It was supposed to be a moment of national reckoning, a rare flash of relief in a country that has learned to live with the weight of cartel violence. When Mexican security forces killed Nemesio Oceguera Cervantes, better known as “El Mencho,” the elusive and brutal leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the news rippled across the country and beyond. But amid the tension, something else spread just as quickly: lies. Javier Negre, the director and then co-owner of the digital outlet La Derecha Diario, posted a fake image of a plane supposedly on fire at the Guadalajara airport. “Mexico’s narco-president must be proud,” he wrote on X in February 2026, conjuring a sinister link between the country’s president and the violence of the drug trade. The image was quickly debunked by authorities and independent fact-checkers, including Chequeado, AFP Factual, and Reuters Fact Check. But the damage had already been done. The post had been shared, seen, and absorbed by thousands of people already primed to believe the worst about Mexico’s government. This is not an accident. It is the business model of La Derecha Diario, a digital media operation that has expanded from Spain into Latin America, and in Mexico it has found a fertile ground for its particular blend of partisan outrage, disinformation, and cultural warfare. The outlet does not simply report from a right-wing perspective; it fabricates, exaggerates, and twists reality in ways that are designed to inflame, polarize, and destabilize.
In the days after El Mencho’s death, La Derecha Diario’s Mexican account went further, falsely claiming that narco-terrorists had taken over the Guadalajara airport. That did not happen. What actually happened was terrifying enough: CJNG members set up roadblocks, burned vehicles, and clashed with the military in several states, including Jalisco, Puebla, Nayarit, Michoacán, and Tamaulipas. There were moments of genuine panic at the Guadalajara airport, with families running and flights disrupted. But reporters on the ground, local media, airport officials, and government authorities all denied that drug traffickers had seized control of the facility. The distinction matters, because in a moment of chaos, false claims can make things worse, can lead to panic, to violence, to policy decisions based on fear rather than fact. The outlet also took advantage of the confusion to attack a Mexican social program. In one post, La Derecha Diario México claimed that young people enrolled in “Jóvenes Construyendo el Futuro,” a government initiative that provides job training and stipends to young people, were vandalizing businesses and attempting to rob them in the chaos of Guadalajara. The post offered no evidence linking the young people in the video to the program or to the ruling party, Morena. It simply mocked the program and implied that the government was somehow responsible for criminal behavior. This is a recurring pattern. Earlier, in November 2025, the outlet had extensively covered protests organized by Gen Z youth against the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum, following the murder of Carlos Manzo, the mayor of Uruapan. The protesters had legitimate demands, especially public safety, but La Derecha Diario used their anger as fuel for its own narrative. It promoted the calls to protest and predicted a “mega march.” It criticized the fences placed around the National Palace. It even published anonymous audio clips, without verifying their authenticity, claiming that government supporters planned to attack marchers with needles. No such attack was ever recorded. None of that happened. But the story had already traveled, and the fear had already taken root.
To understand why La Derecha Diario has a branch in Mexico at all, you have to look at an unusual alliance that took shape in late 2024. That December, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, the billionaire owner of TV Azteca, one of Mexico’s most powerful television networks, publicly reached out to Javier Negre on X. “What if you help us in Mexico against these criminal lefties?” Salinas Pliego wrote. Negre replied publicly, “It will be a pleasure. Mexico is a great country that deserves to escape the clutches of communism.” Within weeks, the X account @DerechaDiarioM was born. It now has around 89,600 followers, a modest number compared to the 606,000 followers of La Derecha Diario’s Argentine account, especially considering that Mexico has three times Argentina’s population. But follower counts do not tell the whole story. The account has been constantly amplified by conservative politicians, including Senator Lilly Téllez, a former employee and ally of Salinas Pliego, and PAN lawmaker América Rangel. It has also been singled out as a source of disinformation in the Mexican government’s own daily press conference, Sheinbaum’s morning “mañanera.” The alliance between Negre and Salinas Pliego has a backstory that explains a lot. When Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the presidency in 2018, Salinas Pliego initially supported him and even joined a business advisory council. That support collapsed after the government refused to forgive a multimillion-dollar tax debt owed by the businessman. From that moment on, Salinas Pliego’s personal account and his network’s news coverage turned sharply oppositional, first against López Obrador and later against Sheinbaum. He has referred to left-wing supporters as “shitty lefties” and made no secret of his sympathy for the far right, attending events like the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, held in Argentina in 2024. That is where he met Negre, who was also attending. According to an investigation by the Spanish newspaper El País, sources close to Salinas Pliego said he agreed to fund the Mexican branch of La Derecha Diario with about $6,000 a month for six months, though the same sources said he was left dissatisfied with the results. Negre denies having been funded by Salinas Pliego. The relationship, whatever its exact financial shape, is visible in the content. The website lists contributors in its Mexico section, including an editor named Luis Arturo Herrera, an economist who frequently appears as an analyst on debate panels on Salinas Pliego’s television channels. The Mexican account and pro-Salinas Pliego “troll” accounts interact constantly, sharing the same narratives, the same enemies, and the same rage.
