Lying on a hospital bed, hours after surviving three gunshot wounds, Nadia Beller, a Bolivian lawyer and political analyst, said she knew who ordered the hit.
“I’ve summoned the presence of DTV to make a live declaration,” Beller said on camera last month in a wobbly voice.
Her married boyfriend, Fernando Cerimedo — an Argentine political consultant labeled “MAGA’s man” in Latin America — had sent two hit men to kill her, shortly after finding out that she was pregnant, she said.
The stunning allegation and quick arrest of Cerimedo — now held in a maximum-security prison and charged with attempted femicide — have ignited a political scandal that has reverberated from Argentina to Washington and drawn attention to the Trump administration’s role in a surge of political victories by right-wing candidates across Latin America.
Cerimedo has denied any role in the attack. His legal team has called the allegations against him a plot by the Bolivian left.
Known as a master of digital media and negative political messaging, Cerimedo was one of the region’s best-known political consultants, guiding conservative presidential candidates to power in Argentina, then Honduras and Bolivia.
The work had also brought him into increasing contact with political operatives close to the White House, which in a break with diplomatic norms has interceded in domestic politics across the region by advocating aggressively for Trump-aligned candidates.
In February, when Cerimedo was named 2025’s best Hispanic political consultant, he accepted the honor at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate in Florida.
In Bolivia, his power extended far beyond the political cycle. Following President Rodrigo Paz’s victory last year, ending two decades of leftist rule, Cerimedo became the president’s shadow — a matter of disquiet in the administration.
The Washington Post reviewed hundreds of pages of court files, including extensive chat messages between Beller and Cerimedo, and conducted two lengthy interviews with the injured woman, including one at her home in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, a tropical metropolis near the foothills of the Andes Mountains.
What emerged is something out of a real-life telenovela: infidelity, lovers’ quarrels, violence and ambition.
Sitting at her sister’s house, three weeks after the attack, her right arm in a sling, Beller said she had little doubt about who wanted her dead: The man she intended to marry, who would be the father of her child, had lured her into an ambush.
“It was Fernando,” Beller told The Post. “He wanted to kill me.”
A rapid rise to Mar-a-Lago
Cerimedo’s history is a mix of embellishment and contradiction.
In interviews with journalists and on his LinkedIn page, Cerimedo claimed to have studied at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earned a PhD in marketing from the University of Phoenix, trained with the U.S. Navy SEALs and served for a time in the White House during the Obama administration.
Little, if any, of that has been proved. In statements to The Post, MIT and the University of Phoenix said they had no records of Cerimedo as a student. Harvard and the U.S. Navy public affairs office didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Reporters across the region similarly came up empty-handed.
“He’s a pathological liar,” Hugo Alconada Mon, an investigative journalist with the Argentine newspaper La Nación, said he concluded.
Alconada Mon said Cerimedo worked as a taxi driver in the coastal Argentine city of Mar del Plata, where he was convicted in 2016 of fraud after selling the same apartment to two different families.
The conviction did little to slow his rise. In recent years, as politics in Latin America coarsened, giving rise to a new class of pugilistic political operatives, Cerimedo was suddenly everywhere.
He released a viral video that alleged the 2022 Brazilian presidential election had been rigged in favor of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
In Argentina, he helped steward Javier Milei’s digital operations, unleashing what he said was an army of trolls and trashing his rivals.
In Bolivia, he championed President Rodrigo Paz — tutoring his daughter, Catalina, on his craft — and he crudely attacked the country’s former president Evo Morales, calling him a “narco-terrorist pedophile.”
Through his Buenos Aires political consultancy, Numen, Cerimedo became a conduit between Latin American and U.S. politics.
He helped connect Tucker Carlson to Milei for an interview broadcast in September 2023. He partnered with Miami consultant Damian Merlo — a fixture in Trump circles — on the Milei campaign. He said he worked with American political consultant and commentator Dick Morris to help coordinate Trump’s pivotal endorsement of Honduran President Nasry Asfura. He also appeared in advertisements as a lecturer at the Dick Morris Academy, an online training tool for politicians and campaign workers.
The Economist late last year called him “MAGA’s man in LatAm.”
