Interview with Paola Ricaurte Quijano.
The introduction of Digital Tribulations, a series of intellectual interviews on the developments of digital sovereignty in Latin America, can be read here. 
I first met Paola Ricaurte in Rio de Janeiro during the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference. Paola is a leading scholar and a founding member of Tierra Común, a network dedicated to the decolonization of data and the struggle for technological autonomy in the Global South. 
Our conversation was informed by the unique political landscape of Mexico, a country where I end up staying for more than two months, overstaying my visa. Mexico’s modern political history follows a fascinating and complex arc: it emerged from seventy years of stable, institutionalized control under the center party, the PRI—famously described by Mario Vargas Llosa as the “perfect dictatorship”—before transitioning to the neoliberal and religious far-right of the PAN. Today, the country is navigating the era of MORENA and the Cuarta Transformación (following the independence, the reform of Benito Juárez and the revolution). While this political project is often characterized by its populist left-wing rhetoric and actions, it represents a significant shift and, in many ways, an improvement in addressing the deep-seated social fractures left by previous administrations.
The interview takes place at a small restaurant in the neighborhood of Coyoacán, Mexico City, with quite a symbolic setting. The Coyoacán name comes from the Nahuatl: it means “place of those who have Coyotes”, symbols of both music and cunning in Aztec cosmology. It is also one of the city’s most storied neighborhoods, where the history of the conquest remains palpable, having served as Hernán Cortés’s first headquarters following the fall of Tenochtitlán. Close to us stood the Casa de la Malinche, the residence of the indigenous woman who served as Cortés’s translator and consort: a figure who remains an essential, yet controversial, symbol of the birth of mestizaje and the complexities of Mexican identity.
In the quiet patio of that restaurant, Paola told me about the challenges of digital sovereignty in Latin America, critiquing how state projects often remain dependent on U.S. corporate infrastructure and conflict with indigenous autonomy. She advocates for decolonizing data through feminist AI and community-led technologies to transition from a model of colonial extraction toward true regional self-determination. 
***
What is your background and how did you come to study digital sovereignty?
I am a research professor in the Department of Media and Digital Culture at Tecnológico de Monterrey, and I study social processes mediated by technology. I have always been dedicated to technology, first as a personal concern and later academically. My academic career began in teaching, reflecting on the role of technology in pedagogical processes, then moved into activism to understand it as a mediation of social transformation, and finally into a space of theoretical reflection.
One of the experiences that most shaped my relationship with technology was activism. In 2010, we formed the collective ContingenteMX, which later became a civil society organization, Enjambre Digital, focused on defending the emerging field of digital rights. At that time, we worked with social movements advocating for access to rights; those were complex times. We also addressed issues such as state surveillance and the use of spyware. It was work closely tied to technological resistance and social movements that used technology from a counter-hegemonic and countercultural position, already raising questions about sovereignty and autonomy.
One thing led to another. After that, and due to the awareness brought by the feminist movement, women began to organize to reflect on hacktivism and what it meant to think about technology from a gender perspective. In particular, in the context of violence in Mexico and based on experiences within hacktivist communities—which were highly masculinized—we began to rearticulate with other spaces. From there, I made the intersectional dimension explicit in my work. Later, I had the opportunity to go to Harvard for a research stay at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, where, together with colleagues, we formed a working group on emerging issues in digital society.
From this group of very engaged thinkers—including Nick Couldry, Ulises Mejías, Juan Ortiz Freuler, Mariel García Montes, Andrés Lombana, Sabelo Mhlambi, Chinmayi Arun, among others—we began to weave initiatives together and work on artificial intelligence and data from a critical perspective, with a focus on the Global South. After the research stay ended, we continued collaborating remotely. Later, at the end of 2019, I invited Nick and Ulises to present their book in Mexico. From one of the conversations we had after the event came the idea of organizing the Tierra Común collective.
