Q24N (Dialogo Americas) The Russian government is financing with considerable resources an ongoing disinformation campaign in Latin America aimed at weakening support for Ukraine and propagating anti-U.S. and anti-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) sentiment, the U.S. State Department said on November 7.
The Kremlin campaign seeks to leverage contacts established with media in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, among others, to carry out an information manipulation campaign designed to exploit, subliminally, the openness of the Latin American media and information environment.
“We observed that Russia is using manipulation through the media domain in order to create disinformation campaigns, as well as through cyber espionage actions,” Argentina international relations expert Luis Somoza, told Diálogo on November 27.
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The Social Design Agency, the Institute for Internet Development, and Structura, are collaborating to develop and maintain an information manipulation campaign directed at Latin America, which aims to promote Russia’s strategic interests in the region at the expense of other countries by overtly and covertly coopting local media and influencers, to spread disinformation and propaganda, the State Department said.
These are entities engaged in “influence-for-hire,” with advanced technical capabilities for exploiting open information environments and a history of contributing to the proliferation of fake news and propaganda to further Russia’s foreign influence objectives.
“Managing or trying to influence public opinion is a very typical game of Russia’s ideological warfare and today we are clearly in that current,” Juan Belikow, professor of international relations at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, told Diálogo. “These situations are occurring within the framework of the digital Iron Curtain that we are living through today.”
According to the U.S. State Department, Moscow plants false stories or amplifies existing popular or divisive discourses, making use of a network of state media, proxy, and social influencers, to then intensify that content and amplify and penetrate even further into the Western disinformation environment.
These activities may include the dissemination of fake content and the amplification of information perceived to be beneficial for Russian conspiracy theories or geopolitical and economic influence efforts.
Speaking to Argentine news site Infobae on October 29, James Rubin, special envoy and coordinator of the Center for Global Engagement, a U.S. State Department agency, said that “there is a kind of knee-jerk system today to blame the United States for all the world’s problems.”
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The disinformation operation is to promote a series of Russian narratives that Rubin calls “flatly false,” such as that Ukraine blames the United States for the war; that the United States is behind the conflict; that Ukrainians are fascists, etc., Rubin said.
According to the U.S. State Department report, the mechanics of the campaign are such that a cultivate team of editorial staff in a Latin American country, most likely in Chile, works with various individuals and local representatives, such as journalists and public opinion leaders from different countries in the region.
A team of propagandists in Russia create content and send the material to the editorial team in Latin America for review, editing, and subsequent publication in as many local media outlets as possible.
In effect, this information laundering process ensures that the pro-Kremlin content, produced in Russia, is “localized” by the team in Latin America and published in Latin American media to have the appearance of factual information and truth.
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“It is clear that Russia uses all this type of operations to position itself in European and Latin American nations, with the aim of trying to convince that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is just because of a territorial dispute, and to get a sector of the public opinion to criticize the actions of support of several countries to the Ukrainian state,” Somoza said.
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