Latin American Policy最新文献

Surveillance capitalism has emerged as a critical ethical challenge in Colombia, where corporations increasingly exploit artificial intelligence (AI) to collect, analyze, and monetize consumer data. While these practices drive economic growth and innovation, they often come at the expense of privacy, autonomy, and consumer rights. This article examines the ethical implications of surveillance capitalism in Colombia, focusing on data privacy risks and regulatory gaps within key sectors such as telecommunications, retail, finance, and digital platforms. Through computational simulations and real-world case studies, we quantify the risks posed by AI-driven data practices, including opaque consent mechanisms, algorithmic bias, and data breach vulnerabilities. The study evaluates Colombia's current AI governance policies as concerns CONPES 4144 de 2025, revealing significant ethical implementation and enforcement shortcomings. Our findings highlight the urgent need for stronger regulatory frameworks to safeguard consumer rights while fostering technological progress. This article adds to the conversation on digital governance and corporate ethics by fusing policy analysis with empirical findings. It provides practical suggestions to improve data privacy and ethical AI practices in Colombia's developing digital economy.

President Nayib Bukele has garnered domestic and international acclaim for his extreme mano dura policies to combat gangs, crime, and violence in El Salvador. While these measures have reduced homicide rates and extortion in El Salvador, they come at the cost of violating human rights and eroding democracy. Still, some politicians around the region have applauded Bukele's model and advocated implementing it in their own countries. To understand Bukele's appeal, we examine public perceptions of insecurity and mano dura in countries that have not historically employed these policies—Ecuador, Costa Rica, Chile, and Uruguay. With data collected in 32 focus groups across these countries, we examine how citizens perceive the problem of insecurity and how they evaluate the efficacy of different methods to fight crime, relying upon thematic analyses using MAXQDA. We find that while there is substantial support for Bukele and his security model, public willingness to absorb its costs varies across these four cases. In Ecuador, citizens were more willing to replicate the Bukele model despite its toll on human rights and democracy. In Uruguay, support for the Bukele model was tempered by distrust of authoritarianism, leading most participants to reject mano dura. Chile and Costa Rica lie on the middle of this spectrum as people were supportive of implementing some parts of Bukele's model (such as harsher prison sentences) but reluctant to embrace the full extent of his authoritarian measures. This article provides insight into the ways in which crime and insecurity can contribute to democratic backsliding in the region.

Why does patronage (the discretionary appointment of public positions) in public education continue to exist in Latin America? What are the key factors that explain its persistence or decay? Using the cases of Chile, Colombia, and Ecuador, and leveraging a multi-source qualitative approach, Author note three central features that set the path for diminished patronage in the education sector, (1) the degree of party system institutionalization in each country, (2) the level of politicization of teacher unions, and (3) the strength of civil society groups and policy networks. Overall, findings show that in countries with high party institutionalization, low union politicization, and a strong civil society, here exemplified by Chile, patronage in the education sector has remained low over time. Ecuador, on the other hand, has seen patronage become more deeply entrenched due to policies taken under the regime of Rafael Correa (2007–2017). Colombia is a “mixed bag” of sorts, curtailing national-level patronage yet still encountering more nuanced and potentially more pernicious versions of patron–client relations at local levels. This article has important insights on state–society relations and particularly on the role education reform can have in lessening patronage practices.

This article examines regional citizenship in Mercosur by linking legal–institutional developments with public perceptions of integration. Drawing on official Mercosur documents and Latin-Barometer datasets, it adopts a multidimensional conception of citizenship encompassing rights, political participation, and collective identity. The findings reveal a persistent gap between normative ambitions and popular support. Despite key agreements such as the Residence Agreement and the Citizenship Statute, weak supranational institutions and limited participatory mechanisms constrain the societal internalization of regional citizenship. Identification with Mercosur remains moderate and uneven across countries, with Uruguay displaying relatively higher levels of regional attachment.

The Brazilian Constitution requires that Voluntary Union Transfers respond to inequalities in regional development. We assess de facto compliance with this mandate by examining data on voluntary transfer appropriations to municipalities 2012–2019 using data-driven machine-learning methods for causal inference. At the extensive margin (whether a municipality features any transfer appropriations), transfer appropriations reveal a significant constitutional failure—all else equal, less developed municipalities are, in fact, less likely to receive transfers. This result holds true regardless of whether the transfers originate from Congress or the federal government and irrespective of their intended purpose. A similar, though less pronounced, constitutional noncompliance is detectable at the intensive margin (the amount of the transfers appropriated), with the notable exception of the health domain, where appropriations align with the constitutional stipulation. The effort to address regional inequalities through individual amendments, a major component of transfers originating from Congress, did not intensify even after the corresponding appropriations became binding on the Federal Government. We articulate the policy implications of our findings.

This article analyzes experiences of nationwide enjoyment and exercise of communication, cultural, and digital rights in state and community instances from a human rights-based approach. The period covered goes from 2019—a year before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in Argentina and the implementation of the preventive measures—to 2023, a year after they were lifted. In view of the increasing inequalities in the fields of communication, culture, and connectivity during the Covid-19 pandemic, we ask, to what extent did the three branches of government operate effectively as guarantors of rights; what policies were designed to this effect, and how did socio-community organizations influence public policies or develop self-managed strategies for the exercise of these rights? The methodology a qualitative analysis of a wide survey of publicly available information, using a method based on a human rights and communication policymaking approach. The article concludes that the executive and legislative branches designed public policies to expand all three rights, but such policies turned out to be insufficient. The judicial acted mostly as an obstacle to the exercise of rights, serving the capture of policies by economic elites. Civil society organizations developed strategies for participation and advocacy in rights-promoting public policies. At the same time, they self-managed initiatives to guarantee such rights. The state would on occasion collaborate in the development of these efforts.

Global Governance with its adherent institutional frame is perplexed by what Gramsci might refer to as “discursive conflict” between the established capitalist core and other nations that advocate divergent values and goals. The regionalist turn in the emergent powers reflects this group's growing disillusionment with the established status quo. Their regionalism amounts to neither a complete retreat from global governance nor a declaration of war on liberal premises upon which global institutions sit. Instead, the objective is to craft new institutions to manage some of the key issues in accordance with their own norms and priorities, critically, with those neighbors who share their perception. As such, Brazil engineered Mercosur and Unasur to secure its economic development within a peaceful South American interstate order. After a promising headstart, this emergent power strategy quickly ran into the systemic constraints of being a latecomer to the game of capitalist development. Reading Brazil's regionalism through Hirschman's “voting with the feet” concept, this study employs a single-case process-tracing design anchored in the institutional evolution of Mercosur and Unasur, with intra-regional trade volumes and presidential discourse providing the principal empirical material.