By Kirk C. Nielsen, FloridaBulldog.org
Possibly the most insane and certainly the most geographically concentrated place where ex-President Trump’s debunked rigged election claims morphed into gospel truths—including the debunked Dominion voting machine conspiracy—is South Florida’s Spanish talk radio universe.
Here, some 20 pro-Trump hosts and a long roster of guest “analysts” on six Spanish-language AM stations have for four years waged a daily nonstop attack campaign portraying President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris (now the Democrats’ presidential nominee) as “extreme leftists” bent on installing a socialist dictatorship in, or even “destroying,” the United States.
Always in the mix is the conviction that Democrats stole the 2020 election using rigged voting machines and other means of cheating and are conspiring to fix this November’s presidential results against the man many listeners still call ‘‘el presidente” (“the president”) or “nuestro presidente” (“our president)” or even “el mejor presidente en la historia de los Estados Unidos” (“The greatest president in the history of the United States”). Talk of rigged elections sometimes comes with declarations that if Trump loses this November, disbelieving supporters will protest violently.
And here, it’s as if Dominion Voting Systems never sued Fox News for defamation in 2021, or won a quarter of a billion-dollar settlement in April of last year against the often-inflammatory television news broadcaster.
“That Dominion thing is totally true. That’s going to be proved,” guest commentator Esteban Gerbasi declared in Spanish this past Jan. 22 to Augustín Acosta and Marián de la Fuente, co-hosts of a four-hour show on Actualidad Radio (WURN 1040 AM). During a 40-minute interview that Monday, Gerbasi, a Venezuelan native who resides in Miami-Dade, said he belongs to a “great team” that has done “a big investigation” into Dominion voting machines. “We already know where the cheating is done, how the cheating is done.”
Gerbasi claimed that Dominion machines “use mother software that was designed at the University of Havana” and developed by a Venezuelan technology company with headquarters “north of Miami named Smartmatic.” The software, he said, “has been used in Venezuela since 2004.” Without citing evidence or sources, he insisted an “algorithm” could make the software flip thousands of votes from one candidate to another. It could “reduce” votes from a “conservative” area in Miami-Dade and tally them for “a liberal zone” without anybody noticing, he explained.
“These election management companies are not made to administer the democratic will of the people but to steal elections,” Gerbasi told the hosts.
Gerbasi’s claim had an eerie resemblance to the tale Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell started telling repeatedly on Fox News in November 2020 in interviews with hosts Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro: that software developed in dictator Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and installed in Dominion Voting Systems ballot scanners tipped the 2020 results in favor of Biden.
In their complaint against Fox, Dominion’s lawyers wrote that Powell and Giuliani had engaged in a “fantasy of a vote-flipping-machine made for a deceased Venezuelan dictator” that was “nonsensical and verifiably false.” The lawyers charged that “before hosting Powell and Giuliani, Fox and its on-air talent Bartiromo and Dobbs at a minimum recklessly disregarded the fact—and indeed knew—that voters had used paper ballots that could be recounted by hand, and that Dominion was not owned by Smartmatic.”
Rather than question Gerbasi’s assertions, De la Fuente—a native of Spain whose website describes her as “one of the most respected hard news journalists at the international level for her versatility and credibility”—gave them credence. Mimicking what countless Trump followers have recited since November 2020, she recalled finding it “very strange” on election night in 2020 that the presidential results map was “red, red, red, red and then suddenly 400,000 votes, 300,000 votes were all for Biden.”
Offering his own conspiratorial anecdote, Acosta (who is Cuban-American) recounted arriving home after election night at around 6:00 a.m. with Trump ahead in six battleground states. But when he turned on the television later that morning, “I almost fell on my back because in the six states that I just mentioned where he was winning, Trump was now losing. And I said, but where did they get these votes from?”
To that, Gerbasi replied: “That’s the same script that was used in Venezuela in 2004. Exactly the same. They change the results between the rooster and midnight—that’s a very Latin phrase.”
