A Washington, DC-based PR firm linked to the US government and Democratic Party, CLS Strategies, ran a fake news network on Facebook and Instagram, spreading propaganda for Bolivia’s coup regime and the right-wing opposition in Venezuela and Mexico.
by Ben Norton
Part 5 - CLS Strategies signs PR contract with Bolivia’s coup regime
After overthrowing Bolivia’s democratically elected President Evo Morales in a US-backed military coup on November 10, 2019, the new junta immediately sought out public relations flacks in Washington help whitewash its image.
Almost exactly a month later, on December 11, 2019, CLS Strategies registered under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as a lobbyist for the Bolivian coup regime.
The firm signed a 90-day contract, at a neat $90,000, agreeing to “provide strategic communications counsel,” which included “creating and distributing communications materials, interfacing with the media, and providing communications services as directed by the Plurinational State of Bolivia.”
This contract did not include CLS Strategies’ work on behalf of the Venezuelan opposition. It is not clear where the firm got the $3.6 million it spent on Facebook ads.
As part of its contract with the Bolivian coup regime, CLS Strategies also helped coordinate meetings between top US government officials and the Bolivian junta’s far-right minister of government, Arturo Murillo, according to another FARA document.
Murillo is an extremist who pledged to “hunt” left-wing leaders from Evo Morales’ MAS party like “animals,” and even went so far as to falsely claim that indigenous protesters massacred by the coup regime had actually shot themselves and then blamed it on the junta.
When he visited Washington in December 2019, CLS Strategies organized in-person meetings between Murillo and Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rick Scott, along with staffers from the National Security Council, State Department, USAID, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and House Foreign Affairs Committee.
CLS also successfully scheduled meetings between the extremist Bolivian minister and Luis Almagro, the hardline right-wing leader of the Organization of American States (OAS), which played a key role in the coup, as well as with the head of the OAS’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
The PR firm then helped plan an event with Murillo at the corporate lobby group the Council of the Americas / Americas Society.
CLS Strategies also coordinated interviews with Murillo for CNN en Español and the major Spanish news agency EFE.
On behalf of the coup regime, CLS likewise contacted the offices of Senator Tim Kaine and House Representatives Eliot Engel, Albio Sires, Mario Diaz-Balart, and Francis Rooney, along with the the prominent DC think tank the Inter-American Dialogue, which hosted an event with Bolivian fascist coup leader Luis Fernando Camacho.
The agreement that CLS Strategies signed with the Bolivian was personally signed by partner Brian Berry, who boasts of having worked for an array of large corporate clients.
At the same time, CLS Strategies Managing Director William Moore also registered with FARA to represent the Bolivian coup regime.
FARA requires registrants to disclose if they have made any political contributions in the past 60 days. Moore revealed that he had donated to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign exactly one week before. (This was months before the start of the Democratic presidential primaries.)
William Moore was identified in the Stanford Internet Observatory report as one of the CLS employees who operated the fake news campaign on Facebook.
CLS Strategies removed Moore’s bio from its website, apparently in response to the revelation of its involvement in the Facebook fake news scandal. Moore also took down his LinkedIn profile.
But a cached version of Moore’s CLS page is available, indicating that it was only recently scrubbed. There, Moore boasts that “he applies his professional experience in Latin America to serve private and public sector clients across the region and in the practice areas of public affairs, crisis communications, and political strategy.”
Moore’s bio adds, “Prior to joining CLS, William cut his teeth at a strategic communications and public affairs agency in Bogota, through which he worked with a government ministry.” He also represented numerous multinational corporations, helping them as they “expanded operations in Colombia.”
When CLS Strategies Managing Director William Moore and partner Brian Berry registered to lobby on behalf of the Bolivian coup regime, they were joined by another colleague: Juan Cortiñas Garcia.
Cortiñas and Moore reportedly led CLS Strategies’ work for the Bolivian junta.
As with Moore’s profile, Cortiñas’ bio was removed from the CLS Strategies website, as the firm has apparently tried to scrub its involvement in the scandal. Coriñas also took down his LinkedIn profile, which he had linked to in his CLS bio.
But in its report on the CLS fake news ring, Stanford University linked to an archived version of Juan Cortiñas’ professional profile. In this bio, he boasts of having “worked with some of the leading political leaders in Latin America such as former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, Argentine Congressman Sergio Massa and the Venezuelan opposition, helping with political communications, campaign strategy and developing digital-based campaigns.”
Cortiñas, who also served as the press secretary for hard-line Florida Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, added that he has “counseled some of the largest companies in Latin America,” and boasted of “helping a Fortune 500 company overcome a reputational crisis that spread across the front pages of newspapers in Mexico.”
FARA registration files reviewed by The Grayzone show that Juan Cortiñas has registered to work on behalf of numerous foreign governments, including Aruba, Bolivia, the right-wing administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto in Mexico, and the coup regime in Honduras.
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