The Pentagon Is Running an AI Propaganda Mill Targeting Latin America

The United States is feeding Pentagon propaganda to internet users in Latin American countries using a new AI-laden content mill, an investigation by The Intercept has found.

La Tilde quietly began development early this year and appears to still be a work in progress, pitching itself as a modern media brand for Latin American audiences with articles published in both Spanish and English. Its name references the accent mark emphasizing vowels in Spanish; “news with an accent” is the site’s catchphrase.

“The tilde is not an ornament. It is a millennial arrow designed to provide direction, save space, and turn up the volume,” a narrator states in a promotional video for the site bearing telltale signs it was AI-generated, such as a newspaper whose sloppily rendered headline reads “SO THEE HOUTIERRER TO TO GHAHOBATEE,” followed by imagery of two medieval monks. “That is why we place the accent on what matters. From the regional pulse and your well-being, to the big ideas and the global context.”

So far, La Tilde’s coverage amounts to an unusual blend of personal finance tips (“Why instant payments matter so much for your business and your wallet”) and articles extolling the value of U.S. military operations in Latin America (“Operation Absolute Resolve: The mission that captured Nicolás Maduro and set a new standard for precision and coordination”).

Its article on the U.S. abduction of the Venezuelan president praises the mission in Trumpian prose, calling it “The Perfect Operation – Coordination, Timing and Precision at an Unprecedented Scale,” and “a military operation of coordination and accuracy never seen before.” Citing “information obtained exclusively by La Tilde,” it describes the operation’s tactical brilliance, flawless execution, and incredibly precise coordination of military assets in the air and on the ground.

If this reads like Pentagon a press release, that’s because it is. An explanation for its glowing coverage of the U.S. military can be found after clicking a small link tucked at the bottom of the site. “La Tilde is a product of an international media organization publicly funded from the budget of the United States Government,” its About page reads.

This easily missed disclosure language is identical to two other Pentagon-sponsored propaganda sites recently revealed by The Intercept.

Targeting audiences, foreign or domestic, with state-run information campaigns remains a politically sensitive topic, and a token disclosure that La Tilde is a U.S.-funded platform allows the American government to say it technically informed readers about the actual source of the information.

According to a defense official familiar with U.S. information operations, La Tilde is operated as a military messaging platform for U.S. Special Operations Command South, or SOCSOUTH, which executes special forces missions throughout South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. When asked about SOCSOUTH’s role behind La Tilde, spokesperson Trevor Wild replied with the text of the site’s About page noting that it’s a government operation, but declined to comment further.

U.S. Southern Command, or SOUTHCOM, which is broadly responsible for coordinating military assets in the countries La Tilde targets, denied involvement. SOUTHCOM “does not fund, operate, or have any official association with La Tilde,” according to spokesperson Steven McLoud, who did not respond to further questions.

Unlike most news websites, La Tilde carries no bylines, masthead, or mention of actual staff of any kind. Although the site claims it employs “dozens of freelance reporters and content creators,” at least some of the site appears to have been generated by a large language model. Running articles through Pangram, an AI-text detection service, produced multiple hits for both English and Spanish writing either partially or entirely written by machines (though such tools are known to deliver false positives).

Emerson Brooking, a fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and former Pentagon cyber-policy adviser, told The Intercept he was struck by site’s shoddiness, describing it as “AI all the way down.”

Despite the low quality of AI-generated articles, this approach could help the Pentagon spin up propaganda efforts faster than in the past. “If you can generate new content and even news fronts at the flip of a switch, your influence operations can shift target and focus much more quickly,” Brooking said. “That seems to be the thinking behind recent AI-powered Russian and Chinese networks, for instance.”

An analysis of subdomains hosted on LaTilde.co reveals the site plans to launch bespoke versions for readers in Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Panama, and Peru.

