Foreword

Vijay Prashad

There is a certain comfort in the stories that empires tell about themselves. These are stories of ingenuity, of discovery, of the steady march of reason and science. In these stories, capitalism appears almost as an inevitability, the natural flowering of human progress in Western Europe, propelled by technological innovation and the so-called Enlightenment. What these narratives leave out is not incidental but foundational: the violence that made the modern world.

Prabir Purkayastha’s The Roots of Capitalism: Slavery and the Sugar Trade is an intervention into this cultivated amnesia. It insists that we look directly at the historical record and recognise that capitalism did not emerge from the gentle unfolding of markets and machines but from the brutal reorganisation of the world through conquest, enslavement, and extraction. Much of this study was written during Prabir Purkayastha’s 225-day incarceration in Rohini Central Jail in Delhi, India, on scraps of paper passed back and forth and discussed with those of us who visited him. It compels us to reconsider what we mean when we speak of the origins of capitalism and to ask: whose history is being told, whose suffering is being obscured, and what was the cost?

At the heart of this study is sugar, not just as a commodity but as a social relation. Sugar was among the first truly global commodities, binding together continents in circuits of production, exchange, and finance. Its cultivation required vast tracts of land – seized through genocide in the Americas – and immense quantities of labour, supplied through the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. Sugar, in this sense, was not simply produced; it was made possible through a system that treated human beings themselves as commodities.

What Purkayastha demonstrates with clarity is that the plantation was not an archaic or pre-capitalist institution. On the contrary, it was one of the earliest sites of modern capitalist organisation. Here we see the integration of agriculture and industry, the careful accounting of costs and returns, the calculation of labour productivity, and the ruthless logic of replacement. Enslaved people were reduced to units of capital, their lives measured against their market price. The plantation, as Sidney Mintz observed, was both field and factory. The immense profits generated by slavery and plantation agriculture were not peripheral to European development; they were central to it. Sugar production, the trade in enslaved people, and the associated industries (shipping, insurance, refining, and finance) formed an interconnected system that fuelled capital accumulation on a global scale. The wealth generated in the Caribbean and the Americas flowed into European cities, underwriting the growth of industries and financial institutions. The sugar refineries of London, Bristol, and Liverpool were among the earliest industrial workplaces. They processed the raw sugar produced by enslaved labour, transforming it into commodities for mass consumption and for re-export across the globe.

To speak of capitalism without speaking of slavery is therefore to tell only half the story. It is to accept a narrative that sanitises the past and obscures the structural violence upon which the modern world was built. Purkayastha’s work aligns with a long tradition of radical scholarship, from Eric Williams to Walter Rodney, that has sought to restore this missing history. But it also advances the discussion by focusing closely on sugar as a lens through which to understand the broader dynamics of capitalist development. What emerges is a picture of capitalism not merely as an economic system but as a global project of domination that involved the reorganisation of land, labour, and resources across continents; the destruction of existing societies; and the creation of new hierarchies of race and power. The interdependence of sugar and enslaved people as commodities illustrates this vividly: one cannot be understood without the other. This history is not merely of academic interest. The legacies of this system persist in the inequalities that structure our world today. The wealth accumulated through slavery and colonialism did not disappear; it was institutionalised in the financial systems, property relations, and global divisions of labour that continue to shape our present. To understand capitalism’s origins is therefore to better understand its contemporary forms and its enduring injustices.

There is also, in this work, an implicit challenge to how we think about resistance. The system described here was sustained by violence, but it was also contested at every stage by the enslaved people¹ who resisted their bondage, by those who exposed the brutality of the trade, and by movements that sought to dismantle it. To recover this history is not only to confront the crimes of the past, but also to recognise the struggles that sought to overcome them.

The Conventional Narrative: An Overview

The conventional explanation for the rise of the West – the lazy, Eurocentric account of civilisation – is that a few Western European countries came to dominate the world because of a set of events that took place only there.² According to this Eurocentric view, the key events of this period are the Age of Discovery (late fifteenth through seventeenth centuries), the Enlightenment (late seventeenth through eighteenth centuries), and the Industrial Revolution (mid-eighteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries). In this view, the Enlightenment accelerated scientific and technological development, helping to set in motion the first wave of industrialisation. The central impetus to progress in the West is thus framed as technological change, led by science and capitalist rationality, which shed the shackles of pre-capitalist production and created a new economic system based on ‘free’ labour. The role of the looting, genocide, and slavery that predated and accompanied the Industrial Revolution is airbrushed out of this history.³ If mentioned, it appears at most as an unhappy adjunct or by-product of this history but by no means central to it.