RIGGED ELECTION CLAIMS
Stolen election claims are hardly new here. Sometimes specific, usually vague, often preposterous, they started buzzing in this Spanish talk radio universe long before a certain brand of ballot scanners became a household word for tens of thousands of AM listeners in South Florida (and others via internet streaming services and social media).
As if to suggest that lots of people would join the fight, De Varona mentioned that pro-Trump caravan of four-thousand cars had wound through Miami-Dade that month (true) and an even bigger caravan was planned for that October, then declared: “We’re going to take to the streets, everyone, to defend democracy in this country and keep them from stealing the election from the President with a golpe de estado!”
In September 2020, listeners to a show called “Acontecer” (“Happening”) on then locally-owned La Poderosa (WWFE-AM) heard the alternately chirpy and stern septuagenarian host Lucy Pereda introduce her guest, John Birch Society affiliate Frank De Varona, as a journalist who’d uncovered a plot to overturn Trump’s certain reelection by force. De Varona told her he’d learned of a conspiracy involving Democratic operatives, “traitors” in the U.S. military command, corporate executives in “the deep state,” unions, Democratic governors, Black Lives Matter, anarchists, and communists to oust then-President Trump with a “golpe de estado,” a coup d’etat.
“We have to take to the streets against antifa, and if they have weapons, we will also have weapons to defend ourselves in the neighborhoods of the United States,” De Varona declared in Spanish and urged listeners to stock up on food and medical supplies.
As if to suggest that lots of people would join the fight, De Varona mentioned that pro-Trump caravan of four-thousand cars had wound through Miami-Dade that month (true) and an even bigger caravan was planned for that October, then declared: “We’re going to take to the streets, everyone, to defend democracy in this country and keep them from stealing the election from the President with a golpe de estado!”
Sounding alarmed, Pereda said she hoped President Trump would order troops “to protect us.”
There would be no coup, and nobody took to the streets (despite calls from listeners to do so). But pro-Trump hosts soon took to the airwaves with the gamut of the Trump campaign’s rigged election claims, especially a yarn about a vote-flipping machine made for Hugo Chavez that an American company in cahoots with Democrats had now deployed to steal the election for Biden.
After Dominion filed its defamation lawsuits against Giuliani and Powell in January 2021 and Fox two months later, explicit references to the company waned on pro-Trump talk radio broadcasting in English.
Alarmed by the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by rioters charged up with Trump’s rigged election claims, some English-language network executives enacted editorial policies aimed at keeping unsubstantiated and disproven election fraud conspiracy theories off the air.
But in South Florida, Spanish talk radio listeners continued to hear a plethora of mentions of “máquinas Dominion” (“Dominion machines”). Hosts, guests and callers couldn’t resist.
“In Michigan they used machines, Dominion machines, I think they were,” host Lourdes Bertot declared in Spanish on then Univision-owned Radio Mambí (WAQI 710 AM) in March 2021, three days before Dominion filed its defamation lawsuit against Fox.
Bertot, a Cuban-American with the on-air name Lourdes D’Kendall, was responding to an irate male caller convinced that Democrats used fraudulent absentee ballots to steal the election from Trump. “They said that from now on, voting is going to be done with a paper ballot. So, congratulations to Michigan,” Bertot added. “That’s the attitude that has to be taken from now on to recover the voter’s faith in the system.”
In reality, Michigan law had for years required voters to use paper ballots, which are then tabulated by optical scanners. Nor did Bertot mention that a bipartisan audit of Dominion scanners in Michigan’s Antrim County in December 2020 determined the scanners accurately read the paper ballots voters had cast the previous month. (Bertot died from cancer in October 2021.)
The fantastical Dominion-Hugo Chavez connection seemed to resonate especially with a the stations’ main cohort of callers: Cuban and Venezuelan exiles enraged at the socialist dictatorships in Havana and Caracas, enamored with Trump, and hostile to Democrats, whom some callers equated with diabolical communists.
