Russia has scaled up its efforts to spread propaganda in Mexico, aiming to create a rupture between the United States and its biggest trading partner, according to a 2024 cable written by American diplomats and seen by The New York Times. The Spanish-language services of the Russian-funded media outlets RT and Sputnik have dramatically expanded their presence in Mexico in recent years thanks to “sympathetic abettors” in then-President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s administration, the cable says.
The Times also cited a new report from the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a counter-propaganda initiative of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, which details how the website of one of Mexico’s oldest clubs for journalists has become “a conduit for pro-Kremlin and anti-Western propaganda, laundering almost two-thirds of its content since April 2025 from RT en Español, Sputnik Mundo, and the Cuban state-run Prensa Latina.”
In a March 2024 WPR briefing, Brenda Estefan and David Agren detailed how Russian propaganda is growing its reach not just in Mexico, but across Latin America. Russian propaganda has “found a receptive audience in much of the region, due to a variety of factors that make public opinion vulnerable to the Kremlin narrative,” Estefan and Agren wrote. “These include insular journalistic cultures, a general distrust of traditional media outlets and longstanding popular suspicion of the U.S. for its history of political meddling in Latin America.”
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