Factual history is quite unkind to this mythical explanation of the capitalist development of the West. The conventional narrative also airbrushes out three significant facts in the history of capitalism: first, that the plantation economy in the Caribbean and the continental Americas (both North and South) established sugar as a commodity of large-scale production and created a global market; second, that the foundations of British capital predated the Industrial Revolution; and third, that it was cotton, produced by enslaved Africans in the US South, that made the US a rising power and underwrote England’s textile revolution.⁴

It is not our intention here to repeat what scholars such as Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, Joseph Inikori, and many others have already written about this issue.⁵ In this study, we will focus on one crop (sugarcane) and its products (such as sugar, molasses, and rum) as commodities for the global market. Sugar was the first global commodity: it created the capitalist market and laid the foundations of the global financial system. It was accompanied by a second ‘commodity’: enslaved people captured in Africa and sold in the Caribbean and the Americas. The development of British, Dutch, and French capital, and later US capital, is as much the story of this vicious practice of treating human beings as commodities for the market as it is about the commodity produced through such labour.

The dominant idea in Western scholarship and historiography about the modern world economy is that its foundations were laid by the Age of Discovery: the European ‘discovery’ of the so-called New World by figures such as Ferdinand Magellan (1480–1521) and Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) and the discovery of the sea route to Asia by Vasco da Gama (c. 1460–1524) when he sailed around Africa. The Age of Discovery is often linked with the Age of Enlightenment, despite the brutality of figures such as Columbus and da Gama.⁶ Then, the story goes, the Scientific Revolution, accompanying the Enlightenment, led to the Industrial Revolution in Britain, followed rapidly by other parts of Western Europe. It was the transmission of the Industrial Revolution to the ‘New World’, primarily to North America – with the expansion of ‘free’ labour and the settler-colonial seizure of territory through genocide – that led the United States to become the leading economic power of the twentieth century.

In other words, slavery, genocide, the expropriation of Indigenous peoples’ land, and colonial loot do not enter this sanitised picture of the development of capitalism except as minor aberrations.⁷ How, then, was the supply of enslaved people from Africa ‘produced’?

The starting point of the transatlantic trade is conventionally viewed as the time when Western merchants – the Portuguese, British, Dutch, and French – bought enslaved human beings in African ports.⁸ Just as the genocide of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Caribbean is covered up by the false narrative that their lands stood empty, waiting for the Europeans to come and claim them, a number of historians have argued that since slavery already existed in Africa, all the Europeans did was tap into the existing markets of enslaved people.⁹ This account ignores the scale of the trade in enslaved people that the West introduced in Africa, which qualitatively transformed what was largely domestic slavery into an industrial-scale ‘production’ of enslaved people for plantations across the Atlantic. Claude Meillassoux describes this process as the production of enslaved people in the ‘womb of iron and gold’ – that is, through the gun-slave-money nexus, in which firearms and gunpowder were exchanged for enslaved people, whose sale generated profit. The ‘iron’ in this formulation refers to the use of firearms and gunpowder as trade goods exchanged for enslaved people and as instruments of capture, while the ‘gold’ refers to the money and profit generated by this trade. This is supported by trade records that show substantial exports of gunpowder from Europe to Africa during this period.¹⁰

One result of this violence-driven trade, as with the genocide in the Americas, was demographic catastrophe. While the population in Asia and Europe grew by 300% or more from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, in sharp contrast, the African population remained almost the same and in many regions declined.¹¹ This was a consequence of the violence wreaked on the existing social structures and the destruction of local economies through the forced capture and sale of human beings. The impact of slavery on the African population is often overlooked when considering only the number of enslaved people transported to the Americas and the Caribbean, which is estimated to be at least ten million. However, as Walter Rodney writes, this figure refers only to people who landed in the Americas and the Caribbean and fails to take into account the activities of the illegal slavers and the numbers of Africans who died crossing the Atlantic and during the process of their ‘acquisition’, or kidnapping, in their homelands. Taken together, these losses suggest that the total number of Africans seized for the transatlantic trade – including both those who survived to reach the Americas and those who died during capture, marches, detention, and the Middle Passage – was substantially higher, plausibly in the range of fourteen to twenty million.¹² It was not until the abolition of slavery that the continent’s population and economy began to recover, and more sustained growth did not occur until African countries achieved independence.