His closest MAGA connection was Brad Parscale. Last year, Cerimedo’s news outlet, the Daily Right, reported that Cerimedo would be the Latin American representative of Parscale’s two political technology platforms — Eyes Over and Campaign Nucleus — both of which featured in Trump’s 2024 campaign.
In February, when Cerimedo accepted his award at Mar-a-Lago, he thanked Parscale “for always believing in me.”
Parscale didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In his remarks, Cerimedo also had someone else to thank.
“My wife,” he said. “I love you.”
A Bolivian affair
At the time of those remarks, Cerimedo was having an affair with Nadia Beller.
The pair first spoke by telephone, Beller said, as Cerimedo sought her input regarding a legislative proposal important to Paz, the Bolivian president. A professional relationship between Beller and Cerimedo never matured, but a personal one blossomed.
“She started staying at my apartment in La Paz,” Cerimedo told police.
To Beller, Cerimedo seemed the epitome of success, she said. He had connections all over Latin America and the United States, and claimed to make between $800,000 and $1 million per month. A picture in his La Paz apartment, she said, showed him with Parscale, whom she said Cerimedo referred to as his “best friend.”
The only hitch was his marriage. But he told Beller that it was over and that he wanted to marry her instead, according to Beller and WhatsApp messages collected by police.
Efforts to reach Cerimedo’s wife weren’t successful.
Beller said she began to mistrust Cerimedo in April, after finding amorous phone messages that he sent to his wife. Later, she said, he tried to hide from her that he’d gone to Buenos Aires, presumably to visit his family. Then, in June, she said she found a condom in his bathroom at their La Paz apartment, and an argument turned violent. She said he strangled her.
She photographed the bruises and threatened to out him, messages show, but ultimately did not.
This summer, the couple discovered Beller was pregnant. She accused Cerimedo of abandoning her — then in August unilaterally broke the news of her pregnancy to Cerimedo’s wife.
“What have you done nadia??????” Cerimedo wrote her.
She said she was going to accuse him publicly of domestic abuse. “You beat me, and like an idiot I stayed quiet,” she wrote. “No more.”
He begged her to wait, to think of his children and their unborn child. “Can’t you wait a few days?” he said. “That’s all I ask.”
As the couple argued, Beller said she received a message from an anonymous tipster. The informant claimed to have dirt on a political rival. If she wanted the intel, she needed to go to a drop-off point.
Cerimedo urged her to go.
“Help me,” he said.
On Aug. 17, as Beller waited outside a luxury hotel to receive the intel, two individuals dressed as deliverymen approached. One pulled a gun and shot her three times.
‘I trusted everything’
Cerimedo’s lawyers called the entire case — from affair to shooting — an elaborate trap set by the left for Cerimedo and the Paz government.
Margarita Arce Chilo, one of his lawyers, said Cerimedo was guilty of adultery, but nothing more.
“This had been constructed with premeditation by Ms. Nadia and the left,” she said.
Police, however, have gathered what appears to be damaging evidence. Days before the shooting, Cerimedo asked a local political contact for $50,000. And on his phone, they found a message in his notes folder.
“Don’t tell anyone anything,” it said. “But she’s sold us out … Nadia. Either we eliminate her already or we’re screwed. Do you know anyone who can help with this job?”
It’s unclear if the message was sent.
After reviewing the contents on his phone and other electronic devices, and finding tens of thousands of dollars at his apartment, prosecutors brought additional charges against Cerimedo of illicit enrichment and domestic violence. Prosecutors also said they’re investigating his alleged ties to drug trafficking.
At a court appearance on Aug. 21, Cerimedo denied any involvement in the attack. He spoke of his children and family, and wept into his hands.
Not far away from the courthouse, in a middle-class section of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Beller moved into her sister’s house. On a recent Monday morning, two police cars were parked outside. Inside, Beller struggled to reconcile all that has happened.
By the time of the attack, she said she believed that she and Cerimedo were past their arguments.
“I miss you,” she wrote in one of the last messages gathered by police.
“Me too,” he replied.
She said she thought they would have a life together.
“I trusted everything he told me,” she said. “I saw him as a good man.”
Gabriel Diez Lacunza contributed to this report.
The post He pushed MAGA in Latin America. Then came an affair, and an attack. appeared first on Washington Post.
