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Gustavo Petro stated that the nearly 50% drop in cocaine seizures during his government had strengthened drug trafficking organizations, which he claimed had 45% more resources. He said this gave them greater capacity to obtain weapons and mercenaries, buy coca leaves, and kill the population. Petro questioned what he called the media spectacle of Abelardo, who appeared with a gun at his waist and a bulletproof vest. He stated that between August 7 and September 19, 2026, 94,868 kilos were seized, the lowest record in five years for that period. In the first year of his presidency, he noted, 147,239 kilos were seized, 58% more. He added that cocaine seizures had fallen by 47% compared to 2025, with 63,310 kilos confiscated. According to Petro, September recorded the lowest monthly seizure since December 2021, when 36,635 kilos were seized. #Narcotráfico #Cocaína #Incautaciones (translated)

Martín argued that an image of Mauricio Lemos and Britos laughing, kissing, and hugging Fosatti summarized a team that he described as interested, losing, and out of place. He stated that Peñarol had lost the championship against Progreso and described what happened that day as the culmination. He also announced a post-match on Kick at 8:30 PM. #Peñarol #FútbolUruguayo #Deportes (translated)

The author rejected the creation of a "Ministry of Truth" and the EU's "Democratic Shields," which he described as instruments of censorship and ideological repression. He also stated that there was no need for a legion of mercenaries financed by the EU in journalism and the media. The message ended with the unfinished beginning of a sentence: "We need." #LibertadDeExpresión #Censura #MediosDeComunicación #EU (translated)