This devastation in Africa was inseparable from the rise of sugar production on the enslaved-labour plantations of the Americas and the Caribbean. Traded on a global scale from the sixteenth century onwards, sugar underpinned the growth of European colonialism and the development of the global commodity market. In fact, it was to expand sugar production that the brutal and complex new system for acquiring and trading enslaved Africans came to be established, distinct from the pre-existing system consisting largely of domestic slavery.¹³ Together, sugar and enslaved people became paired commodities, and the circuits of production, credit, and trade built around them helped lay the foundations of modern capitalism. This dynamic is especially clear in the Caribbean plantation complex,¹⁴ which proved central to Britain’s capitalist development and forms one dimension of what Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman call ‘slavery’s capitalism’.¹⁵

Riding on the back of the extremely profitable trade in enslaved people, the goods made from sugarcane (sugar, molasses, and rum) were among the first commodities produced for global markets. Before cotton production became the exemplar of both the Industrial Revolution and the horrors of slavery in the US South, sugar anchored a transatlantic system of labour extraction and exchange, linking plantation production to long-distance trade and re-export. From the sixteenth century until the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, sugar and its by-products circulated through interlocking markets, generating profits across shipping, insurance, warehousing, and finance as goods were exported, refined, and re-exported.

The dominant narrative of triangular trade – the three-cornered exchange of enslaved people, raw materials, and manufactured goods among Europe, Africa, and the ‘New World’ – often overlooks other commodities essential to this system, including textiles and saltpetre (potassium nitrate, a key ingredient in gunpowder).¹⁶ For example, through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (1750–1850, according to Kazuo Kobayashi), textiles produced in India were shipped by the British and French East India Companies to the west coast of Africa, where they were exchanged for enslaved people.¹⁷ Similarly, Europeans used saltpetre exported from India to manufacture gunpowder, which they then exchanged for enslaved Africans. In their assessments of the importance of the triangular trade, Ronald Findlay and Kazuo Kobayashi argue that in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, a significant percentage of British exports to Africa were re-exports from India, not European manufactured goods.¹⁸ It was the colonial loot from India – land revenue extracted from the Indian peasantry – that paid for the ‘export’ of textiles and saltpetre from India.¹⁹

Political economists like Adam Smith, for example, view this period either as mercantilist and, hence, inefficient, or as a source of originary accumulation – a precursor to the capitalist accumulation that followed. However, Marx makes it clear that this ‘so-called originary accumulation’ was expropriation, not accumulation.²⁰ It was loot, pure and simple, not savings or the accretion of a nest egg.

In sugar production, slavery and its associated labour processes were a major source of both expropriation and capital accumulation. This form of capital accumulation rooted in the plantations laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution. It is disingenuous to claim that the impact of colonialism on the colonies (in terms of deindustrialisation and the drain of wealth, for instance) was a separate phenomenon from the plantation economy based on enslaved labour and the broader ‘New World’ dynamic, or that these factors were not important in determining the development of capitalism in the mother country. Such a claim obscures the colonial foundations of modern capitalism.²¹

Next, let us consider how the plantation system was developed to produce sugar, primarily by means of enslaved labour. This requires tracing the development of sugar cultivation and trade in the Mediterranean region as a precursor to the development of plantation-based production in the Atlantic world. How did the production, export, and re-export of sugar shape European finance capital and industrial development? Given that the production of sugar was founded on enslaved labour, to answer this question we must examine the dynamics of slavery and sugar production in the American-Caribbean sugar economy, with greater emphasis on the Caribbean plantation system under the Dutch, French, and British. This discussion illustrates that both sugar and enslaved Africans, produced and sold as market commodities, were crucial for early capitalism’s global expansion and production structures.

Sugar Production in the Mediterranean: From Peasant Agriculture to Plantation Capitalism

Before the Crusades, Western Europe (aside from its elite) was unfamiliar with sugar.²² Then, two transformations occurred. First, the use of sugar, imported from the eastern Mediterranean, kept increasing, even after the Crusades failed to capture the ‘Holy Land’. Second, sugar cultivation spread westward from the eastern Mediterranean to the western Mediterranean and Iberia: first to Mediterranean islands such as Sicily, Cyprus, Rhodes, and Crete; then to parts of Iberia and North Africa; and later to Atlantic islands such as Madeira and the Canary Islands. This geography was shaped in part by climate: sugarcane requires a long, warm growing season and a cool but frost-free ripening and harvesting period. Frost can kill cane and damage its roots, which meant that cultivation was largely limited to the warmer Mediterranean, southern Iberian, North African, and Atlantic island zones rather than northern and much of western Europe.

