Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Engineers build a Latin American AI model, former Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner loses a trial, and Colombia reels from a high-profile shooting.
Building a Regional AI Model
This month, an artificial intelligence project that has quietly gained backers in Latin America is set to move to its first phase of trials outside of the laboratory. After a test period, a preview of the model, known as Latam-GPT, is due to go public in September. It aims to boost the region’s know-how and influence in the global AI race.
The world’s most prominent AI firms are currently based in the United States, China, and Europe. But AI models that were trained and created elsewhere can give incomplete or overly stereotypical answers when questioned about Latin America. That prompted a group of researchers based in Chile to start building their own alternative.
“If we want to be part of the debate on governance, adoption, and putting AI at the service of people in our countries … we have to get our hands dirty,” said Rodrigo Durán, the director of Chile’s National Center for Artificial Intelligence, or CENIA, which is coordinating Latam-GPT.
CENIA is funded in large part by Chile’s government. Several other countries in the region, including Brazil, as well as private and multilateral institutions have gotten on board with the project in the past few months.
What sets Latam-GPT apart from other AI models is how it is being trained. Durán told Foreign Policy that at least 37 entities—from government agencies and universities to the Organization of American States and Inter-American Development Bank—have agreed to turn over data to the project; some 70 more are in talks to do so.
Though many of today’s biggest AI models do not fully disclose where they get their data for training, Latam-GPT will publish its list of sources. Large volumes of that data are in Spanish and Portuguese, as opposed to models such as ChatGPT, which are trained primarily in English.
Engineers are combing through data for Latam-GPT to ensure that any sensitive personal information will be anonymized to future users. CENIA considers ethical data curation to be one of the project’s major contributions. That helps explain why so many collaborators are comfortable handing over their information.
Flush with this data, Latam-GPT promises to produce more accurate information about the region than AI players from the global north. The project echoes other geographically focused AI models, such as Singapore’s Sea-Lion, which is trained on content in 13 languages spoken in Southeast Asia.
There are many potential uses for Latam-GPT. Several city governments across Chile are participating in a series of workshops about how the AI model could be used for goals such as reducing school dropout rates and wait times for public health services, Durán said.
Chile’s Gabriela Mistral University, which already uses AI in the classroom, expects that adding Latam-GPT could lead to a better learning experience, rector Sergio Mena said. Currently, psychology students interact with an AI-created patient; Latam-GPT could help the virtual patient behave in a more Chilean—rather than American or European—manner, Mena added.
Despite its expanding roster of collaborators, Latam-GPT still has plenty of limitations. Due to tight funding, the team plans to post the model online as a packet of code rather than as a chat app. (Conversational AI tools such as ChatGPT require enormous computing power and funding.)
Furthermore, because of its finite computing power, Latam-GPT will be weaker on tasks such as cracking hard math problems, Durán said. Its strengths are expected to lie in the social sciences and humanities.
Many efforts at Latin American integration have fallen short in the past. But AI cooperation could be a bright spot, Fernando Vargas, of the Inter-American Development Bank, said. He added that a cohort of people gaining experience through Latam-GPT could go on “to develop models in other areas of knowledge.”
Even so, meeting AI’s full potential in the region may come down to questions of basic infrastructure. Eduardo Levy Yeyati, an economist at Argentina’s Torcuato di Tella University who studies the impact of AI, cautioned that Latin America still needs to overcome gaps in internet reliability and affordability.
“We have public education, health, and transportation policies, but we don’t have public digital connectivity policies,” Yeyati said. “That is absolutely inexplicable today.”
Upcoming Events
Tuesday, June 17: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva attends the G-7 in Canada.
Saturday, June 22: São Paulo hosts the world’s biggest LGBTQ+ Pride event.
What We’re Following
Fernández de Kirchner’s sentence. On Tuesday, Argentina’s top court rejected former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s appeal of a six-year prison sentence for a corruption conviction. The verdict banned her from a planned legislative run in October midterm elections. The case surrounds the misuse of public funds during Fernández de Kirchner’s tenure as first lady and then as president. She denies wrongdoing.