Operation Dark Clark – Russia built a real organisation around a false identity Most influence operations create fake people, fake websites or fake news stories. Operation Dark Clark appears to have gone considerably further: Russian operators built what looked like a functioning research organisation in Latin America, employed real people to produce genuine research and concealed from those employees who was ultimately directing their work. OpenAI disclosed the operation on 8 October after banning a cluster of accounts originating in Russia. The actors used ChatGPT while targeting countries across Latin America, principally to damage Ukraine’s reputation, manipulate domestic political debates and manage a self-described research organisation called the Social Research Center, or SRC. OpenAI assessed Dark Clark as Category Five on the six-level Breakout Scale, the first operation it has disrupted since beginning its influence-operation reporting to reach that level. A front organisation with real employees The SRC presented itself as a research platform studying subjects including Latin America’s relationship with India and the Indian diaspora. OpenAI found more than 60 articles on its website, most of them apparently original rather than plagiarised. Internal reports produced by the Russian operators discussed hiring, dismissals, salary scales, staffing and unfinished research projects, strongly suggesting that the operators controlled the organisation rather than merely collaborating with it. At the centre of the structure was “Mia Clark”, a fictitious identity reportedly used to manage social-media activity and communicate with staff. According to OpenAI, the available evidence indicates that employees working for SRC in Latin America were probably unaware that the organisation was being directed by Russian actors. They interviewed experts, conducted research and wrote papers in what appears to have been good faith. The deception therefore existed primarily at the organisational level: much of the work was real, but the identity and strategic purpose of the institution commissioning it were not. OpenAI This is one reason Dark Clark differs from the familiar model of a troll farm. A reader encountering an SRC paper might be looking at research genuinely written by a Latin American employee based on genuine interviews. The manipulation lies further upstream, in who built the institution, selected its direction and controlled its infrastructure. From forged emails to real events The operation also appears to have attempted something more ambitious than online persuasion: inducing real people to produce events that could later be turned into propaganda. In May 2026, according to the operators’ internal reports, they created an email address impersonating Lima’s regional education authorities and instructed schools to organise activities about Ukraine for a cultural-diversity event. The instructions included references to Stepan Bandera, whose historical legacy remains particularly contentious in Poland and parts of Eastern Europe. The operators claimed that some schools complied, replied to the false address and sent photographs of the events. OpenAI could not independently verify every claim contained in the operators’ reports. It did, however, find Peruvian reporting matching the story, followed by publications in Poland and an English-language outlet in Hungary. Some coverage included comments from a Polish MEP calling for people displaying what he described as anti-Polish attitudes to be declared persona non grata. OpenAI therefore concluded that the fabricated starting point appears to have entered genuine political debate across national borders. The mechanism is unusually effective because the final photographs need not themselves be fabricated. If people can be tricked into staging a real event on the basis of a forged instruction, the operation creates authentic visual evidence of something that was artificially initiated. The same method in Ecuador and Bolivia Dark Clark’s internal reports describe similar efforts elsewhere. In Ecuador, the operators claimed they used a fake education email to encourage schools to stage ceremonies involving President Daniel Noboa and Erik Prince, the former head of Blackwater. Ecuadorian media subsequently covered a matching controversy, and the country’s education minister issued a detailed denial. Other Ecuador-focused material included fabricated audio attributed to Ukraine’s consul and a false television report alleging that Noboa’s government was recruiting Ecuadorians to fight in Ukraine. Local fact-checker Lupa found that the supposed Teleamazonas report had never been broadcast, that images had been taken from Instagram, that the audio was AI-generated and that a company named in a supposed recruitment contract did not exist in Ecuador’s corporate registry. In Bolivia, an internal report described a fake audio recording supposedly made by an employee of state water company EPSAS during anti-government protests. It claimed that water supplies to La Paz would be cut and a state of emergency declared. The allegation produced a fact-check and an official denial. OpenAI says the operators explicitly described their objective as worsening the political crisis surrounding the demonstrations. Possible links to the post-Wagner influence machine Dark Clark did not emerge in a vacuum. The operators repeatedly asked ChatGPT about Politology and La Compania, names associated in previous investigations with the Russian influence apparatus that developed from structures once connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin. Forbidden Stories and its partners obtained 1,431 pages of internal documents describing a network known as “The Company”, which they reported had grown to almost 100 operatives and was conducting influence projects across roughly 30 Global South countries. Their investigation found that the organisation moved under the supervision of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, after Prigozhin’s death. Its documented budget for ten months of activity in 2024 was approximately €7.3 million. Two older Argentina campaigns claimed in Dark Clark’s internal reports — a false story about Javier Milei buying Cartier collars for his dogs and the staging of anti-Milei graffiti — had already been independently attributed by investigative journalists to Politology/La Compania. That is significant corroboration, but it is not enough to prove that every Dark Clark activity was run by the same organisational structure. AI was the back office, not the mastermind Perhaps the most important finding concerns artificial intelligence itself. In most documented cases, the Russians were not using ChatGPT to generate the propaganda seen by the public. Their principal use was administrative: drafting reports for an unknown superior, summarising operations, translating material and recording the supposed success of campaigns. Those reports also expose a weakness in the operators’ own measurement. OpenAI found instances in which they tried to claim credit for developments they had probably not caused, suggesting that they were not only attempting to manipulate Latin American audiences but also presenting an inflated picture of their effectiveness to whoever was supervising them. Dark Clark nevertheless broke further into the real world than any influence operation OpenAI had previously disrupted. Under the Brookings framework, Category Five means that an operation has escaped its original network and been amplified by high-profile individuals such as politicians. Dark Clark crossed that threshold because fabricated narratives appear to have provoked governmental denials, mainstream reporting and political comment in several countries. Its most important innovation was therefore not a particularly convincing deepfake. It was the construction of a partly genuine institution around a concealed foreign controller. The research could be real. The employees could be real. The interviews could be real. What was false was who they were ultimately working for. Sources OpenAI — Disrupting AI-enabled “false front” operations https://openai.com/index/disrupting-ai-enabled-false-front-operations/ Forbidden Stories — Propaganda Machine: Russia’s foreign influence strategy across three continents https://forbiddenstories.org/propaganda-machine-secret-documents-reveal-russias-foreign-influence-strategy-across-three-continents/ Forbidden Stories — Ghost Journalists, Cash and Kremlin Scripts: Argentina https://forbiddenstories.org/ghost-journalists-cash-and-kremlin-scripts-how-russian-operatives-tried-to-influence-argentinian-media/ openDemocracy — Russian influence operation in Bolivia https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/russia-bolivia-south-america-putin-evo-morales-wagner-prigozhin-covert-operations-propaganda-disinformation-foreign-interference/ Lupa Media — Fake Teleamazonas report about recruiting Ecuadorians for Ukraine https://lupa.com.ec/verificaciones/noboa-mercenarios-ucrania-ecuador/ Brookings Institution — The Breakout Scale https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-breakout-scale-measuring-the-impact-of-influence-operations/ Keywords: #DISINFORMED #Episode17 #OperationDarkClark #DarkClark #Russia #LatinAmerica #RussianInfluence #RussianDisinformation #Disinformation #InformationWarfare #InfluenceOperations #ForeignInterference #FIMI #FalseFront #FrontOrganisation #FakeInstitution #SocialResearchCenter #SRC #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #GenerativeAI #ChatGPT #OpenAI #NarrativeManipulation #SourceLaundering #InstitutionalManipulation #ForgedDocuments #FakeAudio #PoliticalInfluence #CovertInfluence #Peru #Ecuador #Bolivia #Argentina #Ukraine #Politology #LaCompania #TheCompany #SVR #WagnerLegacy #PropagandaMachine #GlobalSouth #BreakoutScale #OSINT #MediaManipulation #WRLD

