Part of The Parscale Investigation. The direct sequel to The Machine Goes South, which this piece partly overtakes.
On the night of 17 August 2026, two men dressed as delivery drivers shot a lawyer three times outside a hotel in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Her name is Nadia Beller. She survived, and she began giving interviews from her hospital bed.
The next morning, Bolivian police arrested her former partner at Viru Viru airport as he tried to board a flight to Buenos Aires. His name is Fernando Cerimedo. Until that week he had been the most influential foreigner in Bolivia — an Argentine political operative who ran the digital strategy that put President Rodrigo Paz in office, and who then kept working inside his government without a contract.
Cerimedo's business partner is Brad Parscale, Donald Trump's former campaign manager.
That sentence is why a Bolivian shooting has become an American story, and it is where the care has to start. Because the honest answer to what does Brad Parscale have to do with Bolivia is narrower than the version now circulating — and the narrow version is more interesting than the loud one.
Parscale and Cerimedo are partners through Numen, a Buenos Aires consultancy. Parscale owns Campaign Nucleus and fronts a US-facing EyesOver operation. In March 2025, Cerimedo was announced as the platforms' Latin American representative — a role he described as exclusive, a label the independent reporting does not adopt.
He has never been shy about the arrangement. At a Mar-a-Lago event he thanked Parscale from the stage: “Thank you to Brad Parscale! For believing [in] me all the time, and giving me your technology.” On Bolivian television, he described Parscale as his business partner. The New York Times reported in December 2025 that Parscale collaborated in the Bolivian election, advising on using data to target voters while Cerimedo ran the messaging on the ground.
The firmest documented pipeline into the Paz campaign, though, is not the software at all. It is a school. Paz publicly credited his digital strategy to his eldest daughter, Catalina Paz Urquidi — a graduate of Academia Numen, Cerimedo's digital-marketing academy. That is an acknowledged, on-the-record route from Cerimedo's operation into the candidate's own staff, and nobody disputes it.
In that declaration Cerimedo told the court he earns roughly one million US dollars a month from digital-communications companies based outside Bolivia — naming Numen Group Inc., a US entity incorporated in 2021, and Numen de Publicidad in Argentina. He also named Rodrigo Paz as his principal contact in the government.
Testifying by video link from Palmasola prison, he denied everything: “I'm not a killer, I'm not a trafficker, and I'm not violent.”
On 27 August, Paz said of the man who had been at his side for a year:
The Bolivian fact-checking outfit Bolivia Verifica documents a different picture. Cerimedo carried business cards reading “Asesor Principal del Presidente” with a presidential-domain email address. He acknowledged participating in the drafting of Decreto Supremo 5515 — which permits the president to exercise his functions by technological means while abroad — and at minimum one further supreme decree and one law. He appeared at the inauguration on 9 November 2025, at the swearing-in of the cabinet, on the official visit to Panama in January 2026, and at the visit of the King of Spain.
He held no formal position. Vice-President Edman Lara says he kept an office near the presidency. Both things are true at once, and that is the part Bolivians are angry about: not a job, but a residence in the machinery of the state without one.
This is the section that matters, because it is where the coverage has run ahead of what anyone can show.
He did not, on this record, travel to Bolivia. El País Bolivia states that Parscale “viajó a Bolivia para implementar herramientas de microsegmentación electoral” and attributes it to the New York Times of 5 December 2025. The Times wording is “travelled to the region” — and on Honduras it says explicitly that he did not travel. No flight record, photograph, dated sighting or entry record has surfaced. The over-read is now being cited as though it were independent corroboration, by outlets quoting El País rather than the Times. One source, over-read, echoing.
Deployment of the platforms in Bolivia is inferred, not evidenced. Cerimedo's licence to represent Campaign Nucleus and EyesOver is documented. Their actual use on Bolivian voter data is not. The most careful piece written on the machinery — Violeta Ayala's “La máquina que aterrizó en Bolivia”, 29 August 2026 — reaches the same wall this investigation did. The campaign received “data diaria sobre los bolivianos”, daily data on Bolivians. And then:
Spanish-language coverage has begun collapsing two separate operations into one. A representative headline: “los US$15.000.000 que Israel giró en un semestre a la empresa que Cerimedo maneja con Parscale.” The money Israel sent to the company Cerimedo runs with Parscale.
That is not what the filings say. The $15 million received between October 2025 and March 2026 from Havas Media Germany went to Clock Tower X LLC — Parscale's US entity, FARA registrant #7649 — for United States-facing work: Gen-Z content and the GPT-framing programme documented in the first part of this series. Cerimedo does not manage Clock Tower X. He is not in it.
The only thread between the two operations is a pair of $18,000 payments from Clock Tower X to a vendor named “Eyes Over” for sentiment analytics — and the article making the connection concedes in its own text that there is “no hay, por ahora, confirmación pública” that this is the same platform Cerimedo represents.
The two fronts share a person, not a purse. That distinction is the difference between a documented finding and a conspiracy theory, and it costs nothing to keep.
Cerimedo carries an adjudicated election-disinformation record — in Brazil. On 4 November 2022 he hosted the “Brasil foi roubado” livestream presenting a bogus voting-machine audit to some 400,000 simultaneous viewers; Brazil's electoral court ordered it removed and five independent fact-checkers debunked it. Brazil's Federal Police later listed him among 37 people in the disinformation nucleus of its coup-plot inquiry — though the Prosecutor-General excluded him from the formal charges, and he has never been tried.
Bolivia is a different question, and the evidence points two ways at once. The rigorous ProBox and Bolivia Verifica study of the 2025 election examined 12,254 items and found the disinformation was decentralised, with “no documented connection to Paz campaign, Cerimedo, Numen, or Parscale” — naming opposition-aligned amplifiers instead. El País Bolivia's eight-part May 2026 investigation, by contrast, alleges the Numen network ran information operations designed to damage an adversary.
Both stand. They are not the same evidentiary object — one is item-level attribution, the other is an investigative narrative. Neither reaches Parscale.
Strip out everything that cannot be shown and a real story is still standing, and it is not a small one.
The man who ran digital strategy for Bolivia's president — and then operated inside his government without a contract, drafting decrees, carrying a card that called him the president's principal adviser — is in a Bolivian prison facing an attempted-femicide accusation and an illicit-enrichment charge, having told a court he earns a million dollars a month. His business partner and technology supplier is Donald Trump's former campaign manager, who is simultaneously a registered foreign agent of the State of Israel.
Parscale is accused of nothing. The two operations share a person, not a purse. And the unresolved question is narrower, more concrete and far more answerable than the conspiracy version:
No Bolivian electoral or data-protection authority has opened a public investigation into that question. That absence is itself a finding. A national election was fought with daily data on a country's citizens, supplied through a foreign consultancy whose principal is now in prison, and nobody with subpoena power has yet asked where the data came from.
The illicit-enrichment file may force the issue by accident. If prosecutors trace a million dollars a month, the counterparties stop being a matter of interpretation and become documents.
Tiered findings with every per-claim source — including the negative findings and the source-hygiene notes on which outlets are recycling which claims — are in the Bolivia file on GitHub ↗. The core reporting is others': the New York Times (Vogel, Adams and Nicas), El País Bolivia, Bolivia Verifica, Infobae, La Nación, The Bulwark, Violeta Ayala, Natalia Volosin, and ProBox. They are credited throughout. This piece's contribution is the verification, the tiering, and the corrections — including the ones that cut against the story.