The ruling prompted a swirl of reflections about the integrity of the Argentina’s justice system—and about who might take over Fernández de Kirchner’s leadership in the country’s already-weak opposition. “Greater fragmentation” is likely before reconstruction, journalist Iván Schargrodsky wrote in Cenital.
U.S. travel ban. The Trump administration’s new travel ban took effect on Monday. Citizens of 12 countries will now be barred from entering the United States, both as visitors and via legal pathways for immigration. (There are some exceptions, such as for green card holders; citizens of seven additional countries will face partial restrictions.)
Three Latin American and Caribbean countries are affected by the policy: Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela. All have large diasporas in the United States. The ban prompted confusion and fear that family members and businesspeople will be unable to travel to the United States for work, visits, medical appointments, and more.
Although it’s less of an immediate concern, Latin American observers are also watching how the ban will affect next year’s men’s FIFA World Cup, co-hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Athletes are exempted from the ban, but fans are not. In 2017, during Trump’s first term, FIFA warned that travel bans could hinder the U.S. bid for the 2026 tournament.
FIFA did not immediately comment to the BBC about the new ban.
Remembering Dom and Bruno. Last week, three years after British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous affairs expert Bruno Pereira were killed in the Amazon rainforest, prosecutors filed charges against a man accused of ordering the killing. The suspect was a poacher carrying out illegal fishing operations that Pereira was investigating; Phillips was traveling with Pereira for book research.
Two new publications dive into Pereira and Phillips’s work. The Guardian, where Phillips was a contributing writer, this month launched a six-part investigative podcast about the search for the men and what compelled them to travel so deep into the jungle. And Phillip’s own book, How to Save the Amazon, was published in English on Tuesday after a team of journalists worked to complete it based on Phillips’s notes.
In the book, Phillips aimed to highlight the shades of gray when it comes to residents of the Amazon whom the media often characterizes in black and white moral terms, such as illegal fishermen. In his outline, he also drew broader conclusions about the kind of international relations necessary for environmental protection.
The world “is not a disconnected, random series of nations and societies, but an interconnected whole whose survival depends on cooperation, not competition,” Phillips wrote.
Question of the Week
When did Mexico last host a World Cup?
Mexico was the first country to host the World Cup twice, following its inaugural tournament in 1970. Next year, it is slated to become the first country to host the tournament three times.
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- The Ukrainians’ New Way of War by Christian Caryl
In Focus: Colombia’s Preelection Attack
A billboard reading “Strength Miguel Uribe” in support of Colombian Sen. Miguel Uribe, who was shot during a June 7 political event, is seen in Bogotá on June 10.Raul Arboleda/AFP via Getty Images
Miguel Uribe, a Colombian opposition senator, was shot outside of a campaign event in Bogotá on Saturday. The close-range attack was reminiscent of the political violence that rocked the country in the late 1980s.
Uribe has been vying for the nomination of a major right-wing party in Colombia’s 2026 presidential election. He spent the subsequent days in the hospital; a medical bulletin issued on Thursday said that he was in critical condition.
Authorities arrested the alleged gunman, a minor who said that he carried out the attempted killing for money. It was not immediately clear who ordered the attack. Uribe had worried about his security and asked for a heightened bodyguard detail multiple times in recent months, but Colombia’s central government did not grant his request.
The killing comes as Colombia’s government and opposition clash over President Gustavo Petro’s legislative agenda and security deteriorates in several parts of the country. On Tuesday, a string of bombings occurred in and around the southwestern city of Cali. Uribe is a proponent of hard-line anti-crime policies.
Petro condemned the attack on Uribe and political violence in general, calling for a de-escalated political environment in the country. But in the days following the attack, Petro compared people who tried to benefit politically from the assassination to “sewer rats.”
Petro bears partial responsible for polarization in Colombia, journalist Maria Jimena Duzán argued on the podcast A Fondo. “It was the political right, to tell the truth, that started it first, and now from the left, Gustavo Petro is also resorting to hate speech,” she said.