Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Argentina and Brazil take different approaches to AI, the United States carries out a military strike in Venezuela, and Lionel Messi scores a World Cup hat trick.
Last week, Brazil became the fifth country—and the first from the global south—to sign a digital partnership agreement with the European Union, following Canada, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. The deal commits the EU and Brazil to annual meetings on topics such as ethical artificial intelligence use and tech cooperation.
“Europe and Latin America are allies in many areas, like regulation of big tech companies,” said Celso Amorim, the top foreign-policy advisor to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in a Tuesday speech at the Forte International Security Conference in Rio de Janeiro.
Brazil’s legislature is currently considering a draft AI regulatory framework that borrows heavily from the EU’s stringent approach. Brazil is not the only country in the region trying to position itself as a global leader on AI. While Lula pushes for the safe and ethical use of AI, Argentine President Javier Milei is taking a different tack—trying to cut as much red tape as he can.
Milei submitted an AI bill to Congress that includes “a commitment to keep AI unregulated” and permission for companies to consist of AI agents, with no human shareholders required, the president wrote in a Financial Times op-ed earlier this month.
The latter prospect is so controversial that it immediately prompted a rebuttal from prominent historian Yuval Noah Harari, who said Milei’s proposal could unleash dangerous consequences. Tech libertarians such as Peter Thiel, who recently bought a house in Buenos Aires, have held meetings with Milei and other top officials.
None of the world’s frontier AI models are currently made in Latin America. The region is increasingly attracting investments in data centers, however, with projects worth tens of billions of dollars announced last year in both Brazil and Argentina. The companies that run them are headquartered overseas, including China’s ByteDance and the United States’ OpenAI.
Argentina offers tax exemptions to new data centers, and Brazil is considering similar legislation. Smart data center policy would require firms to give back to host countries, said Daniele Kleiner, the co-director of Brazilian tech policy consultancy Alandar. Examples include reserving “some capacity of your data center for public interest services, or for emergencies.”
Kleiner added that Brazilian policymakers need to take more seriously the workforce retraining needed for the country to reap the potential benefits of AI. “Everyone is arguing about whether you are going to regulate more, regulate less, or not regulate at all. What are we doing about the people who will have their jobs transformed?”
Brazil is not alone; 13 of the 19 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean studied by Chile’s National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA) do not teach early AI adoption in schools, the center said in a report last year. “A bottleneck in advanced training limits the region’s ability to produce its own solutions,” it wrote.
CENIA is the Chile’s own stab at AI leadership. In addition to producing the annual Latin America Artificial Intelligence Index, which compiles data on AI readiness, it leads the AI model Latam-GPT, which was trained on data from the region.
At worst, experts at the International Labor Organization warned in a recent paper, AI could trigger job losses and a slowdown of upward social mobility in developing countries.
Brazilian officials in recent days have said that the tech partnership with the EU will help protect the country’s AI sovereignty. But “regulation alone is not enough,” Kleiner said. “We need to make real investments in technology and in training people.”
Sunday, June 21: Colombia holds a presidential runoff election.
Wednesday, June 24: A U.S. court hearing for Alex Saab, an ally of jailed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro who is accused of a money-laundering conspiracy, is held in Miami.
U.S. gang targets. Last Friday, the United States said it bombed a site in Venezuela that housed a leader of the gang Tren de Aragua, killing him. Venezuelan officials also confirmed that the leader, Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, was killed.
Acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez’s administration worked with U.S. officials in the strike, the latest sign of cooperation with Washington since Maduro’s capture in January.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security separately announced this week that it had arrested a Brazilian man in the United States who it said was a top player in both of Brazil’s largest drug gangs, the Red Command and the First Capital Command. That assertion confounded analysts, as those organizations are generally distinct.
U.S. authorities did not immediately share evidence to back up their accusation. The U.S. State Department recently designated both groups as terrorist organizations.
Colombia runoff countdown. As Colombia’s runoff presidential election approaches on Sunday, left-wing candidate Iván Cepeda ditched a controversial promise: that he would aim to rewrite the country’s constitution. The pledge was so central to Cepeda’s campaign that Colombian political observers called his abandonment of it “the big reversal.”
Cepeda’s move was aimed at courting centrist Colombian voters. In a signal that some could be coming over to Cepeda’s side, center-left presidential candidate Claudia López—who did not make it past the first round of voting—said on Wednesday she would vote for Cepeda, despite her critiques of his close ally, outgoing President Gustavo Petro.
Polls still suggest a far-right victory on Sunday.
Lionel Messi of Argentina celebrates scoring his team’s first goal during the FIFA World Cup 2026 Group J match between Argentina and Algeria at Kansas City Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri, on June 16.Charlotte Wilson/Getty Images