Tierra Común has become a space for articulating critical thinking around the decolonization of data. I later became more involved in artificial intelligence through the feminist AI project and the network I have coordinated since 2021. Currently, we have a distributed governance model, and our members come from civil society organizations, academia, and activism across the region.
This project seeks to promote innovation in AI from a feminist perspective. We provide resources to multidisciplinary teams based in Latin America to develop technologies grounded in feminist principles. These projects are led by women and rooted in their communities.
What do you think of the concept of digital sovereignty?
Sovereignty, from its origins, is a problematic concept, because what sovereignty means is having the capacity to exercise power: it is the power of a sovereign to impose their authority on a territory. And that, in a context of political and national diversity, when you have societies as diverse as ours, is complicated. Now, reflection on sovereignty is resurging no longer in terms of the nation-state, but in regional terms for geopolitical reasons, and the concept is also being applied to the digital sphere. There are many governments and regions that are claiming digital sovereignty—or better, technological sovereignty—as the capacity of states to take decisions about their technological path at all levels.
At the level of governance and technology policies, for example, talking about sovereignty in our countries—especially as we are currently experiencing it—seems like a good purpose, but something complex to achieve concretely in all its layers, since the United States is imposing its sovereignty by force on the rest of the world through weapons, taxes, trade policies, and investments. It has always built its sovereignty using mechanisms of hard power, but now it is much more explicit. That is why this is a historical moment, because we can witness in real time the deployment of hard power and soft power through technology. One only needs to review Trump’s executive orders on AI and the policy and his own notion of sovereignty become clear, to the detriment of the sovereignty of other nations.
The difficult question we ask ourselves is: what capacity do we, our countries, have to exercise sovereignty in a geopolitical context in which the United States is trying to do everything to consolidate its own? At a global level, I believe that only two countries can say they have technological sovereignty—that is, that they have control of the entire value chain of technological production. Europe tries to respond with its regulations and say that with them it is building sovereignty and promoting the development of its own technologies, but the reality is that they are also subordinated to the technological stack of the United States.
Here in Latin America, we are far from the construction of a regional technological sovereignty, because it is not understood that it is difficult for countries, in isolation, to truly have a policy that serves as a counterweight to the interventionist policy of the United States. The only country where there are indices of sovereignty is Brazil and, to a certain extent, Mexico. There is a discourse of industrial and technological sovereignty; there is a proposal for sovereignty in general—energy sovereignty, for example, which is important in this context—and the current government is taking steps toward that.
It is an interesting bet. However, when you begin to think in a more granular way and consider the technological stack necessary to build that sovereignty, it is still a project; it has not materialized. United States companies are very clear about it; they say: “we are going to give you your capacity for sovereignty.” It sounds absurd, but I have photos from an Amazon conference talking about technological sovereignty associated with the offer of its services. The discourse of sovereignty is also captured by corporations, as mentioned in a recent paper by Rafael Grohmann and others.
If you go to the bottom of what technological sovereignty implies for a country like this, you also understand that sovereignty thought of at a national level is—until now—in contrast with forms of community governance. The question of sovereignty must be understood carefully when you have contexts where communities, especially indigenous peoples in Mexico, claim their autonomy and self-determination. That process of self-determination is in conflict with the sovereign program of the State. There is an important problem there to take into account if one truly wants to move toward a technopolitical project that is not oppressive, and it is something very difficult to solve.
And in the new government with Claudia Sheinbaum, did the program change or is it the same?
Mexico’s sovereign policy has been developing since the government of López Obrador; both have worked a lot from the discourse of sovereignty. What Claudia Sheinbaum has done is that some of her policies are advancing more decisively toward that project, especially in the energy plan. For her it is very clear; she always mentions that energy sovereignty is the axis of her policy. In recent months, she has launched projects that have to do with technological sovereignty. For example, now the construction of a supercomputer, the Coatlicue, is underway, and the idea is to begin building that public stack of infrastructure to provide service to the government and to the production of knowledge from the public sphere. However, those technological sovereignty initiatives are still anchored to the technological stack of the United States.
