The Arrest in Bolivia of the King of the Trolls
the Digital Suicide of Chile’s Far-Right Tweeters
HAVANA TIMES – Just hours after Argentine Fernando Cerimedo was arrested for attempted femicide in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, the accounts of the trolls “Dress” and “Neuroc” disappeared from cyberspace.
The following is a simple chronology of a series of events related to the far-right trolls and bots that have become so prevalent in Latin America and Chile, all occurring over the past five days.
Last Monday, August 17, at around 8:30 p.m., Bolivian attorney Nadie Beller was shot by two hitmen at the entrance to a hotel in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Despite being shot three times, she survived.
When police began investigating, they discovered that the woman was the partner of an Argentine citizen, Fernando Cerimedo, the king of the trolls, a man with ties to the continent’s far right who worked on the “Reject” campaign in Chile and even publicly celebrated on September 4, 2022, when that option won by a landslide in the constitutional referendum.
During the early morning hours of August 18, Cerimedo, a close associate of Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz, was arrested at the Santa Cruz airport, where initial reports indicated that he was trying to board a flight to Buenos Aires. He is currently charged with the attempted femicide of Beller, who says the Argentine was the person who hired the trolls.
The Chilean President Condemns Trolls and Bots
One of the harshest episodes of the last presidential campaign in Chile was the dirty war waged by far-right accounts against Evelyn Matthei, the candidate of the traditional right. As will be recalled, she directly linked them to the Chilean Republican Party and asserted that these were “immoral campaigns that seek to spread lies through a very intense and coordinated use of social media, targeting people, damaging their honor and their image. Basically, the aim is to destroy them in the eyes of public opinion.”
President Kast had not addressed the issue since the campaign, but on the morning of August 18, during the leadership handover ceremony of the Federation of Social Communication Media, held at the offices of El Mercurio in Vitacura, he spoke about it, saying: “I condemn, and have always unequivocally condemned, digital intimidation or harassment in the form of funas (trolls) against those who practice journalism.” He then added: “It’s almost instantaneous: someone says something and the famous trolls appear. I condemn them on both sides.”
Digital Suicide
Hours after all this, something happened that, judging by a message posted on August 16 on the account of “Neuroc,” one of the leading trolls of Chile’s far right, had already been brewing: “We’re quitting. Dres and I are quitting. We’re fed up. Nobody thanks us and all we get is criticism, so bye”, he wrote, referring to the “Dress” account. Dress and Neuroc were the main figures responsible for much of the smear campaign against Evelyn Matthei.
The first account belonged to Ricardo Inaimán Barrios. Likewise, another account from the same political sector, “Patitto_verde,” was reported at the time to have been operated by Patricio Góngora, who was forced to resign from his position on the board of Canal 13 as a result.
However, Dress’s true identity has yet to be uncovered. Although social media users frequently point to an engineer who works in Osorno as the person behind the account, he denies being the far-right troll.
In any event, Neuroc stopped posting messages on August 18. A message subsequently appeared saying, “Posts aren’t loading right now,” and now the account no longer exists. The same happened with Dress’s profile, which disappeared from X after several years of trolling the right and the far right—and coincidentally at the same time as the arrest in Bolivia of the father of the continent’s far-right trolls.
First published in Spanish by El Mostrador and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.