assignment of eight contracts between 2017 and 2018 worth 12.4 million bolivianos (around
1.8 million dollars). Neurona stated it worked on social media and communication strategies,
among other things, for Morales’ campaigns (León, 2019). Similarly, the government paid
549,840 bolivianos (almost 80,000 dollars) to the agency Espora for the design of a digital
strategy and the analysis of social media use and influencers in Bolivia (Página Siete, 2019),
although there is no further evidence about the nature of the work undertaken.
The political party Unidad Democrata is also suspected of using the services IDEIA Big Data,
a company which uses the techniques of psychological profiling. An analysis of the pitch desk
of the company shows that “several sentences in the slides are exact transcriptions of a
presentation of Cambridge Analytica chief executive” (Goldhill, 2019). The company also
claims “to have worked” with the Unidad Democrata in Bolivia (Goldhill, 2019).
Whilst the presence of coordinated online activities propelled by Morales’ government has not
been extensively examined, researchers and journalists have recently observed an
extraordinary wave of new Twitter accounts in late 2019 that supported the interim government.
Also, on December 10, 2019 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights published
preliminary findings (Organization of American States, 2019) in which it identified that these
accounts supported Luis Fernando Camacho and Jeanine Áñez, president of the Civic
Committee of Santa Cruz and interim President, respectively (Gallagher, 2019). In spite of the
ideological connection, there is no evidence to link the incident to Camacho or Áñez.
It is also worth noting that a US Army veteran called Luis Suarez actively participated in
automating his own account in order to amplify content favouring the opposition (Díaz Arnau,
2020b). In fact, his account was among those most active in the online campaign in favour of
Morales’ removal. According to Julián Macías Tovar, social media coordinator for the Spanish
party Podemos, who examined a set of accounts during the November and December crisis,
stated that the automation was done via the use of “a custom app named tfb-suarez” (Gallagher,
2019).
Most recently, the interim government has accused the former government of attacking the
Twitter account of the Ministry of Justice and posting a list of people in Bolivia with COVID19. However, forensic analysis by the Ministry pointed towards the account
@SoyUnCocodriloS, which had the credentials of the official account and is associated with
José Daniel Llorenti (Europa Press, 2020). Llorenti is the nephew of the former Permanent
Representative to the United Nations and Ambassador of Bolivia to the United Nations and a
founding member of the “Generación Evo” movement. He has also an arrest warrant related to
his involvement with Morales’ Digital Warriors strategy (Ibid.).
Finally, it is worth noting that there have also been references to foreign activities targeting
Bolivia during the election campaigns and the associated political turmoil of late 2019. In
October 2019, Facebook removed thirty-six accounts, six pages, four groups, and ten Instagram
accounts originating in Iran that focused on Bolivia, among other Latin American countries
(Gleicher, 2019).
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