That rage helped kindle incredible tales of voting machine fraud that never crossed the language barrier into Fox News or other English-language outlets for pro-Trump disinformation. For example, during a June 2022 show on Radio Mambí, a furious male caller declared that rigged Dominion voting machines had swung Colombia’s presidential election the day before in favor of former leftist guerrilla leader Gustavo Petro. The caller said Cuban agents had brought the Dominion machines into Colombia during Juan Manuel Santos’s 2010-2018 presidency.
“The dogs of Cuban security had already penetrated Colombia a long time ago during Santos. And they already had all the bases created to do this fraud that they did with Dominion,” the caller declared angrily in Spanish. “It’s clearer than water!” Dominion runs elections in the United States, he said. “We have to be very careful here, because I don’t doubt at all that they’re going to commit the same fraud again!”
“Thank you!” boomed host Nelson Rubio, known for loudly interrupting the odd caller who speaks favorably of Democrats or critically of Trump. “Let’s go with more of our listeners.”
On Actualidad Radio in September 2022, Augustín Acosta talked at length with his then co-host Carines Moncada about a report by “a group of experts” concerning a “vulnerability” in voting machines that could be “electronically manipulated from a distance” for cheating in that year’s midterms.
“Listen to how the headline reads: They have to replace the Dominion company’s voting machines before the November elections because they represent a grave threat,” Acosta recited, translating from English. “That is the conclusion of the study.” He offered no details of who specifically conducted the study, where exactly the supposedly vulnerable machines were, or what Dominion had to say about the report, and Moncada didn’t ask. Instead she complained that “máquinas Dominion” had been a concern “since before the last elections between Donald Trump and Joe Biden” and that “the media had prohibited talking about the topic” along with other “irregularities” like “undocumented persons” voting in Nevada and Arizona.
As Dominion’s lawyers pursued their defamation case against Fox throughout 2022 and into 2023, “las máquinas Dominion”—or “las máquinas” for short had become simply key words in South Florida’s collective Spanish talk radio narrative, in which “corrupt and communistic” Democratic elites, aided by cronies in the Justice Department, the FBI and mainstream “liberal” media, were allegedly orchestrating ingenious schemes to eliminate Trump. If a host, guest or caller upset about the results of the 2020 election didn’t actually say the name of the voting machine company, it was almost certainly on the tip of their tongues.
DOMINION STILL DENIGRATED
Dominion’s lucrative victory against Fox in April of 2023— in the form of a $787.5 million damages settlement deal—had no discernible impact on the talk coming out of South Florida’s pro-Trump stations.
Six months later on now Salem Media-owned La Nueva Poderosa, I heard De Varona, the Birch Society man, weave “Dominion” into a litany of praise for then newly elected U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson. De Varona credited the Louisiana Republican for endorsing the Dominion-Chavez conspiracy back in 2020.
“Of course the Democrats criticize him, because they say the elections were clean,” De Varona, scoffed by phone in Spanish, referring to Johnson. “But he also has mentioned that the little machines [maquinitas], the software, came from Venezuela, from Dominion Voting Systems above all.”
(Johnson told hosts at KEEL-AM in Shreveport two weeks after the 2020 election the Dominion accusation had “a lot of merit.” Audio of that interview remains posted on the KEEL website and on Johnson’s X feed.)
“Even RINOs had voted for the new Speaker,” De Varona added, using the scurrilous acronym for Republicans in Name Only.
Host Alberto Cutie, a Christian minister and Cuban exile, took issue with his use of RINO, saying the epithet “is hurting” the GOP. But he never questioned De Varona’s defamatory remark about Dominion.
Rubio and Cutie did not reply to requests for comment regarding the ethics of broadcasting unsubstantiated claims about election fraud and rigged voting machines.
As Trump amped up the rigged election canard during the primary campaign season this year, so did pro-Trump hosts and guests on the South Florida Spanish talk stations. Some, like Actualidad Radio’s Acosta, De la Fuente and Gerbasi, resurrected the debunked Dominion tale in detail. Other hosts managed to avoid naming the company, while implying they believed the conspiracy.