In other words, in the technological aspect Claudia Sheinbaum has taken more concrete steps. Perhaps the previous government remained more on the level of policy, but without landing it in projects, although the discourse was always present. She has taken it up and is trying to promote it from public policy. But there is also the contradictory part: sometimes we see in the news that many of the alliances to enable these infrastructures are made with corporations. That is the part that is not consistent in the discourse. There was an announcement last year of Amazon investments for data centers. Therefore, the way we are understanding technological sovereignty is different from building infrastructure that is not dependent on the technology corporations of the United States. So we return to the fundamental question: how to build technological sovereignty in our context? Technological sovereignty has many layers that are not easy to resolve by one State alone. Thus, what we see in our governments is that they turn to corporations to solve their technological needs.
How does the Mexican context intersect with nationalism and narcotrafficking? It was known that Mexico bought software from Israel to monitor activists.
The Mexican State is a nationalist state since its constitution, but that nationalism is understood in a lax way by governments whose discourses can be nationalist, but at the same time they open the doors to foreign corporations. That nationalist narrative does not necessarily translate into a material reality that defends local technology companies, for example.
Regarding the spyware, the purchase dates back several governments; in 2010 Felipe Calderón bought the software from NSO Group and later it was used by Enrique Peña Nieto. At the time the software was bought under the pretext of security and the war against narcotrafficking—which is a transversal issue—but it was clearly deployed in the end as a tool of authoritarian governments that monitored people inconvenient to the government. During the government of Enrique Peña Nieto, the surveillance of activists and journalists whose activity implied a “threat” to the interests of companies or the government itself was documented. Alejandro Calvillo, director of El Poder del Consumidor and a key figure in the fight against soda corporations and agribusiness, was one of the people spied on. Who is interested in spying on an activist who promoted regulations and taxes on soft drinks? And questions arise about the alliances between states and corporations. Another similar case was that of the journalist Carmen Aristegui.
When there was a change of government and López Obrador took office, as civil society we expected the use of spyware from Israel companies and ghost companies to be disabled. But it was not disabled and, according to the evidence, it continues to be used by the Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA). The State has become militarized with the National Guard, something that civil society has repeatedly denounced. Human rights defenders continue to be monitored because they directly denounce territorial powers, but the State is a complex monster with multiple actors and a struggle of forces: on one hand there is the federal government, on the other the local governments and on another, as we mentioned, there is organized crime; and there in the middle are the people and the communities demanding respect for their rights.
And what about public digital infrastructure, such as identification or payment systems like PIX in Brazil?
PIX was a very intelligent movement by the government of Brazil. Here in the financial part, that transformation has not occurred. And in the identification part, unfortunately, we are at a point where mandatory biometric identification is going to be requested. For those of us in civil society, there is a lot of concern with that regarding both privacy and surveillance as well as security. One thing is the State developing infrastructure for services and another is the infrastructural capacity in terms of security. What is being proposed now is quite problematic, because you are associating all your sensitive data with a public infrastructure that is characterized by having no cybersecurity. The security protocols are minimal, people are poorly trained, and there are public data breaches for which no one is held accountable. There are historical cases of data leaks from public servers and the citizenry that had no consequences. Many steps are still missing so that a public infrastructure of services and data does not become as big a risk as is projected.
In Mexico, the electoral registry is the most complete in terms of data of the citizenry, but the government does not have access to it; that was considered a victory in terms of privacy due to the separation of powers. Since the government has not been able to access that data, what it is doing now is trying to reconstruct it through this biometric record. For us it is terrible because you are going to be exposed everywhere. Some organizations are promoting injunctions (amparos). It is a very uncertain scenario and a step backward regarding the right to privacy.
And do the Zapatistas talk about these issues?
The Zapatista government is an autonomous government in opposition to the State’s policy. The State does not recognize the Zapatista movement, ignores it, and does not attend to its demands. But it is a form of government and I believe that example is very good for showing how the Mexican State, in its sovereign policy, runs over those movements, both of original peoples and of political movements that do not want to adjust to national policy.
