Across Latin America, a growing wave of right-wing governments has turned to increasingly militarized, technology-focused strategies to combat organized crime — and Israel has moved quickly to position its powerful cybersecurity sector as a go-to source of specialized expertise, surveillance infrastructure, and national security solutions. This expanding cooperation has unlocked lucrative new export markets for an Israeli industry deeply intertwined with the country’s military and intelligence networks, where core technologies are first developed and field-tested during Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories before being marketed to global buyers.
Recent high-level agreements across the region underscore this growing partnership. Colombia’s new hardline right-wing president, Abelardo de la Espriella, has publicly identified Israeli artificial intelligence and cybersecurity know-how as a critical tool to deliver on his campaign promise of a sweeping crackdown on organized criminal groups. “A collaboration with Israel would allow these resources to be applied directly to combating criminal structures within the national territory,” de la Espriella stated. In neighboring Ecuador, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and Ecuadorian counterpart Roberto Kury signed new counterterrorism and cybersecurity cooperation pacts during an August 4 state visit. Israel and Argentina have also finalized new deals to deepen collaboration on artificial intelligence development and joint action against what they frame as “terrorist” cyber threats.
These agreements mark a major new opening for Israel’s cyber sector in Latin America, riding a regional political wave that has prioritized tech-driven responses to organized crime. But digital rights advocates warn that the line between defensive cybersecurity and intrusive mass surveillance can quickly blur when technologies refined in Israel’s military and occupation apparatus are sold to governments with weak regulatory safeguards and documented histories of human rights abuse.
Pepe Flores, program director at independent Mexican digital rights nonprofit R3D Mexico, notes that Latin American governments overwhelmingly prioritize a risk-focused approach to security, rather than a human rights-centered framework. “There is an illusion of control with technology,” Flores explained in an interview with Middle East Eye. This push for expanded security cooperation with Israel also aligns with growing U.S. efforts to leverage cyber capabilities against transnational criminal networks. On August 12, former U.S. President Donald Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum granting U.S. federal law enforcement agencies broad authority to use cyber tools “to disrupt transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) that operate in foreign jurisdictions to attack Americans.”
The turn toward closer Israeli security ties comes as part of a broader rightward political shift across Latin America, where multiple new administrations have aligned more closely with Washington and adopted hardline stances on organized crime, migration, and national security. Juan Diego Castaneda, co-director of Bogota-based digital rights and civil society group Fundacion Karisma, points out that new right-wing presidencies led by figures including Daniel Noboa, Antonio Kast, and de la Espriella represent a political pendulum swing away from the left-leaning governments of leaders like Hugo Chavez, Gustavo Petro, and Lula da Silva. In this context, Castaneda argues that selecting Israel as a security partner is not merely a choice based on technical quality. “Nothing particularly special” sets Israeli cyber tools apart from competing offerings, he noted. Instead, “the choice of Israel is ideological, meaning that when faced with two equal suppliers, they pick the one that aligns better with their values, or one that reinforces their own stance.”
Israel has long positioned itself as a global leader in defense, cybersecurity, and counterterrorism expertise for Latin American governments. But Castaneda cautions that the official framing of “defense” rarely stays limited to protection from external threats. “That is the official narrative but clearly it also involves defending against whatever is strategic. In other words, defending oneself can become a form of attack.” The language of defense has been repeatedly used to justify expanding state power, from the U.S.-led global “war on terror” to the decades-long “war on drugs” in the Western Hemisphere. In contemporary Latin America, this rhetoric and these hardline tactics are increasingly merging into campaigns against what governments label “narco-terrorism” — a shift that rights groups warn has already led to widespread militarization and severe human rights violations in countries including Ecuador and El Salvador. Critics note that Israel has used identical “defensive war” rhetoric to justify its ongoing military campaign in Gaza, framing the operation as a defensive action against Hamas rather than a conflict targeting the Palestinian people.
International criticism of Israel’s cyber industry has long centered on well-documented offensive tools such as Pegasus, the notorious Israeli spyware that has been used by governments worldwide to target journalists, human rights activists, and political opponents. But Flores and other digital rights advocates emphasize that even firms that market their products as purely defensive maintain deep institutional and operational ties to Israel’s military and security apparatus. “That is part of the selling point,” Flores said. He added that the U.S. has pushed a widespread narrative that cyber technology can dismantle transnational cartels, creating pressure on Latin American governments to deliver quick security results. In this environment, governments are often tempted to adopt Israeli security tactics, creating “a complex matrix where US interests, Israel’s interests and big-tech interests align.”
A core feature of Israel’s cyber industry that is rarely highlighted in global marketing is its direct origins in the occupation of Palestine. For decades, Israeli authorities have developed and deployed mass surveillance and digital tools on the Palestinian population, which has no ability to opt out of or challenge these systems. The commercialized expertise Israel sells is not generic intelligence capability — which many countries possess — it is hands-on experience running population-scale surveillance on a disenfranchised population that cannot resist, explained Lama Nazeeh, advocacy manager at 7amleh, the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement. “That is the intellectual property, and every Palestinian is an unconsenting contributor,” Nazeeh said. She detailed that since 2017, Israeli authorities have used predictive policing algorithms that scrape social media data to generate detention recommendations, leading to thousands of arrests based on flawed, error-prone systems. The use of these surveillance tools is part of a broader system of digital repression against Palestinians: 7amleh’s 2025 documentation recorded 3,452 digital rights violations against Palestinians, including 538 cases of censorship and 2,910 incidents of hate speech and incitement. “The absence of consent is not an unfortunate side effect, it is a design requirement,” Nazeeh emphasized.