“I understand your question about the subject of the electoral act,” Jorge Sánchez Grass, host of “Direct Line Plus” (“Linea Directa Plus”), a two-hour show on Latino Media Network’s Radio Mambí, told an agitated male caller worried that Trump could not win this year given “all the problems” with the 2020 election, including allegedly rigged voting machines.
“This subject of the machines, of the elections, is tremendous!” Sanchez Grass added, then took the next caller.
On “Hoy Por Hoy” (“Day By Day”), a two-hour show on America Radio (WSUA 1260 AM), host Carines Moncada avoided uttering the D-word during a typical interview in May about “election integrity,” even though pro-Trump commentator Carlos Carballido, on the phone from Texas, did not. During a sprawling conversation, Moncada carped about Jimmy Carter’s certification of Hugo Chavez’s victory in a 2004 recall vote, saying it exemplified the naivety many Americans have about global communism. “Because they are very nice (son bonachones), and are naive to think that everybody is doing the correct thing,” she said. “And we are in front of a leftist monster with a thousand heads, right?”
“Well, and where do the voting machines come from?” Carballido asked. “What country?”
Moncada paused. “But look at what happened to Tucker Carlson for talking about that,” she said, apparently thinking Fox executives fired the talk show host for the spreading the Dominion-Venezuela story. (Emails that surfaced in the defamation lawsuit showed Carlson actually expressed skepticism about the Dominion claims others were making on Fox.) “And look at what happened to Trump’s lawyer, whose name escapes me.”
“Sidney Powell,” Carballido said, then scoffed that lawyers had forced Powell to retract her claims about Dominion machines. “If that’s not tyranny, tell me what it is!” Carballido groused, then said, inaccurately, that “Texas protected its elections and prohibited the use of Dominion and Smartmart [sic] machines.”
Despite such mentions of ballot scanner brands on the air, America Radio’s station director Luis Gutierrez told me, in English, he’s not concerned about triggering a defamation lawsuit.
“Because we don’t promote it. The Fox hosts were actually saying it,” Gutierrez reasoned, referring to the false claims about Dominion’s vote tabulators. “If a caller calls and says they were rigged, we’re not in the business to correct or educate. We’re in the business to communicate.
“We don’t promote conspiracy theories,” Gutierrez insisted. “And by we, I mean our people. Now if we invite somebody on the air to give their opinion and they’re off the rails, then that’s a different story. If our listeners call in and they want to make a comment, and that comment has no bearing on reality, honestly, by us just correcting it, it’s not going to do much.”
Hosts at other stations take a similar approach.
“I think my principle responsibility is to the First Amendment,” Radio Mambí’s Jorge Sanchez Grass, who is Cuban-American, told me in Spanish outside a sedation dentistry clinic, after a two-hour remote show that was equal parts anti-Democrat attack monologue, call-in and infomercial for the clinic.
At a forum on the “Hispanic vote” held at Florida International University this past March, I asked Ninoska Perez-Castellón, the Cuban-American host of a three-hour show on Salem Media-owned La Nueva Poderosa, to proffer an ethical journalistic approach toward assertions by callers and guests that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election and are plotting to steal this year’s.
“They can think whatever they want,” she said sternly (in English). “I’m not there to change their mind.”
But Fox’s lawyers based their failed defense against Dominion Voting Systems on a free speech argument. Under libel law, the jury would have had two considerations. Whether Fox executives and hosts knew statements about rigged Dominion machines were false but allowed them to air anyway. Or whether they merely acted recklessly in failing to determine the truthfulness of those statements.
Crucially, Dominion lawyers garnered enough text messages, emails and deposition testimony from Fox News insiders to force the settlement. Indeed, Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch admitted in a deposition that while he knew the claims involving rigged Dominion machines were false, he failed to impose sufficient editorial control to prevent hosts and guests from repeating them on the air.
