The Miami Pipeline: How Fernando Cerimedo and a Shadow Network of Republican Operatives Are Reshaping Latin American Elections

The story of Fernando Cerimedo, the Argentine digital strategist who has become an increasingly visible force in the right-wing political machinery sweeping Latin America, might have remained a footnote in the English-language press. For months, the coverage of his activities has been thin, episodic, and largely confined to regional outlets, despite his fingerprints appearing on some of the most consequential elections in the hemisphere. That silence, however, has been broken by a meticulous investigation published in the Mexican daily La Jornada, which draws on documents filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) to reconstruct the full arc of Cerimedo’s influence. According to that investigation, Cerimedo’s port of entry into the United States was not New York or Washington, but Miami — and that South Florida city, the report argues, was far more than a convenient business address. It operated, in the language of the investigation, “as a platform for coordination among Latin American campaigns, ideologically driven media outlets, political consultants, organizations within the Cuban American ecosystem, and sectors of the Republican Party with the ability to influence U.S. policy toward the hemisphere.” The portrait that emerges is not one of a lone operative working in the shadows, but of a densely interwoven ecosystem of consultants, lobbyists, media personalities, and elected officials, all operating under a shared ideological banner that treats Latin America as a battleground for the broader global culture war. Cerimedo, in this telling, is both a product and a conduit of that ecosystem — a man whose access and influence are inseparable from the network that welcomed him the moment he set foot in Miami.

At the center of this “extremist petri dish,” as La Jornada characterizes it, stands Damian Merlo, a lobbyist and public relations consultant who serves as managing partner at the Latin America Advisory Group (LAAG). Merlo’s résumé is distinctive: he is a former screening officer for the U.S. Department of State in Havana, a position that gave him deep familiarity with Cuban affairs and, presumably, with the broader political dynamics of the hemisphere. In Miami, Merlo has positioned himself as a fixer and facilitator, the man who can open doors that others cannot. The investigation identifies him as the key welcome-wagon figure in Cerimedo’s American journey, and the specific examples of that facilitation are striking. It was Merlo, according to the report, who organized the now-viral appearance of Argentine libertarian Javier Milei on the Tucker Carlson program in 2023 — an appearance that took place just two months before Milei’s election as president of Argentina and that served as a powerful launchpad for his international profile. But Merlo’s access did not stop at media appearances. For Cerimedo, Merlo could offer entry into the offices of congresspeople deeply involved in hard-right politics in Latin America, including Representatives Mario Díaz-Balart and Maria Elvira Salazar — Salazar at one point chairing the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere — and, crucially, Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The proximity of these connections is captured in an official State Department photo of the Shield of the Americas summit, dated March 7 of this year, in which Cerimedo is seated next to Rodrigo Paz and directly across from the U.S. secretary of state at a chummy table of six. The image is worth a thousand words: it shows, in a single frame, how thoroughly Cerimedo has been absorbed into the highest levels of American political power.

The pathways of this influence network are not merely social; they are commercial and operational. In 2023, the same year Cerimedo established his company Numen Academy in Miami, Numen and LAAG joined forces to work on the Milei campaign. This partnership was not incidental — it represented a deliberate pooling of resources, expertise, and political capital. Numen brought Cerimedo into contact with another fundamental figure in this entire saga: Brad Parscale, the digital media director for Trump’s 2016 campaign and campaign manager for Trump’s 2020 bid. The pairing was described by those who observed it as a match made in heaven, and for good reason: the two men offered a very similar basket of “services,” combining data-driven microtargeting with an aggressive, often adversarial approach to political communication. Parscale’s name carries enormous baggage in the United States, where he is remembered as the man who paid approximately $6 million to Cambridge Analytica in 2016 to harness Facebook data harvested from eighty-seven million users without their consent. That scandal, which erupted in 2018, fundamentally altered the global conversation about data privacy and election integrity, and it sent Parscale into a temporary retreat from public view. But by the early 2020s, he had reemerged, and his partnership with Cerimedo suggests that the playbook once used in American presidential politics had found a new market in Latin America — a market with fewer legal protections, weaker institutional oversight, and, for the operatives involved, far less scrutiny from the international press.

The operational details of that partnership, as documented by the investigation, are alarming in their precision and scope. In the Honduran elections, Parscale advised Numen remotely about leveraging data to target voters, providing the kind of analytical firepower that had previously been reserved for superpower politics. In Bolivia, he went one better, traveling in person to the country to help Numen’s team harness the data tools his companies had developed. This on-the-ground involvement transformed the relationship from a consulting arrangement into something far more hands-on, with Parscale lending his personal reputation and expertise directly to campaigns in the region. By 2025, the relationship had been formalized and expanded. Cerimedo was designated representative and exclusive Latin American licensee of Campaign Nucleus, the political technology platform owned by Parscale, as well as Eyesover, an affiliated company. The licensing agreement gave Cerimedo and his clients access to a suite of tools that, in the hands of less scrupulous actors, could be used to identify, target, and mobilize voters with surgical precision — or, depending on one’s perspective, to manipulate and mislead them. Cerimedo has been characteristically frank about the arrangement. “Brad provided all the technology I work with,” he has admitted, in a statement that confirms the depth of the technical relationship between the Argentine strategist and the American data guru.

The broader context of these operations requires an understanding of the regulatory and legal environment in which they operate. The Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, is a U.S. disclosure statute that requires individuals and organizations acting as agents of foreign principals to register with the Department of Justice, making their activities and financial arrangements a matter of public record. FARA has historically been underenforced, but it has become an increasingly important tool for journalists and investigators seeking to trace the flows of money and influence that shape American foreign policy. The La Jornada investigation is a prime example of how FARA filings can be leveraged by the press to reconstruct networks that might otherwise remain opaque. In October 2025, Parscale himself registered under FARA with the Israeli government, through the intermediary of Havas Media Germany GmbH, a registration that underscores the transnational, multi-client nature of these political technology operators. The registration suggests that Parscale’s business model now encompasses multiple foreign principals, with Latin America being only one of several markets. For observers of the region, the implications are sobering: the same tools and techniques that were used to win elections in the United States, and that have been implicated in numerous scandals, are now being exported to countries with less developed democratic institutions and weaker protections for electoral integrity.

What does this mean for the future of democracy in Latin America? The Cerimedo story is not merely the tale of one Argentine strategist; it is the story of how the tools, tactics, and networks of the American political right have been globalized. The Miami ecosystem described in the La Jornada investigation — a world of lobbyists, media personalities, Cuban American organizations, and Republican politicians — functions as a kind of embassy for a particular vision of Latin American politics, one that is unabashedly pro-Business, ideologically aligned with the American right, and willing to employ aggressive, data-driven methods to achieve victory. For Cerimedo, access to U.S. officials and media platforms has provided a powerful foundation for his campaigns in Argentina, Honduras, Bolivia, and beyond. For the American politicians involved, the relationship offers influence over the hemisphere and a base of operational support for ideological allies. And for the citizens of Latin American countries, the consequences are more ambiguous — and potentially more dangerous. The use of voter data harvested without consent, the deployment of viral content engineered for maximum emotional impact, and the employment of sophisticated microtargeting techniques may deliver short-term victories for candidates like Milei, but they also raise profound questions about the integrity of the democratic process itself. As the 2026 electoral cycle unfolds, and as figures like Cerimedo and Parscale continue to expand their reach, the need for transparency, regulation, and public awareness has never been greater. The story, contrary to the initial dearth of coverage, is far from over. It is, in fact, only beginning.