Welcome again Foreign Policy‘s Latin America Brief.
Highlights this week: Argentina and Brazil taking a different approach to AI, the United States conducts a military strike in Venezuelaand Lionel Messi scored a World Cup hat trick.
Last week, Brazil became the fifth country—and the first from the global south—to a sign a digital partnership agreement and the European Union, followed by Canada, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. The agreement commits the European Union and Brazil to annual meetings on topics such as the ethical use of artificial intelligence and technical cooperation.
“Europe and Latin America are partners in many areas, such as the control of large technology companies,” said Celso Amorim, chief foreign policy adviser to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in a speech on Tuesday at Forte International Security Conference in Rio de Janeiro.
Brazil’s parliament is currently considering a draft AI regulatory framework that borrows heavily from the EU’s strict approach. Brazil is not the only country in the region trying to position itself as a global leader on AI. While Lula is pushing for the safe and ethical use of AI, Argentina’s President Javier Milei is taking a different approach—trying to cut as much red tape as possible.
Milei presented an AI bill to Congress that includes a “commitment to keep AI unregulated” and permission for companies to have AI agents, without the required human shareholders, president. he wrote in a Financial Times edit earlier this month.
The latter prospect is so controversial that it immediately led to a to deny from renowned historian Yuval Noah Harari, who said Milei’s proposal could have dangerous consequences. Tech liberals like Peter Thiel, who recently bought a house in Buenos Aires, have held meetings and Milei and other great leaders.
There are no world border AI models currently being developed in Latin America. The region is increasingly attracting investment in data centers, however, with projects worth tens of billions of dollars announced last year in both. Brazil and Argentina. The companies operating them are headquartered abroad, including China’s ByteDance and America’s OpenAI.
Argentina offers tax exemptions for new data centers, and so does Brazil consider the same law. The Smart data center policy would require companies to repatriate to the host country, said Daniele Kleiner, co-director of Brazilian technology policy consultancy Alandar. Examples include reserving “some of your data center capacity for services in the public interest, or for emergencies.”
Kleiner added that Brazilian policymakers need to take more seriously the retraining of workers needed for the country to reap the benefits of AI. “Everybody’s arguing about whether you’re going to regulate more, regulate less, or not regulate at all. What do we do about the people who are going to have their jobs changed?”
Brazil is not alone; Thirteen out of 19 Latin American and Caribbean countries studied by Chile’s Center for National Intelligence (CENIA) do not teach early adoption of AI in schools, the center said in a report last year. “The limitation in advanced training limits the region’s ability to provide its own solutions,” it said he wrote.
CENIA is Chile’s own knife for AI leadership. In addition to producing every year Latin America Artificial Intelligence Indexwhich collects data on AI readiness, leads the AI model Latam-GPTwhich was trained on data from tapes.
Worse, experts at the International Labor Organization warned recently paperAI could lead to job losses and slow social mobility in developing countries.
Brazilian officials in recent days have said that technology cooperation with the EU will help protect the country’s AI independence. But “regulation alone is not enough,” Kleiner said. “We need to make real investments in technology and train people.”
Sunday, June 21: Colombia holds repeat presidential elections.
Wednesday, June 24: The US court case against Alex Saab, an associate of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro who is accused of money laundering, is being held in Miami.
American gang goals. Last Friday, the United States said bombed area in Venezuela that had the leader of the Tren de Aragua gang, and killed him. Venezuelan officials also confirmed that the leader, Hector Rustenford Guerrero Flores, was killed.
The administration of Venezuela’s Acting President Delcy Rodríguez worked with US officials on the strike, the latest sign of cooperation with Washington since Maduro’s arrest in January.
The US Department of Homeland Security announced separately this week that it had arrested a Brazilian man in the US who it said was a top player in Brazil’s largest drug cartels, Red Command and First Capital Command. That claim confused analystsas those organizations are generally different.
US authorities did not immediately share evidence to support their charges. The US State Department recently he named both groups as terrorist organizations.
count the repetition of Colombia. As the second round of the presidential election in Colombia approaches on Sunday, left-wing candidate Ivan Cepeda is excluded A controversial promise: that he would aim to rewrite the country’s constitution. That promise was so central to Cepeda’s campaign that Colombian political observers called his abandonment “a radical change.”
Cepeda’s move was aimed at appealing to Colombian voters. In a sign that some may come to Cepeda’s side, centrist presidential candidate Claudia López—who failed to make it past the first round of voting—he said On Wednesday he would vote for Cepeda, despite his criticism of his close ally, outgoing President Gustavo Petro.
Vote yet recommend a victory of the right wing on sunday.
Argentina’s Lionel Messi celebrates scoring his team’s first goal during the 2026 FIFA World Cup Group J match between Argentina and Algeria at the Kansas City Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri, June 16.Charlotte Wilson/Getty Images
World Cup Information. Teams from South America and the Caribbean have been mixed start for the FIFA World Cup in their first group stage matches.
Brazil and Uruguay drew, while Curacao, Ecuador, Haiti, Panama, and Paraguay lost. Meanwhile, Mexico beat South Africa 2-0, Colombia defeated Uzbekistan 3-1, and Argentina won 3-0 against Algeria, where Lionel Messi scored his first hat trick in the World Cup. (John Haltiwanger of FP witnessed live.)
Messi will turn 39 next week. “Messi is doing things for the first time in his life when soccer players in general are doing things for the last time,” Argentine journalist Alejandro Wall. he wrote in Time. “It’s worth asking if it was his best World Cup performance.”
Although it belongs to Carlo Ancelotti The Brazilian team bemused, Brazilian fans celebrated other ways their footballing history has unfolded in this year’s tournament. Cape Verde goalkeeper Josimar Diaswho shone in helping his side to a historic draw with Spain, is name after Brazil’s most famous player from the 1986 World Cup.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani too celebration legacy of Brazilian anti-dictatorship activist and link Sócrates in a speech last week. Sócrates promoted the idea that “whether you were a star striker or worked in a laundry, you had the same vote,” Mamdani said.
Which Colombian player scored in the team’s opening game against Uzbekistan on Wednesday?
James Rodriguez
Luis Diaz
Faustino Asprilla
Radamel Falcao
It was Díaz’s first World Cup goal. Daniel Muñoz and Jáminton Campaz also scored.
Chilean President José Antonio Kast delivering his State of the Nation address in Valparaiso, Chile, June 1. Francesco Degasperi/AFP via Getty Images
Right-wing Chilean President José Antonio Kast completed his first 100 days in office this week. While the beginning of a presidential term is usually a honeymoon period, Kast’s early days in office have been the opposite—to stimulate major revision of its policies.
Kast’s main obstacle has been the rise in oil prices caused by Iran waswhich came when he was withdrawing fuel subsidies. The rise in the price of oil caused a stir in the street protestso Kast reduced public spending. He previously promised to reduce the budget deficit to zero by the end of his term; now he hopes to bring it down to 1.5 percent of GDP, Chile’s finance minister he said last week.
Kast’s approval rating has has come down by almost 20 percent since he came to power, according to Cadem. He has already made a cabinet reshuffle, leaving his security minister and shifting the duties of his interior minister to also cover that of his spokesman, who fired him.
One thing that hasn’t changed is Kast’s characteristic emphasis on an anti-crime agenda. This month, Kast delivered the Chilean president’s annual policy speech. He it promised increasing the deployment of security forces at borders and ports throughout the country, mentioning security more often in his speeches than any other Chilean president, according to analysis and the Center for Public Studies of Chile. “The question is how this doctrine is translated into practice,” the analysts wrote.
