RIO DE JANEIRO.– The Ueno Bank financial scandal in Paraguay exposed what some Latin American political analysts define as an ecosystem in which political and economic actors and magnates of the so-called big techs operate, increasingly influential in Latin America. The crisis that affected half of Paraguay's population was not only a political and financial storm; it was also a warning about the new challenges to the sovereignty of the region's countries in the face of the advance of figures like Peter Thiel, owner of Palantir, who was in Asunción meeting with then-president Santiago Peña six months before the collapse of Ueno Bank, in a meeting about which little is known, as with all the magnate's meetings with Latin American heads of state and political leaders. After that meeting, confirmed on his social media by the former Paraguayan president, Peña referred to Thiel as "one of the most visionary investors in the world." Six months later, Peña's government collapsed. Former vice president Pedro Alliana took power and, days later, the new president of the Central Bank of Paraguay, Jorge Schreiner, stated that the real business of Ueno Bank's owners was not banking, but the capture of biometric data from millions of Paraguayans to build a large national database and then exploit it commercially. Businessman Peter Thiel, one of Silicon Valley's most influential investors. Schreiner made this statement in his country's Senate on November 9, when Paraguayans were still trying to recover from a trauma that had affected half the population. "They were not bankers; they were database administrators," said the president of the Paraguayan Central Bank, who also criticized the requirement of biometric data to carry out transactions at large events, arguing that it made no sense to demand a person's "face" for operations in local currency. The Paraguayan crisis and the ecosystem in which it occurred was the subject of debate at a summit of Latin American academics organized last week in Rio de Janeiro by the Latin American Conservatory (Conlat), a group formed by Di Tella University of Argentina; the College of Mexico; the Institute of Social and Political Studies of the State University of Rio de Janeiro; and the University of the Andes, Colombia. One of those who mentioned what is seen as a new challenge for the region was Bernabé Malacalza, a researcher at Conicet and the National University of Quilmes and a graduate professor at Di Tella University. "It became known in recent days that Ueno Bank sponsored the Hispanic Prosperity gala dinner at Mar-a-Lago, finances and has ties with Latino Wall Street [which, in turn, has ties with CPAC] and, in turn, financed the newspaper La Derecha Diario, of Negre and Cerimedo. That is, there is a network of political financing at the core of this right-wing international, where [Argentine president Javier] Milei and Eduardo Bolsonaro are," Malacalza opined. Politics and its financing, the use of new technologies such as AI, access to millions of data points on the Latin American population and, above all of that, zero regulation. The big tech magnates push to operate under legal frameworks that allow them to carry out their operations without barriers, both in capital movements and in penetrating the public and private databases of the region's countries. Private enclaves In addition to having a close relationship—and one about which nothing is known—with governments of the region, the tech magnates have been promoting private enclaves within countries such as Honduras, Venezuela, Nicaragua and, perhaps soon, Uruguay and Argentina. The issue was raised by Svenja Blanke, director of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES) office in Uruguay. These tech cities represent, she told LA NACION, "an enormous dilemma for Latin American states interested in investment and development." "One must not look only at the economic side, but also at the issue of their neocolonialist and antidemocratic logic. This shows how state sovereignty is undergoing profound alterations, favoring non-state actors from the Global North," she analyzed. In the article "Latin America, laboratory of private cities," published in the magazine Nueva Sociedad, Blanke mentions the cases of Próspera, Veritas Village, CryptoCity, Praxis and Xcity. Rendering of the homes of Roatán Próspera on the island of Roatán in Honduras, by the firm Zaha Hadid Architects. Zaha Hadid Architects "These private enclaves are experiments, artificial habitats for 'free' entrepreneurs and start-ups that intend to develop without being subject to state laws and obligations. Private cities in the style of Próspera, in Honduras—probably the best-known model—attract tech start-up owners, cryptocurrency fanatics, transhumanists or biohackers and, above all, libertarians who do not wish to pay taxes. Depending on the point of view, these experiments can be considered disruptive or visionary, but they are, above all, libertarian and deeply neocolonialist: the state in question is nullified through private contracts; these are highly developed islands in the middle of poorer regions," Blanke adds. Próspera is administered by the American company Honduras Próspera Inc. and is located on the island of Roatán. According to the company, around 1,700 people have already obtained residency in the city, which is achieved by paying a one-time tax of 5,000 dollars. "The tax rate amounts to 1% of a company's gross income, while at the national level the same rate is approximately 25%. Próspera was legalized by Honduras as a special economic zone in 2017. It is not obliged to comply with Honduran laws and has the power to establish its own legal system, its own courts, its own police, as well as its own tax laws and regulations," Blanke says in her article. The laboratory city entered into litigation with the government of Xiomara Castro starting in 2022, and the case remains unresolved. The change of government in Honduras in 2026 could tip the balance in favor of Próspera, a project in which Titus Gebel participates, founder of the Free City Foundation and advocate of privately managed "city-states" that escape democratic control. In parallel to projects that seem like science fiction but are becoming more real every day, state surveillance of the citizens of Latin America is growing. Data from the Colombian project Public Algorithm Systems, of the School of Government of the University of the Andes, presented at the Conlat meeting, are frightening: today there are 1,085 documented AI systems in public entities in the region; 77% of these systems process personal data; 45% of the AI systems in operation support state surveillance practices; and 31% correspond to facial recognition (265 systems), the most frequent AI application in the region's public sector. Peter Thiel's Palantir is present in Ecuador and Colombia, and there are negotiations with Argentina, Chile and Paraguay. "In Colombia, Palantir provided services to the national government during the pandemic through a platform called Palantir Foundry, to help them integrate health information systems for pandemic control. There were many doubts about whether that information was being used only for health matters or whether it was really being used for other purposes. We are in a scenario of maximum lack of protection, both for the citizen and for the states themselves. Because the states are receiving a Trojan horse: it sounds very attractive to be able to use all these tools to cross-reference a lot of information and draw more conclusions from different databases, but, at the same time, you become very dependent on the tech company," explained Juan David Gutiérrez, professor at the School of Government of the University of the Andes. In times of expansion of right-wing and far-right governments in the region, the presence of tech-libertarians and their connections with politics is something that must be watched closely, especially because of their thinking about democracy, seen by many of them as an obstacle to their projects and to the societies they imagine as possible. The Conlat meeting issued a warning about the presence of what are more than signals: they are concrete facts, with concrete impact on Latin American countries.