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Disinfo: US dirty war in Facebook against Venezuela, Bolivia and Mexico is a new Condor Plan

Summary

Facebook removed dozens of accounts, Instagram pages and fake profiles linked to the US company CLS Strategies that pretended to be local pages from Mexico, Bolivia and Venezuela while promoting disaffection against progressive rulers and an image of governmental chaos in those countries. Disinformation, essential to manipulate citizens, has become a very powerful weapon, one that the US has used and still uses shamelessly. The goal was to weaken or overthrow these progressive governments, as the US has wanted for years, and promote the Bolivian government resulting of the coup carried out by Jeanine Áñez. This US dirty war on Facebook against Venezuela, Bolivia and Mexico is a new ‘Condor Plan’ to dominate Latin America again.

Disproof

Though the information on the CLS Strategies network is correct, as confirmed by Facebook and the Stanford Internet Observatory, the comparison with the so-called Condor Plan is not. CLS Strategies is a private company and was hired in this capacity by the Bolivian government and private citizens of Venezuela and Mexico, and there is no evidence that it was acting on behalf of the US government.

This is part of a recurrent Russian disinformation narrative about constant US plots to undermine Latin American governments. You can see many examples in our database, such as an alleged CIA-led Twitter campaign and a hybrid war in Bolivia, the engineering of blackouts all over Latin America, the promotion of secessionism in Mexico or Venezuela, the training of Venezuelan exiles in Guyana for military operations inside the country or preparations for a military intervention in that country after forcing Brazil to join NATO.

 

Background:

The Condor Plan or Operation Condor was a US-backed, coordinated intelligence operation from 1968 to 1989, formally institutionalised in 1975, between right-wing Latin American dictatorships, whose intelligence services illegally tracked down, kidnapped, murdered or forcefully disappeared thousands of political opponents across the continent. At least 50,000 killings were documented by the perpetrators. Any comparison between these events and an influence campaign in social media by a PR company, as it is the case, is not relevant.

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publication/media

RT Spanish
  • Reported in: Issue 212
  • DATE OF PUBLICATION: 08/09/2020
  • Language/target audience: Spanish, Castilian
  • Country: Bolivia, Mexico, Venezuela, US
  • Keywords: Nicolas Maduro, Facebook, Coup

Disclaimer

Cases in the EUvsDisinfo database focus on messages in the international information space that are identified as providing a partial, distorted, or false depiction of reality and spread key pro-Kremlin messages. This does not necessarily imply, however, that a given outlet is linked to the Kremlin or editorially pro-Kremlin, or that it has intentionally sought to disinform. EUvsDisinfo publications do not represent an official EU position, as the information and opinions expressed are based on media reporting and analysis of the East Stratcom Task Force.

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