Russia is targeting Mexico with anti-U.S. propaganda

OPINION:

A specter is haunting Mexico. The specter of Russian propaganda is part of a Kremlin disinformation campaign designed to turn America’s southern neighbor against it.

Earlier this year, I penned a Washington Times column titled “Russia is turning Latin America against the U.S. with veiled propaganda,” detailing how Kremlin-sponsored media outlets such as Russia Today, Sputnik, Tass and RIA Novosti are targeting Central and South America in Spanish, intending to ignite anti-U.S. sentiment. I wrote that RT Español has a staff of more than 200 Spanish-speaking employees in Moscow dedicated to disseminating the Kremlin’s anti-Western viewpoint throughout the region.

The column also revealed that Kremlin-sponsored outlets falsely accused then President-elect Donald Trump of planning to use tariffs to “intensify … covert operations” in the region and reported that the U.S. Agency for International Development was igniting a civil war in Spain while mischaracterizing Republican support for anti-Maduro sanctions as a political tool to appease Florida’s Hispanic voters. These outlets also depicted the Putin regime as a defender of Christian values despite the ongoing genocide in Ukraine and Moscow’s mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children — an act Rep. Michael McCaul recently called, “evil in its pure form.”

As Moscow continues to contaminate Latin America with anti-American sentiment, it is taking aim at our southern neighbor. Shortly after the 2024 U.S. elections, the Digital News Association’s Latin America Disinformation Tracking Initiative revealed that Russian media were falsely reporting that Mr. Trump was seeking to ignite a trade war with Mexico to “break the value chains between the Mexican and American economies” and “end free trade” while weakening regional currencies.

The Kremlin’s interest in sowing discord in Mexico was reaffirmed in an April 2024 U.S. diplomatic cable titled “Mexico: RT’s invasion.” The cable’s findings, according to a recent New York Times report, were supported by a 2024 Justice Department investigation that uncovered a Kremlin-sponsored influence campaign called Doppelganger, which aimed to turn America’s allies and citizens against it.

According to the cable, American diplomats were alarmed by the “sudden and dramatic expansion” of Kremlin-sponsored news in the North American nation and troubled that RT Español’s audience skyrocketed from 191,000 views on X in 2022 to 715 million in 2023.

The cable partly attributed the “allegedly sympathetic abettors in President Lopez Obrador’s administration” for the domination of Russian media in Mexico. The recent New York Times report pointed out that the Kremlin’s presence in Latin America has escalated since RT has been widely blocked throughout Europe.

“RT’s aggressive investment in Mexico and its strategy to build its credibility and undermine the United States poses a threat to current popular perception,” said the cable, adding that “mission Mexico needs more resources to counter RT’s well-funded efforts.” According to a Justice Department affidavit, “The campaign intended to encourage ‘anti-American sentiment’ as well as to exacerbate confrontation between the United States and Mexico.”

These concerns are not just in Washington. Three sources told The New York Times that British and French officials raised concerns about Russia’s regional activities with the Mexican foreign ministry, and with good reason.

A November report published by the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy found that the decades-old Club de Periodistas de Mexico (Club of Journalists of Mexico) is collaborating with Russian state media. The club recently bestowed awards on three RT journalists for its skewed coverage of the Kremlin’s “special operation in Ukraine.” Viktor Koronelli, then Russia’s ambassador to Mexico, thanked Mexico during the ceremony for its support “in its fight against Ukrainian terrorism.”

The club, founded in 1952, receives state funding from the Mexican Senate and is now training RT journalists.

The Alliance for Securing Democracy confirms that Kremlin-sponsored Spanish-language media are outperforming their counterparts in English and other languages aimed at Latin American audiences: Before being removed from Meta last year, RT en Español had more than 18 million followers on Facebook, dominating Spanish-language offerings from Western outlets such as CNN and BBC Mundo. According to the Alliance for Securing Democracy, RT en Español’s cable service is in nearly all Latin American nations, boasting a following of more than 500 million, with 40 million in Mexico.

While Kremlin-sponsored outlets have dominated the Western Hemisphere with conventional methods, the Alliance for Securing Democracy reports that its operatives are “resorting to covert tactics to circumvent bans on state outlets and reach new audiences.”

These tactics, the group says, include “information laundering,” a process of republishing content from Russian sources on less suspicious third-party websites to dampen people’s awareness that they are reading Kremlin propaganda. “Venezuela’s state outlet TeleSUR, for example, serves as a ‘media vassal,’ redistributing content from Russian and Chinese state media to reinforce narratives supporting autocracy and denigrating the West,” the report reads.

Another investigation led by the German Marshall Fund and Factchequeado, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization combating disinformation, analyzed content produced by the club’s online news aggregator and opinion site, Voces del Periodista Diario (Journalist’s Voices Daily). Their findings indicate that since April, the site has laundered nearly two-thirds of its content from Russian state outlets Sputnik Mundo and RT en Español, along with the Cuban state-run site Prensa Latina.

While the Kremlin continues to implement covert tactics to spread anti-American sentiment throughout Latin America, it also targets U.S. intelligence services to exploit the region’s neocolonial past. In one month alone, the Digital News Association found that Russian state media made 610 mentions of the CIA and regularly promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories.

In its content analysis, the Alliance for Securing Democracy found that the content published by Voces del Periodista Diario largely favors Russia and victim-blames Ukraine for “terrorism” while targeting other U.S. allies, such as Israel.

As I concluded in my previous column, “Russia rewards the loyalty of its Latin American allies by legitimizing their authoritarian measures” and has done so in dictatorships such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Such rewards are not limited to totalitarian states and are stealthily creeping into control of Latin America’s more U.S.-friendly democracies.

It is in the interests of the United States to combat Russian propaganda and disinformation to dispel anti-American sentiment and maintain peace, freedom and stability throughout the Western Hemisphere.

• Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is a journalist who has reported on Russian affairs. He served as a senior adviser and director for the U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting from 2017 to 2021 and now oversees the Digital News Association’s Latin America Disinformation Tracking Initiative, which identifies Kremlin narratives aimed at Spanish-language audiences.