilateralism, and of course, democracy, peace, and security.

Speaker 5:

That is what was kind of important about these sessions is that there was a lot of information sharing, experience sharing, and people talking about various policy ideas that can be implemented sometimes at the congressional level. But also, the pendulum is bound to swing back in the other direction in spite of the best efforts of the Trump administration and some of the other more authoritarian governments in the region.

I absolutely came away with a sense of hope from the conference in Montevideo because one, you had a lot of strong leaders from the region that despite the rise of authoritarianism everywhere are not giving up. In fact, they are optimistic about the future and about returning to power. They know it’s in many cases going to be a tough process because in some instances, democracy, the rule of law and so on have to be reestablished. So it’s going to take very strong people’s movements to do that, but they really seem up to the task. And what was also very encouraging was just the amount of young leaders from the region, a new generation of progressive leaders that have very big plans for their countries and for the region, and in particular for regional integration between Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Speaker 1:

The final declaration referenced Simon Bolivar’s historic Panama Congress, which took place 200 years ago this year. It read, “Today, August 23rd, we therefore unite to combat the renewed doctrine of domination in all its forms, defending the rights and freedoms won across centuries of struggle for self-determination, collaborate from respective legislatures to advance our own vision of hemispheric cooperation based on solidarity between peoples and sovereignty among nations. They plan to meet again in Brazil next year.” Hi folks, that is all for this episode of Under the Shadow. I’m now getting back on track and I will be bringing you much more in the coming weeks, both about Trump’s shadow looming over the upcoming Brazilian elections and the shocking revelations in the wake of the arrest of Argentine right-wing election fixer Fernando Serimedo. If you can’t wait for my reporting on Brazil, I’ve just released a 10-minute video from Sao Paulo.

I’ll add a link in the show notes. Also, please check out Belly of the Beasts reporting. They are so, so good at what they do. Many thanks to the team for allowing me to use clips from their footage. I’ve added links in the show notes. In the meantime, as always, you can find me on Patreon, that’s 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. 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 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.