“Dominion won because they took the deposition of Rupert Murdoch, and Rupert Murdoch said he knew it was bullshit. So therefore they weren’t protected by a good faith belief in the facts they were presenting,” Richard Burton, a Miami-based First Amendment lawyer, Democrat and former local AM talk show host, told me.
Assertions on South Florida’s Spanish talk stations involving rigged Dominion machines are also “a bunch of bullshit” and “probably actionable because it’s beyond the question of argument,” Burton said. But he suggested a company might shirk from suing “thinly capitalized” AM stations, which, unlike Fox, could lack the equity needed to pay big enough damages to warrant the expense of a lawsuit. “You’d have to go through hundreds if not thousands of hours of tapes, examination of emails and texts to be able to prove it,” Burton explained. “You’d be lucky to get back the cost of the case.”
(Voice messages left at Actualidad Radio for the station director went unanswered, as did emailed questions to Acosta. A media consultant who handled a request for comment I emailed to Dominion indicated the company wasn’t pursuing any defamation suits involving Spanish media in South Florida. A spokesman for Smartmatic said the Boca Raton-based firm has no lawsuits against Gerbasi or anyone else at the stations. Smartmatic has settled defamation lawsuits against Newsmax and One America News Network for undisclosed amounts and has pending suits against Fox and Sidney Powell.)
RADIO MAMBI REMAINS RADIO LOCO
Further vexing South Floridians distressed by the stations’ foment of stolen election paranoia has been the failure of Latino Media Network (LMN) to establish “balance and journalistic integrity” at Radio Mambí (WAQI). LMN co-founder Stephanie Valencia floated those watchwords in June 2022 when her New Mexico startup bought the station along with Miami-based sports talk WQBA and 16 other mostly FM music stations in other states from TelevisaUnivision.
News of the Mambí sale outraged a coalition of Cuban exile groups because a company affiliated with billionaire philanthropist George Soros had helped LMN finance the buy.
Some hosts at the Spanish-language AM stations have long demonized Soros.
Several hosts left Radio Mambí to protest the sale, but their replacements have continued to promote Trump, malign the Biden Administration, and demonize Soros.
One is former La Poderosa host Lucy Pereda, who joined Radio Mambí just after the sale to LMN and has used her show “Sin Censura” (“Uncensored”) as a forum for recycling Trump’s rigged election fabrications and entertaining other bizarre plots to keep him from returning to the White House.
“All the fraud that they’re going commit with the Dominion machines—they already have that prepared!” exclaimed an angry-sounding man during a call-in segment on Pereda’s show in April. “That, simultaneously with the war with Taiwan.”
“Well, yes, many people are saying that,” Pereda replied. “That if there is a war crisis with Taiwan or China, or the thing gets worse, they could declare a state of emergency for war and suspend the elections.” Then she added a Spanish refrain. “But let’s hope the blood doesn’t reach the river.”
On another show she entertained a ludicrous new variation on the Dominion-Venezuela canard involving an extradition deal last December for convicted U.S. Navy contractor Leonard Francis. The deal was real but a male caller claimed the Venezuelan government told the Biden Administration that in exchange for Francis, “You have to do the fraud with the Dominion machines.”
“Thank you for your call,” Pereda replied. “And there’s another point, also. Biden wants Venezuelan oil!” she added, with a laugh.
Like hosts on other stations, Pereda has often recited Trump’s old claim that Democrats exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to issue thousands of fraudulent mail-in ballots in 2020. But she has added a new twist: “Democrats” might use an avian flu pandemic to rig the 2024 vote.
“The experts are saying that this could be 100 times worse than COVID-19!” she exclaimed during an April show, citing misinformation from an article on Gateway Pundit, a pro-Trump website facing various defamation lawsuits, whose plaintiffs include Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer.
In mid-August, LMN finally launched several talk shows in South Florida with hosts who adhere to traditional American journalistic values (evidence, verification, substantiation, corroboration, fairness)—on WQBA, not Radio Mambí. Dubbed “El Pulso de Miami” (“The Pulse of Miami”), WQBA’s new programming includes “El Antídoto” (“The Antidote”), a show hosted by Uruguayan-born TV journalist Pedro Sevcec, which aims to counter misinformation and disinformation.