Some pro-U.S. content is clearly tailored to these national audiences. An article filed to the site’s “In Good Hands” section highlights the benefits of U.S.–Panamanian joint jungle warfare training exercises, regaling readers with how “temperatures and heart rates climb at the Cristóbal Colón Naval Air Base as Panamanian security forces push forward through the ‘Green Mile,’ the demanding final test of the Combined Jungle Operations Course.” Such joint initiatives are, according to La Tilde, a bulwark against China’s efforts to engage in similar joint exercises in Latin America. Rather than engage with “Beijing’s predatory practices,” the article suggests countries should follow Panama’s lead and “seek training opportunities closer to home or with longstanding partners such as the United States.”

The article makes no mention of the controversy surrounding PANAMAX, a joint military exercise between SOUTHCOM and the Panamanian forces that has sparked increased protest on the grounds it violates national sovereignty. Permanent U.S. military installations in Panama were shuttered in 1999 as part of a 1977 treaty between the two countries; Panamanian opposition parties decried the reestablishment of an American military presence under the guise of joint exercises as a “camouflaged invasion.” Participants in the 2025 PANAMAX exercise La Tilde is pushing include the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, previously known as the School of the Americas, a Pentagon training institute whose graduates included thousands of Latin American death squad gunmen and dictator Manuel Noriega.

The importance of military and intelligence-sharing compacts with the U.S. is a recurring theme. “Far from weakening sovereignty, this kind of cooperation can strengthen it,” one article says.

Other stories from La Tilde argue the American side of Latin American controversies, similarly downplaying issues of national sovereignty. One piece describes how the U.S. abduction of Maduro “has reawakened a long-contained hope among millions of Venezuelans inside and outside the country.” Another alleges Ecuador is a nexus of the international cocaine trade, echoing claims the Trump administration has used to expand Operation Southern Spear, SOUTHCOM’s Caribbean airstrike campaign that has killed more than 200 civilians to date.

It’s unclear who exactly is operating the site on a day-to-day basis. A similar network of military propaganda pages, descendants of an Obama-era information warfare program called the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, appears to be administered by military contractor General Dynamics Information Technology. Renée DiResta, who co-authored a 2022 report on online propaganda efforts backed by U.S. Central Command, told The Intercept that the TRWI successor websites share a common Google Ads identifier code owned by General Dynamics, according to a recent comprehensive analysis of the network she conducted. La Tilde also runs a legal disclosure with identical language as those sites.

General Dynamics did not respond to multiple requests for comment about La Tilde.

Halcyon Group International, another information warfare contractor that operates Diálogo Américas, a similar pseudo-news site backed by the Pentagon, told The Intercept it was not involved with La Tilde.

Design of the La Tilde website was subcontracted to Antpack, a Colombian digital marketing firm. Multiple files hosted on the site created by the AI image-generation service Midjourney contain the word “Antpack” in their name. The Intercept signed up for a user account on La Tilde, part of planned functionality that will let readers comment and save articles for later. Once registered, The Intercept was able to view comments left on a non-public version of the site used by its developers, who posted under names corresponding to LinkedIn profiles of Antpack employees. Antpack did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

U.S. Special Operations has a long record of leading the American internet propaganda efforts, ranging from high-tech efforts to less-sophisticated projects like phony online newsrooms. SOCOM has since 2018 operated the Joint Military Information Support Operations Web Operations Center, which coordinates information warfare and online psychological operations.

The Intercept reported in 2023 that SOCOM was working on acquiring state-of-the-art “deepfake” video fabrication technologies to “generate messages and influence operations via non-traditional channels,” according to procurement documents. La Tilde appears to be using low-effort AI tools rather than anything cutting-edge. Art accompanying its stories often includes portion of the prompt used to quickly generate the image in the file name, and shows mixed results, such as a rendering of the White House portico missing several of its columns or a diploma with garbled text. Photographs illustrating pro-SOUTHCOM messaging, however, are drawn from the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, an official Pentagon media library.

“The intent is probably to fill these sites with generic material, build an audience base, and then slip in more pieces of explicit propaganda, like that rather fulsome recounting of the U.S. attack on Venezuela,” Brooking said. “This is how you build these sorts of networks. But the content is lazy, the AI is bad, and the required disclosures make the whole thing a farce.”