This system of mass surveillance in occupied Palestinian territories has even expanded into biometric facial recognition, part of an official push for what Israeli officials describe as a “frictionless” occupation that reduces direct interactions between soldiers and Palestinian civilians by handing over identity verification to automated systems. Israeli firms including Corsight AI, Oosto, and Mabat 2000 have all integrated their facial recognition tools into Israel’s extensive surveillance network across Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and occupied East Jerusalem. “Anywhere else deploying a biometric system at scale involves a procurement process, a data protection authority, legal basis, courts that enjoin you, journalists with access and a population that can refuse. In the West Bank and East Jerusalem there is none of that,” Nazeeh noted. It is these very technologies, refined in the occupation context, that are then marketed globally as defensive or civilian security solutions. For example, Corsight AI’s facial recognition software is already in use at Mexican hospitals and Brazilian schools, even as the Israeli military’s elite Unit 8200 cyber intelligence division uses the company’s technology to identify and track Palestinians in Gaza. While commercial deployments in Latin America may not currently serve the same military purposes as in Palestine, rights advocates warn that their shared technological and institutional origins raise urgent questions about oversight, data safeguards, and how these tools could be abused by governments seeking to expand intrusive surveillance powers.
The deep ties between Israel’s military and its cyber sector are no coincidence. Approximately 80 percent of founders of Israel’s 700 cyber technology companies are veterans of Unit 8200, the country’s elite cyber intelligence division, according to research cited by Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Unit 8200 is widely viewed as a foundational training ground for Israel’s multi-billion dollar cybersecurity industry. Leading Israeli cyber firms such as Check Point, whose founder Gil Shwed and CEO Nadav Zafrir are both Unit 8200 veterans, now actively market their services to Latin American governments and businesses. Check Point says it is committed to “empowering Latin America businesses and governments with cutting-edge security solutions to combat rising cyber threats.” The company recently held talks with a delegation from Honduras’ National Telecommunications Commission to discuss plans for a national cybersecurity strategy, and has partnered with Israel Aerospace Industries — one of Israel’s largest weapons manufacturers — through the Israeli Cyber Companies Consortium (IC3). Established in 2016 with Israeli government backing, IC3 brings together leading domestic cyber firms to deliver full-scale national cyber defense systems to government clients worldwide. In 2017, the consortium announced it had secured a tens-of-millions-of-dollar contract to build a national cyber center for an unnamed Latin American country, including national threat monitoring, intelligence sharing, forensic tools, cyber training, and attack detection systems. Israeli firm Cellebrite, another company staffed heavily by Unit 8200 veterans, announced in 2023 that it would supply a digital intelligence system to federal forces in an unnamed Latin American nation.
This current expansion of Israel’s cyber sector in Latin America builds on a decades-long history of military and security cooperation between the two regions. In the second half of the 20th century, Israel supplied weapons, training, and security assistance to multiple Latin American governments and armed forces that carried out violent campaigns against Indigenous communities and left-wing political movements. As journalist Antony Loewenstein wrote in his book *The Palestine Laboratory*, these tools and tactics were “conveniently tested on occupied Palestinians, then marketed as ‘battle-tested’.” As researcher Bishara Bahbah noted in his 1988 seminal work *Israel and Latin America: The Military Connection*, the significance of Israeli arms exports to the region extends far beyond the volume of equipment sold. “The significance lies in what has become Israel’s absolute imperative to export arms. From this dependence on arms exports, all else is derivative,” Bahbah wrote, pointing to Israel’s longstanding close cooperation with authoritarian regimes and its integration into U.S. global strategic goals.
Castaneda notes that this long history of trilateral relations between Latin America, the U.S., and Israel sets the context for today’s expanding cyber partnerships. “The history of relations forms the broader context in which we find ourselves today,” he said. “In other words, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that these threads are converging again.” The left-wing government of former Colombian president Gustavo Petro, which broke diplomatic relations with Israel over the Gaza war, represented a rare break from this long-running pattern. “What we’re seeing now is [a return to] the norm,” Castaneda added.
From northern Mexico to southern Argentina, digital rights advocates warn that the combination of militarized security policies and increasingly intrusive surveillance technologies creates significant risks of widespread abuse and targeted repression. For Castaneda, Colombia’s new de la Espriella administration will serve as a critical test case for how this partnership plays out in practice. “We have to keep watching how the Abelardo de la Espriella administration evolves and how it reconnects with Colombia’s long history of asserting that national security requires exceptional solutions,” he said. “That history justified secrecy. It justified the use of weapons, violence, killing of people and the notion that we should not complain.”