Unlike the peasant-based agriculture in the eastern and southern Mediterranean coastal plains, agriculture in Western Europe was based on a combination of peasant and corvée labour (unpaid labour that peasants were obliged to perform on land owned by the feudal manor, or demesne land). In the Mediterranean islands of Sicily, Cyprus, Rhodes, and Crete, settling or importing peasants from Italy or Greece was not a viable option because the Black Death (1347–1351) had drastically reduced the peasant labour supply in Europe and the Mediterranean. Instead, the West European rulers of these islands imported enslaved people from North Africa to substitute for the ‘free’ labour that corvée services provided in Western Europe.²³ This had enormous significance: sugar production morphed from the largely peasant-based production in the Arab world to the ‘modern’ slavery-based plantation economy in the Caribbean.

Another important feature of plantations in the Mediterranean islands was the capital investment by big merchant families from Venice and Genoa: it was in these islands that the marriage of merchant capital and modern slavery began. Portugal extended this slavery-based sugar plantation model from the Atlantic islands closest to Iberia – Madeira, the Canary Islands, and the Azores – to Cape Verde, off the West African coast, and later to São Tomé, in the Gulf of Guinea (close to present-day Ghana). The final step in the transformation from peasant-based agriculture to the slavery-based sugar plantations took place in São Tomé. Plantation owners, generally from the aristocracy, got land from the Portuguese king, capital from Venice or Genoa, and enslaved people from Africa. The Portuguese transported this system to Brazil; from there, it spread to the Caribbean and later to parts of North America.

Did these Mediterranean and Atlantic islands introduce any major technological change in the production of sugar? According to Ulbe Bosma, the answer is no. The earlier mistake that historians made was to obscure the technological similarity of milling and sugar-processing techniques across the eastern and western Mediterranean, Iberia, the Atlantic islands, and finally the ‘New World’.²⁴ In his extraordinary work The World of Sugar, Bosma summarises this journey:

Sugar makers travelled from Egypt and Syria to Cyprus and Sicily, from where their knowledge and skills crossed into Valencia and reached Madeira. Portuguese sugar masters learned their art from the Muslims in Andalusia, who ruled it for 800 years, and brought it to Madeira and the Canary Islands.²⁵

The plantation model that would be transplanted across the Americas virtually unchanged, especially to Brazil and the Caribbean, began in São Tomé. The cane cultivated in the Americas and the Caribbean was from the Atlantic islands, where it had in turn been introduced from the Levant and Egypt. As for sugarcane cultivation, there were few major changes. The model continued to rely on the long-established technique of leaving part of the cane stalk in the soil after harvest so that it would produce a new crop (a process known as vegetative reproduction, or ‘ratooning’, that is still used today). Even as new crops were planted, shoots from the old stalks continued to grow.

The Mediterranean islands remodelled the existing relationship between the peasant producers of sugarcane and those involved in the secondary and tertiary processes of crushing the cane, producing sugar from the juice, and trading the sugar. In the new plantation model, sugarcane production was integrated with the crushing, boiling, and refining processes at one site. This created the new ‘workflow’ of using enslaved labour all the way from the cultivation of sugarcane to the final product, whether as brown sugar or as crystalline white sugar, which was refined in Europe.

Thus ran the flow on the sugar plantations: during the crushing season, the ripe cane had to be cut and crushed, and the juice had to be concentrated before it crystallised into sugar (see diagram 1). Once the juice was extracted by crushing the cane, it was boiled in a series of large vats or cauldrons that required a large amount of fuel to concentrate the juice into a thick syrup, which would then be cooled in inverted earthenware cones. This would enable its separation into sugar loaves and molasses. Processes of crystallisation, or further refining, were also adopted to produce sugar crystals rather than loaves.

Diagram 1. The labour regime of sugar production.

Sugar Crosses the Atlantic: The Plantation Complex and the Trade in Enslaved People

When sugar expanded from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic islands, Brazil, and the Caribbean in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, the core processing techniques remained relatively unchanged, but the growing scale of plantation operations and the expanding circuits of export and re-export gradually transformed patterns of both production and trade. This system of commodity production and trade, rooted in slavery, sugar cultivation, and global cycles of export and re-export, helped lay the foundations of the modern capitalist economy. As we shall see, the key ‘innovation’ was how to extract maximum output at minimum cost from enslaved people before they could be ‘replaced’ – that is, to generate enough surplus from enslaved labour to cover both profits and replacement costs.

