SANTA CRUZ DE LA SIERRA — Two days after lawyer and political analyst Nadia Beller was shot outside a Santa Cruz hotel, Bolivian prosecutors moved Wednesday to formally charge Fernando Cerimedo, Beller's former partner and an informal adviser to President Rodrigo Paz, with attempted femicide. A search of two properties tied to Cerimedo in La Paz turned up enough irregularities to open a second, unrelated criminal probe. A judge in Santa Cruz's 20th criminal court is due to rule as soon as Thursday afternoon on whether Cerimedo remains behind bars.
What Beller Is Saying
Speaking from her hospital bed at Clínica Las Américas, Beller has told Argentine and Bolivian outlets she is convinced Cerimedo is the intellectual author of the shooting, according to Canal 26. Her account holds that he lured her to the hotel with the promise of protected access to evidence against former President Evo Morales, telling her plainclothes officers would be watching and that gunmen were unlikely to strike somewhere with security cameras. Those escorts, she told Alerta Urbana, never materialized, and she says she was on the phone with Cerimedo the moment gunmen opened fire. Beller's own retelling and a handful of Argentine reports cite four, a discrepancy investigators have not resolved.
Beller's allegations reach well past the shooting itself. In an interview from her hospital bed, she told La Nación that Cerimedo — during a relationship she dates to last December — told her that Karina Milei, the Argentine president's sister and General Secretary of the Presidency, was implicated in the corruption scandal engulfing Argentina's disability agency, ANDIS, and that he and his wife had a role in leaking the recordings that set off that scandal. In the same interview, Beller claimed Cerimedo had orchestrated a campaign to undermine Argentine Vice President Victoria Villarruel and was funneling roughly $800,000 a month in proceeds from alleged corruption inside Paz's government through front companies in Argentina. Separately, she has posted old chat messages, cited by Infobae, in which an account she attributes to Cerimedo references choking her, throwing her to the ground, and striking her face in incidents that predate the shooting. None of these claims — the ANDIS link, the alleged financial network, or the earlier violence — has been independently documented; all rest on Beller's account.
What Bolivia Is Saying
President Paz addressed the case Tuesday night on social media, ordering what he called a "profound, transparent and exhaustive" investigation and pledging Beller full protection, without naming Cerimedo directly. By Wednesday, however, BAE Negocios reported that Paz had acknowledged Cerimedo did perform advisory work for him — a shift from presidential spokesman José Luis Gálvez's earlier framing of Cerimedo as merely a campaign-era "close collaborator" whose later contact with the government was informal. Prosecutor Yolanda Aguilera filed the formal attempted-femicide charge Wednesday and asked a judge to order 180 days of pretrial detention at Bolivia's largest prison, Palmasola, with the hearing set for Thursday afternoon, according to La Nación.
Vice President Edman Lara broke with the president's cautious tone, publicly calling Cerimedo the leading suspect in the shooting and warning, in comments carried by Ambito, that "the government must not shield anyone, whoever falls."
A Search in La Paz Opens a Second Case
Investigators raided two residences tied to Cerimedo in the La Florida and Los Pinos neighborhoods of southern La Paz and reportedly found large sums of cash hidden in furniture compartments, a satellite phone, a vehicle outfitted with lights meant to resemble an official government car, a shirt bearing Bolivian police markings, and business cards identifying him as "asesor principal del Presidente del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia" — principal adviser to the president of the Plurinational State — according to Canal 13 San Juan and La Nación. Those findings prompted La Paz prosecutor Carlos Torrez to open a separate illicit-enrichment investigation, to run independently of the attempted-femicide case. Investigators have also ordered forensic analysis of Cerimedo's phone and laptop, seized at his arrest; he provided the passwords voluntarily, per Radio Profesional. Gálvez, the presidential spokesman, told Infobae that a "principal adviser" role "doesn't exist within the state structure," and that the government never issued those cards.
What Argentina Is Saying
The Casa Rosada has moved to distance itself from Cerimedo. Government sources told Infobae that Cerimedo has "had nothing to do with us or the president for years." That account sits awkwardly beside building-access logs showing Cerimedo entered Casa Rosada at least 13 times during 2024, the final visit personally authorized by presidential strategist Santiago Caputo, according to elDiarioAR. Beller's claims have also reached Argentina's courts: opposition lawmaker Marcela Pagano has formally asked federal judge Ariel Lijo to summon Beller as a witness in the existing ANDIS case, per La Nación.
The Defense, and What Comes Thursday
Cerimedo's lawyer, Margarita Arce, rejects every element of Beller's account, calling the case, in remarks to La Razón, "a political show," and arguing Beller staged the attack herself to damage Cerimedo and, by extension, Paz, given her past ties to the MAS party. Arce also disputes that Cerimedo fathered Beller's pregnancy and says the defense will request a DNA test, per El Deber. Cerimedo has declined to testify on his lawyers' advice while they seek fuller access to the evidence against him. As of this writing, no ruling had been issued; one outlet covering the case, Agencia Comunas, reported that the most realistic outcome the defense could hope for is house arrest rather than outright release.
