On Tuesday, August 18, an Argentine citizen named Fernando Cerimedo was arrested at the Viru Viru International Airport in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Cerimedo, age forty-five, was charged with the attempted homicide of his ex-partner, Bolivian lawyer Nadia Beller, and ordered held for 180 days of pretrial detention. The details are grisly: security camera footage showed hit men, disguised as delivery workers, firing on an unsuspecting Beller at point-blank range before fleeing the scene. Compounding matters, Beller, who miraculously survived the assault, was apparently pregnant with Cerimedo’s own child.

Thus far, the affair could be classified as a case — gruesome, yes, but hardly unusual — of a botched femicide in the wake of a failed relationship. Something to briefly grace the crime section of the local papers. And indeed, that is how a number of interested parties would be keen to frame it. But Cerimedo happens to be the disinformation mastermind behind the far-right campaigns that have taken Latin America by storm.

Nor are his connections limited to the Southern Cone: they extend up into the inner circles of Trumpism itself.