Latin America is becoming a laboratory for tech-supremacism

Published 31 July 2026 · us

Latin America is becoming the political and ideological laboratory for tech-supremacism. With Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel recently relocating to Argentina, and the explicit influence

Latin America is becoming the political and ideological laboratory for tech-supremacism. With Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel recently relocating to Argentina, and the explicit influence of Trumpism shaping the discourse of the region’s latest presidential elections, we are witnessing a dangerous transition. This new model combines extreme corporate deregulation, biometric surveillance and unconditional geopolitical alignment with Washington. Traditional elites are embracing this far-right blueprint because it allows them to weaponise racial profiling under the guise of “law and order”, aiming to restore colonial hierarchies and roll back the gains achieved by social movements. On July 6, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro denounced alleged cyber-interference in the country’s presidential run-off. In Peru, candidate Roberto Sanchez also alleged fraud following Keiko Fujimori’s victory. While neither of these claims has been judicially corroborated, the victors in both electoral processes fit a common pattern: they are far-right candidates who champion “tough-on-crime” narratives, align themselves closely with the United States, and push for the incorporation of artificial intelligence into law enforcement and security management. Donald Trump has reinvigorated the Monroe Doctrine with the “Trump Corollary”. The Security Strategy of the United States explicitly outlines the goal of expanding its list of regional allies “by cultivating and strengthening new partners while bolstering our own nation’s appeal as the Hemisphere’s economic and security partner of choice”. Where there were once military coups, lawfare and the coercive leverage of multilateral credit organisations, a new pincer movement now operates, combining Trumpist financing with Silicon Valley’s surveillance infrastructure. The novelty lies in the degree of structural dependency these tech corporations manage to embed within the state apparatus itself.

This is evident even within the United States, given the Department of Defense’s transfer of crucial military functions to Palantir Technologies, the company co-founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. Within this architecture, Argentina has consolidated its position as the Global South’s primary experimental station. Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, has taken up residence in Buenos Aires. Coincidentally, Javier Milei’s anarcho-capitalist administration recently introduced a legislative incentive framework for artificial intelligence investments, based on deregulation, limited liability and a competitive tax environment (known locally as the Super RIGI). In other words, it offers extreme corporate benefits of a distinctly extractivist nature: cheap energy, customs exemptions and the exploitation of critical resources like water and land to cool and sustain global data-processing infrastructure. Tech-supremacists share Milei’s belief in the supposed superiority of the West, rooted in its defence of capitalism, which they equate with freedom, understood strictly as a free market economy, free from all government control and dilution. In fact, Milei introduced the Super RIGI project in an op-ed for The Financial Times, opening with praise for the Dutch East India Company (VOC), a corporation that fused corporate and governmental power. It was granted a commercial monopoly, its own army, currency and legal system, and the power to declare war. It built its wealth on colonial exploitation and the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of people. In this sense, the Super RIGI is the legal framework for a foreign-flagged VOC to operate on Argentine soil. Milei celebrates the VOC as the birthplace of limited liability, “the invention that allowed capitalism to develop its full potential”, a supposed gift from the West to the world, upon which Western superiority rests.