Original peoples often do not recognize themselves as “Mexicans” and that is a constant source of conflict. That is why community technological sovereignty initiatives have much more value to me, because they show how those initiatives work under other principles and logics that are not those of the State nor those of corporations, and they fall outside the State’s conception of sovereignty. That doesn’t fit there. It is negative that a State does not understand that these possibilities, instead of being a threat, are a possibility to strengthen the social fabric.
Is artificial intelligence talked about in the government of Mexico?
There are some initiatives. This government has worked on an external policy through the Secretariat of Foreign Relations. Also in January 2026, the Chapultepec Principles were launched from the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (Secihti) and the Digital Transformation and Telecommunications Agency (ATDT). In addition, there is the technological sovereignty policy, which includes the supercomputer and a network of research centers in the country. That is to say, there are steps, but there is still no specific regulation for AI or for data centers, for example. There is talk of technological sovereignty and sovereignty in AI, but if you “scratch” a bit and ask whose servers they are or what cables they use, well, they belong to the corporations.
The discussion about digital colonialism is not part of the main debate because there is a need for direct foreign investment. The State does not have an anti-extractive policy, so it is going to receive any investment that implies economic growth, especially from extractive industries. There is no consistent sovereign policy. I remember when López Obrador first arrived, one of his first remote meetings was with Zuckerberg and he said: “let’s see if you can help us connect people.” There is no deep understanding of what that relationship of infrastructural dependency implies. It is a bit more present in Claudia’s discourse, but in practice not yet.
And are there interesting activism projects or social movements?
There have always been interesting community technological projects here. The case of Oaxaca is exemplary: original peoples have their own cellular technology and community internet. You can buy community internet chips, but they are niche initiatives because they have not been backed by public policy. There was a telecommunications reform in 2014 that we hoped would support these projects, but it did not advance in that direction; on the contrary, it continued to privilege the companies. There are many people working on community communications projects from an adverse context. There are no fiscal or innovation policies that create the necessary conditions for these projects to exist in terms of equity. It is the great contradiction of governments that call themselves progressive, but whose policies are not oriented toward transforming the matrix of production or the matrix of power. The new Telecommunications Law approved in 2025 does not substantively transform the conditions to strengthen community initiatives.
The feminist AI project, which receives money from abroad because there are no funds for that here, tries to demonstrate that technologies can be built from other principles. We opened the last call in October 2025 and received 129 proposals from all over the region, but we can only support seven. If I had three times more money, I could finance more initiatives. It is a small project trying to do something that the State should generate: the conditions for communities to develop their own technology (technical and social knowledge, accompaniment). We had proposals from indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, young people from the peripheries of Brazil, collectives of trans sex workers… projects that you will not see anywhere else. We want to show that technology governed by the community can be made that does not respond to market interests. We operate in the layer of software and applications, but we cannot yet operate in the deep infrastructure, the computing capacity, or the cables. I would love for this to be part of a public policy of community innovation outside the market, but for now it is just a project.
What are the perspectives for the coming years in Latin America?
Unfortunately, we depend a lot on how global geopolitics moves. Based on this aggressive policy of Trump, what our governments do is react or adopt without opposition that role we have in the global value chains of the technological industry. We participate mainly in stages of low added value: raw material extraction, assembly, and supply of data, knowledge, and labor, but we do not participate in the distribution of resources or in the ownership of infrastructure, software, or products. That worries me: as long as we do not have an articulated regional vision—something difficult in the face of the onslaught of the right and authoritarianisms—that allows for the generation of a counterweight muscle against the interventionism of the United States, it will be complicated to make technological sovereignty a real fact. All regions have an interest in Latin America and Africa because of what we can contribute to those global value chains, but without a joint vision, there is little room for action for us to defend our sovereignty, autonomy, and self-determination. We are living again in a phase of imperialism where the United States is going to use all its weapons to impose its interests on the rest of the planet.