More than a thousand. That is the number of content creators and journalists trained by Russia to manipulate the information landscape in Hispanic America — specifically in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, as well as in its regional allies: Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela — according to a report presented last week in Miami.

Attempts to influence the United States' closest neighbors — with the aim of compromising Washington's national security by fostering hostility among its neighbors — are nothing new. The USSR infiltrated Peru and Central America, ultimately establishing its primary regional foothold in Cuba during the turbulent 1960s.

Now, Vladimir Putin’s Russia — heir to that leftist empire which collapsed in the 1990s and a man who was himself part of the Soviet intelligence apparatus — is employing the arts of disinformation across the entire American continent.

The operation unmasked by the report mentioned at the beginning of this article had, among its objectives, the weakening of key allies of the White House's foreign policy. One of those targets was the government of Argentine President Javier Milei.

As researcher Santiago O’Donnell noted after the Russian operation came to light: in 2024, Buenos Aires had publicly backed Ukraine in the war it is waging against Putin. Consequently, Russia launched a campaign that “consisted of smearing the Milei government and fomenting disputes with neighboring nations with progressive leanings,” or else emphasizing “the hardships that we all experience on a daily basis.”

How did they do it? By inserting pieces of disinformation into various media outlets: articles for which they paid sums exceeding $350 — a considerable figure within the Hispanic American context. Doing so proved relatively simple, given that a segment of Argentina’s media landscape leans rabidly to the left; consequently, producing material critical of the Milei administration was perceived less as an additional workload and more as a natural extension of their own preexisting agenda.

In some cases, these articles appeared under false bylines — a fact exposed by political scientist Agustín Laje. Or they were created by artificial intelligence, under names such as that of the nonexistent Gabriel Di Taranto, who appears in over 20 publications across various websites. Some of the media outlets implicated — such as A24 — have stated that internal investigations are currently underway.

Milei, for his part, emphasized that the “sowing of fake news by corrupt journalists and traitors to the homeland” reveals the true character of the vast majority of the Argentinian press.

As highlighted during the report’s presentation event at the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, the state-run outlet RT en Español trained Hispanic media professionals. Furthermore, Moscow utilized nearly 200 influencers to disseminate information throughout Latin America, noted former prosecutor Jeffrey Scott Shapiro.

Accounts associated with RT en Español and Sputnik Mundo — another Kremlin-aligned outlet — boast a combined following of over 17 million on Facebook and six million on YouTube; this comes in addition to approximately 16 Russia-created websites that masquerade as other recognized media outlets.

According to Shapiro — who possesses in-depth knowledge of government entities dedicated to promoting pro-American ideas, such as the U.S. Agency for Global Media — “the efforts Russia has undertaken regarding its state-sponsored media apparatus are extraordinary, and they are spending far more than we are.”

Gelet Martínez, founder of the news website ADN, explained during the presentation of the report that Russia employs "narrative laundering" regarding existing conflicts — such as the war in Ukraine — and fosters "anti-imperialist" and "anti-colonial" sentiments within certain sectors of Latin America.

And while in that region the Kremlin leverages leftist ideologies as a vehicle to sow tribalism, in the United States, it has also successfully managed to penetrate segments of the political Right. It achieves this systematically through the emotional manipulation of information, the biased selection of facts, the injection of conspiracy theories into the collective consciousness, the use of false equivalencies, and the amplification of extremist viewpoints.

Martínez asserted that Putin pursues three objectives: “to polarize, to sow distrust in our institutions, and to fragment our societies. Today, with the rise of the Internet, this is becoming increasingly simple.”