Colombian hacker claims to have rigged elections throughout Latin America by manipulating social media, spying on other campaigns, stealing information
How to Hack an Election — Andrés Sepúlveda rigged elections throughout Latin America for almost a decade.
Context & Ripple Effects
Andrés Sepúlveda's account is the founding document of the election-hacking beat: a single Colombian contractor describing a decade of social media manipulation, campaign espionage, and information theft across Latin America. The reporting that followed filled in his supply chain — Latin American governments were simultaneously buying Hacking Team exploit packages to spy on political opposition, and Mexican firms were running Facebook pages, Twitter bots, and purchased likes as a paid service in the run-up to national elections.
First-order effects
- The campaigns that hired Sepúlveda gained stolen opposition research and manufactured social media momentum, while rival candidates competed against adversaries who could see their internal communications.
Second-order effects
- Commercial vendors formalized what Sepúlveda did ad hoc: by 2023, investigators exposed Team Jorge, an Israeli unit-for-hire claiming covert involvement in 33 presidential elections, turning one contractor's methods into an exportable product line.
Third-order effects
- Freedom House later found governments in 30 countries manipulating social media, with elections in 18 possibly affected — pointing toward election integrity becoming a cybersecurity discipline, with platform provenance and verification standards as the structural response.
The trend: Election interference has evolved from individual contractors like Sepúlveda into an industrialized, for-hire disinformation industry spanning hacking tools, bot networks, and AI-assisted operations.