The author stated that the cartels had been sending fighters to Ukraine for some time to gain combat experience and that those who survived were sent back to fight against their enemies. He also described CJNG mercenaries in Ukrainian forests and presented them as NATO comrades. https://t.co/JCmtmWMjUq #CJNG #Ucrania #Conflicto #UA (translated)

Mati Smith stated that in C5N they had recognized that Lula financed the campaigns of Kirchnerism. He also mentioned a comment according to which, by 2027, they needed Lula to be president to help them defeat Milei. Smith referred to those mentioned as mercenaries and anti-patriots. https://t.co/SYsrwqWSGd #Política #Argentina #Lula (translated)

The author accused Vero Brunati and other critics of repeating arguments about the friendly matches without modifying the text and described them as people paid to attack the AFA. He argued that the matches were originally planned to be held in China and that, in that case, Lionel Messi would not have been able to say goodbye to the national team in Argentina and in front of his fans. He also stated that FIFA recognized the friendlies as Class A matches, which allowed pending sanctions for Enzo, Thiago, and members of the coaching staff, including Ayala, to be fulfilled before the qualifiers. According to the author, holding the dates in China would not have allowed Argentina to comply with the attendance sanction, meaning the national team would have faced a qualifying match with reduced capacity. He added that the AFA took advantage of the friendlies to say goodbye to Messi in front of his fans, fulfill the sanctions, and avoid problems in the qualifiers. He accused those who criticized the AFA of also positioning themselves against Messi, Lionel Scaloni, and the national team. #AFA #Messi #Eliminatorias (translated)

SE RE PUDRIO EN YEMEN Los huties (bancados x iran) tomaron unos puertos cerca del estrecho Bab al-Mandab que desemboca en el canal de suez Ahora arabia saudita va a tener que tarjetear 10,000 mercenarios para destrabar y que no aumente el betroleo https://t.co/Zsjr9fuJmv #Yemen #Hutíes #ArabiaSaudita

Te encargaron infiltrarte en un curso universitario para hacer una pieza contra mí e intimidar al profesorado y llegaste a escribir que “El príncipe” de Maquiavelo es una novela. Vais de periodistas y sois una turba de mercenarios analfabetos https://t.co/e2069uP9Iq #Educación #Periodismo #Literatura

Expulsan a los reporteros de Malas Lenguas y Mañaneros360 de las manifestaciones por la invasión de Ceuta que está habiendo en Madrid. Son unos mercenarios que se dedican a mentir sobre las situaciones que sufre la gente de a pie. Que no se hagan los sorprendidos cuando esas mismas personas los expulsan de sus convocatorias. #Ceuta #Madrid #LibertadDePrensa

Elisa Beni amenazando a Sarah. A este nivel a llegado esta mujer. Hace unos años, ser progresista daba fama y pasta, ahora lo da ser ultra. Siempre han sido unos mercenarios. https://t.co/MSktlfqVR4 #Política #Sociedad #Progresismo