Beyond the political attacks on Sheinbaum and Morena, La Derecha Diario México has also become a vehicle for homophobic and anti-feminist messages. Its posts are not just critical of policies; they are openly degrading toward people. Figures like Genaro Lozano, who was appointed as Mexico’s ambassador to Italy, have been called “degenerate” in several posts because of his sexual orientation. In June 2025, the account criticized Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada for an event to display the world’s largest LGBTQ+ pride flag in the capital’s main square, the Zócalo. “Degeneracy advances,” the outlet wrote, claiming that instead of solving flooding, insecurity, or dispossession, the mayor’s government was using taxpayer money to call LGBT+ collectives to the Zócalo to make the “world’s largest perverted flag.” Months later, in October 2025, it accused the federal government of distributing “books with degenerate content for public school children that promote despicable gender ideology to brainwash Mexican children.” The “books” it referred to were actually a public document from the National Council to Prevent Discrimination, and it was not aimed at children. The document simply described concepts related to sexual diversity, gender identities, and sex characteristics. The outlet’s posts have also attacked women’s reproductive rights, describing abortion as part of a “murderous agenda,” and using derogatory terms for feminist groups such as “feminazis” and “stinking femi-orcs.” This is not just crude language. It is a deliberate strategy to strip people of dignity, to make them seem dangerous or less than human, and to create a climate where discrimination feels acceptable. In a country with high rates of violence against women and LGBTQ+ people, these words have consequences. They do not stay on the screen. They get repeated in classrooms, in workplaces, in homes, and sometimes in streets. They give permission to hate.
The disinformation from La Derecha Diario is not contained by borders. From its main account in Argentina, the outlet has repeatedly spread false or unsubstantiated claims about Mexico. In February 2026, in addition to the false airport takeover story, it shared what it called the “last audio” of El Mencho, supposedly threatening to kill a police chief before being “exterminated by Trump.” The audio was not recent at all. It had been circulating since 2016, as verified by ColombiaCheck. The same platform amplified a claim by Argentine politician Carlos Ruckauf that the United States had led El Mencho’s capture and that “Claudia Sheinbaum decided to kill him during his transfer so he would not expose in the United States his ties to Mexico’s narco-government and the funding of Morena.” There was no evidence for any of this. The Mexican government, for its part, issued a statement explaining that during the operation, military personnel were attacked, and in defense of their safety they repelled the aggression, resulting in four members of the criminal group killed at the scene and three seriously wounded, who died during their air transfer to Mexico City. Among the latter was Ruben “N,” known as Mencho. The official account was not necessarily beyond criticism, but it was a far cry from the wild conspiracy theory that the president had ordered a murder to cover up secret ties. Then came the World Cup. On July 2, 2026, La Derecha Diario Argentina repeated a claim by an Argentine commentator that Ecuador national team players had been threatened by drug cartels to throw their match against Mexico. The rumor bounced around social media, but no evidence ever surfaced, no direct complaints from Ecuador’s players, no investigation, no confirmation. It was just another story designed to make Mexico look lawless and the government look complicit. Factchequeado contacted Javier Negre to ask about La Derecha Diario’s funding in Mexico and any ties to Salinas Pliego, but he had not responded at the time of publication. The silence is telling. When the questions get too specific, when they move from outrage to facts, the storytellers disappear.
All of this would be easier to dismiss if it stayed in a small corner of the internet. But it does not. La Derecha Diario México may have a relatively small following, but it is amplified by politicians with real power, by television personalities with national reach, and by the algorithmic engines of social media. It has been cited in the Mexican government’s own morning press conference, not as a credible source, but as an example of the kind of disinformation that has become part of the political landscape. It has been promoted by senators and lawmakers who use its claims to attack the government without having to do the hard work of producing evidence themselves. And it is part of a larger network. This investigation was produced as part of a collaborative series by Chequeado, Factchequeado, and La Silla Vacía, under the banner of “La Derecha Diario: Its Network in Latin America and Its Connections to MAGA.” It is part of “Los Desinformantes,” an initiative of LatamChequea, the Latin American fact-checkers network. The collaboration matters because disinformation does not respect national borders, and neither should the response to it. Factchequeado, a fact-checking outlet that builds a Spanish-speaking community to counter disinformation in the United States, invites people to verify content by sending it to their WhatsApp at +1 (646) 873-6087 or at factchequeado.com/whatsapp. The invitation is simple, but it is also radical: before you share, before you rage, before you believe, take a moment to check. Disinformation thrives in chaos. It feeds on fear, on anger, on the instinct to share something that confirms what we already suspect. But the antidote is not silence. It is patience, proof, and a refusal to be played. The story of La Derecha Diario in Mexico is not just about one outlet or one billionaire or one set of lies. It is about how easily public fear can be weaponized, how quickly the truth can be buried under a flood of outrage, and how important it is to hold on to the habit of asking questions. In a country that has already suffered so much real violence, the last thing anyone needs is more invented violence. The last thing anyone needs is a lie that looks like news, designed to make us hate each other a little more. The best defense is not to look away, but to look closely. To demand evidence. To remember that behind every anonymous audio clip, every fake image, every convenient rumor, there is someone with a purpose. And that purpose is not to inform you. It is to use you.