By Ricardo F. Morín

Oct. 14, 2025

In the post-truth landscape of Latin American media, where outrage has become currency, few figures illustrate the fusion of ideology and marketing as clearly as Inna Afinogenova.    She has become the most recognizable voice of authoritarian suspicion in the Spanish-speaking sphere.    From platforms such as Canal Red Latinoamérica, her discourse forms part of a vast network of disinformation spreading across the region, cloaked in the rhetoric of critical thinking and popular emancipation.    These networks—spanning Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, and several Latin American governments—follow a single script: to dismantle trust in liberal democracy, to weaken institutions, and to turn permanent doubt into a substitute for conscience.    In the name of informational sovereignty, they replace debate with discredit, analysis with suspicion, and truth with narrative.    Their power lies not in blatant falsehoods but in the emotional manipulation that transforms confusion into conviction.    Within this context, Afinogenova stands not as an isolated commentator but as the emblem of a sophisticated propaganda apparatus—one that disguises obedience to twenty-first-century autocracies beneath the costume of dissent.

Inna Afinogenova, born in Dagestan in 1989, is a Russian journalist who worked as deputy director of RT en Español until May 2022.    She resigned citing her disagreement with the war in Ukraine and the imposition of a state-sanctioned narrative of aggression.    Since then, she has collaborated with geopolitical and Latin American media such as La Base, produced by the Spanish newspaper Público, and participates in Canal Red, an audiovisual project led by Pablo Iglesias (former vice-president of Spain and founder of the left-wing party Podemos, now active in political media).    There she directs and hosts programs like CaféInna and contributes to political analysis, particularly on Latin America.    Her audience is broad and her reach on digital platforms considerable, which makes her an influential figure in the political and informational debates of the Spanish-speaking world.

Her trajectory, however, has not escaped controversy.    During her tenure at RT en Español, she was one of the network’s most visible faces in Latin America, amplifying narratives that portrayed Western powers as inherently deceitful and predatory.    An opinion column in The Washington Post described her as “the Spanish voice of Russian propaganda,” citing her recurring defense of positions favorable to the Kremlin.    In December 2021, two months before the invasion of Ukraine, she used her program Ahí les va to mock Western intelligence warnings of an imminent attack and predicted that “January will come, then February, and still no invasion,” implying that the media hysteria served the interests of NATO.    Such episodes, though later overtaken by events, exemplify her rhetorical method:    to transform skepticism into disbelief and disbelief into persuasion.

Following her departure from RT, Afinogenova has continued to operate in media circles ideologically aligned with the Latin American left, reinforcing a discourse that equates the Western press with manipulation and imperialism.    Outlets such as Expediente Público have noted her role in shaping narratives within partisan campaigns, often echoing state-sponsored or geopolitically motivated lines from Russia, China, or Iran.    Through Canal Red and Diario Red, both associated with Pablo Iglesias, she participates in content ecosystems that frequently recycle material from international broadcasters like CGTN.    In countries such as Honduras, she has been accused of contributing to media strategies that favor left-wing candidates under the guise of “sovereign communication.”   While the evidence does not show a direct chain of command linking her to a specific regime, the pattern of thematic consistency reveals a coherent ideological alignment rather than independent journalism.

This alignment has provoked renewed debate since the release of her recent video, “¿Premio Nobel de la Paz… o de la Guerra?”, where she presents the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to María Corina Machado as a maneuver of geopolitical design rather than a moral recognition.    The video does not examine facts so much as it interprets intentions, suggesting that the award serves Western influence instead of honoring civic courage.   The argument, though rhetorically effective, confuses correlation with causality.    It is possible to acknowledge the imperfections of international institutions without denying the ethical weight of public bravery.   The Nobel Prize, like every human institution, reflects judgments; but in this case, it distinguishes a life of civic risk undertaken without weapons, privileges, or access to the coercive power of the State.

Questioning motives is legitimate; insinuating conspiracies without evidence is not.   Every critical voice bears responsibility, for truth demands proportion, not projection.   The struggle of María Corina Machado cannot be reduced to the rhetoric of “Western intervention” or dismissed as “fabricated dissent.”   It belongs to the conscience of a people seeking self-determination through legitimate means after decades of dispossession.    Respecting pluralism requires granting others the same intellectual good faith one demands for oneself.   Debate ennobles democracy only when grounded in verifiable facts and moral clarity, not when suspicion itself becomes the argument.    Between necessary skepticism and systematic suspicion lies a moral frontier:    crossing it is to pass from thinking freely to serving without knowing it.