By: Staff Writer
October 27, 2023
A regional Think Tank says Russia has been tipping the election pendulum in Central America more heavily since 2013 their recent report indicates and its influence has only been growing in nearly all facets of Central American societies.
The United States Institute for Peace, in its latest publication, “Russian Influence Campaigns in Latin America,” said that: Over the past decade, a period roughly coinciding with increasing Russian focus on absorbing Ukraine back into Russia’s ambit, the information operations in Latin America have sharpened and broadened. In 2013, Moscow declared its relations with Latin America to be of strategic importance, and the following year, during which Russia illegally seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, Moscow started to greatly expand its information warfare efforts in Latin America.5 On August 15, 2022—six months after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine—Putin noted the “historically strong, friendly, truly trusting ties” with Latin America.
“Since 2013, Russia has created a diversified, sophisticated information ecosystem in Latin America that continues to allow Moscow to significantly shape the region’s information environment through persistent, multiplatform anti-US and antidemocratic messaging. This creates an alternative reality that has taken hold much more broadly and deeply than is generally understood. The information ecosystem targets multiple audiences across a broad ideological spectrum by leveraging Russia’s limited but influential Latin American alliances—and those of friendly nations such as Iran—to weaken US influence, strengthen authoritarianism, and create the perception that Russia has a strong international network of allies, even in a region dominated by the United States.”
Russia’s influence has been seen most heaviest in Venezuela and the Nicholas Maduro regime despite it not being in the Central American proper. Guatemala also has a lot of Russian influence in its mining sectors and inside its politics as the US Treasury Department has had to sanction Russian citizen Dmitry Kudryakov and Belarusian citizen Iryna Litviniuk, who financed and directed three mining companies in Guatemala.
So far, only one country, Costa Rica, has supported US efforts to impose economic sanctions on Russia, even though Latin America is an arena of primary US influence.
The report also said: “To achieve its often-underappreciated level of success in Latin America, Russia has built a broad and diverse information operations environment that relies on Spanish-language Russian state media, Latin American state media, social media allies, and websites that align with Russia on key narratives, integrating these messages and platforms into cyber echo chambers that amplify the message. This series of echo chambers is used by actors—almost all experienced and disciplined “super-spreaders” of disinformation—to push the Russian narratives far beyond what is traditionally measured in studies of Russian influence.26 In doing so, the super-spreaders have transformed the Latin American media landscape. A few examples illustrate how the system works.
“Successful Russian information operations require teams to craft the narratives and disseminators to adapt the messaging to target audiences and package it in a way that resonates with them. Although the radical populist governments of the Bolivarian Alliance are Russia’s natural allies in Latin America, along with kindred governments in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico, Russian information operations encompass a broader ideological coalition, and Russia successfully differentiates its messengers and messaging in order to find allies across the political spectrum without creating visible contradictions.”