It should noted, however, that three longtime hosts on Actualidad Radio, Ricardo Brown, Juan Camilo Gómez and Roberto Rodriguez Tejera, are also adherents of fair, evidence-based journalism.
In a stroke of only-in-Miami absurdity, LMN has left Radio Mambí to run as a Soros-financed anti-Soros presence, with hour after hour of pro-Trump, anti-Democrat pontificating, infomercials featuring immigration lawyers, insurance agents, and financial experts and play-by-play of Florida Marlins baseball games.
LMN did not respond to emailed requests for comment.
PROPAGANDA, NOT JOURNALISM
“They are not behaving as journalists, and they are defrauding the profession,” Alejandro Alvarado, director of FIU’s Spanish-language master’s in journalism program, told me, referring to all the Trumpist hosts now populating the region’s AM airwaves. “They are basically helping in the fabrication or the construction of the conspiracy theories that come from the top of the structure, which is Donald Trump.”
He likens them to “brand ambassadors” but warns their spread of falsehoods about vote rigging amounts to “institutional harassment against electoral workers and electoral officials.”
“Now it’s a violence in the form of harassment of institutions. But it can become violence against adversaries,” Alvarado said.
America Radio’s station director Luis Rodriguez told me it was “obvious” that undermining trust in the electoral system is dangerous. “But, you know, these people that we invite, we can’t control ‘em,” he maintained, adding that other stations “are even more scandalous than ours.”
Ratings companies “control the money that we receive,” Rodriguez explained. “So for us not going down that really radical path, it kind of hurts us. Honestly, we would be in a better place if we could be lying all day.
“At the end of the day, it’s just pure business,” Rodriguez said. “If I could do other types of content that could generate more revenue, well, we would go down that path.”
And so “the ghost of election fraud,” as Actualidad’s De la Fuente likes to say, keeps swirling, even as South Florida’s Trumpist cohort of AM radio hosts and guests constantly call for a voter turnout for the ex-president so massive that even Democratic schemes to rig the results couldn’t hide his victory.
“If we win overwhelmingly, then there’s no way they can steal the election,” U.S. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), a frequent guest on the shows, told Augustín Acosta, in English, during a phone interview on Actualidad. “The most important guarantee is that people need to vote and get their friends to vote.”
Scott, who voted against certifying Biden’s 2020 win, is up for reelection against Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a former U.S. House member, in a race that some polls indicate is tied. Votes from the stations’ tens of thousands of listeners could be crucial for Scott.
While Trumpist rigged election canards have taken various forms (noncitizens voting, bogus absentee ballots), a contingent of hosts and guests seem determined to keep stoking the one about a vote-flipping-machine made for a deceased Venezuelan dictator—although a trend away from uttering the word Dominion seems to have emerged.
In one broadcast over the summer, Augustín Acosta (not to be confused with another host, Carlos Acosta) told his guest, Republican “analyst” Alfonso Aguilar, that he had “certain information” that “very experienced” people had discovered “what really occurred in last presidential election with certain machines manufactured by certain companies used in certain electoral districts to change the electoral result.”
“The problem with these people,” Aguilar responded, alluding to Democrats, “is that they know how to manipulate the electoral machinery.”
On another afternoon, Acosta had an update for listeners about the mysterious vote-counting machine investigation, alluding to the one Gerbasi had described earlier in the year involving Dominion and Smartmatic machines.
Acosta, in the studio with De la Fuente, told her the findings were now in the form of a “dossier,” which contained the way election results “were altered electronically in certain demarcations.”
And yet the proof would never see the light of day under the Biden Administration, he said, because the “experts of extraordinary capacity” who had conducted the investigation had nowhere to submit the findings because “the federal prosecutor of this government is the first one interested in that this not be investigated.”
Then he added, “I can’t give you more details but, yes, the Donald Trump campaign has been informed.”
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