Brazil, EU Sign AI and Tech Regulation Agreement

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.

World Cup updates. Latin American and Caribbean teams have had a mixed start to the FIFA World Cup in their first group-stage matches.

Brazil and Uruguay’s games resulted in draws, while Curaçao, Ecuador, Haiti, Panama, and Paraguay suffered losses. Meanwhile, Mexico defeated South Africa 2-0, Colombia beat Uzbekistan 3-1, and Argentina saw a 3-0 victory over Algeria, for which Lionel Messi scored his first-ever World Cup hat trick. (FP’s John Haltiwanger witnessed it live.)

Messi turns 39 next week. “Messi does things for the first time at a time in his life when soccer players are generally doing things for the last time,” Argentine journalist Alejandro Wall wrote in Tiempo. “It’s worth asking if it was his best World Cup performance.”

Though Carlo Ancelotti’s Brazil team underwhelmed, Brazil fans celebrated other ways that their soccer history has popped up in this year’s tournament. Cape Verde goalkeeper Josimar Dias, who shined in helping his squad achieve a historic draw with Spain, is named after a famous Brazilian player from the 1986 World Cup.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani also celebrated the legacy of Brazilian anti-dictatorship activist and midfielder Sócrates in a speech last week. Sócrates promoted the idea that “whether you were the star striker or you worked in the laundry room, you had the same one vote,” Mamdani said.

Chilean President José Antonio Kast delivers his State of the Nation address in Valparaiso, Chile, on June 1. Francesco Degasperi/AFP via Getty Images

Right-wing Chilean President José Antonio Kast completed his first 100 days in office this week. Though the start of a presidential term is usually a honeymoon period, Kast’s early days in office have been the opposite—triggering a major readjustment of his policies.

A main stumbling block for Kast has been the fuel price spike caused by the Iran war, which came as he was removing fuel subsidies. Rising fuel prices triggered street protests, so Kast cut public spending. He previously pledged to reduce the budget deficit to zero by the end of his term; he now hopes to lower it to 1.5 percent of GDP, Chile’s finance minister said last week.

Kast’s approval rating has dropped by around 20 percentage points since he took office, according to pollster Cadem. He has already carried out a cabinet shakeup, ditching his security minister and shifting the responsibilities of his interior minister to also cover those of his spokesperson, who he dismissed.

One thing that has not changed is Kast’s rhetorical focus on an anti-crime agenda. This month, Kast gave Chile’s annual presidential policy address. He pledged to increase deployments of security forces to borders and ports across the country, mentioning security more frequently in his speech than any other Chilean president, according to analysis by Chile’s Center for Public Studies. “The question is how this doctrine translates into practice,” the analysts wrote.