It was the promise of immense profits that prompted the Portuguese to take sugar monoculture from the Mediterranean region first to the Atlantic islands off Iberia and West Africa in the fifteenth century. The Portuguese entry into sugar production using enslaved labour took place in the islands of Madeira, the Azores, Cape Verde, São Tomé, and Príncipe.²⁶ By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the colonial slavery-based plantation system emerged in Brazil under the aegis of the Portuguese. From 1624 to 1654, the Dutch gained control of Portugal’s plantations in northern Brazil and learned the techniques of sugar plantation production, holding the territory. During this period, and after their expulsion by the Portuguese, Dutch capital and expertise helped spread sugar production to their Caribbean colonies. In the seventeenth century, the British and French learned from Dutch practice and introduced sugar into their colonies.

Caribbean sugar production involved a concentration of capital and an intensification of enslaved labour unmatched by any other monoculture in a single region. Cotton plantations in the US South later used a similar model of enslaved labour, but this emerged at least 150 years later.

Sidney Mintz, who has written extensively on sugar as a commodity and the plantation economy, argues that the production of sugar was profoundly industrial and ‘modern’ in terms of the labour process, productivity of capital, and management systems employed.²⁷ Sugar production was quintessentially industrial and capitalist in nature, except that it treated human beings as fixed capital – that is, as machines – and therefore as replaceable.

Sugar Production in the Caribbean, 1600s-1800s

Data compiled mainly from Noël Deerr, The History of Sugar, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1949–1950).

The Caribbean Islands: Plantations, Sugar, and Enslaved People

To track how sugar plantations expanded and how the trade in enslaved people was organised across competing empires, we will sketch the shifting colonial control of key Caribbean territories. The five main colonial powers in the Caribbean were Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and England. The early colonisers were the Spanish, who captured Jamaica, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola between the 1490s and the early 1600s. England claimed Barbados in 1625 and began settlement in 1627. In 1655, England seized Jamaica from Spain. France established colonies in Guadeloupe (1635) and Martinique (1635) and, under the Treaty of Rijswijk (1697), gained the western third of Hispaniola, which it renamed Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). On the nearby Guiana coast, the Dutch established colonies including the Essequibo from 1616; Suriname, which they acquired later, became known as Dutch Guiana. By the second half of the eighteenth century, Britain and France had emerged as the major colonial presence in the Caribbean.

But sugar did not first come to the Americas through the Caribbean. It came through Brazil, where the Portuguese imported the São Tomé model of slavery-based sugar production to the Pernambuco and Bahia regions.²⁸ These regions had a climate suitable for producing sugar and lands which were not densely forested and could be cleared to develop sugar plantations. The Portuguese needed their feet on the ground to strengthen their claim to a land that was otherwise nothing more than a line drawn on a map in the infamous Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), and so they provided land grants to settlers who would then till the land using enslaved labour. Unlike the plantations in the Caribbean, the land parcels in these regions of Brazil were smaller. In both Brazil and the Caribbean, sugar production relied largely on enslaved Africans, along with the labour of some Indigenous people.

The advantage of the ‘free’ land granted by the Portuguese Crown to settlers and planters in Brazil after the genocidal violence employed against Indigenous people was that the plantations could be extended without any meaningful physical limit. The disadvantage of this system was that it provided no incentive to improve cultivation; it was cheaper to expand the plantation lands than to make an effort to improve yields or the efficiency of sugar production – subject, of course, to the availability of enslaved Africans. On the island plantations, in contrast, the land imposed a physical limit. For example, in Barbados, a relatively tiny island with very few forests, planters had to adopt a variety of practices to adapt to these limitations, such as using bagasse – the dried cane stalks after crushing – as fuel to boil the juice to produce sugar, along with various practices to preserve soil fertility.²⁹

In Brazil, however, land was abundantly available. This enabled methods that deplete soil productivity, since cultivation could be shifts to new fields, and expansion-driven deforestation. While the Dutch, French, and British did improve certain practices – for example, by introducing more efficient mills and fuel-use strategies and tightening plantation logistics – they also had a major advantage over the Portuguese: access to powerful merchant-finance, insurance, and refining networks in Europe that could fund production, insure shipments, refine sugar, and market it at scale. Where Italian city traders had earlier provided capital and marketing for Mediterranean sugar, the Portuguese did not have such a financial community, having driven out the Sephardic Jews and the Arabs who once played that role, including through expulsions from Iberia under King Manuel I in 1496. Even during the war that the Low Countries (modern Netherlands and Belgium) fought with Habsburg-Spain (whose king had been declared by the Pope as the head of the Holy Roman Empire), Antwerp and Amsterdam remained the cities that would refine sugar for the European market.

The Dutch occupied the heart of Brazil’s sugar economy, Pernambuco, between 1630 and 1654, when the Portuguese regained control. In that period, Dutch merchants developed commercial ties with Portuguese planters and channelled Brazilian sugar to refineries in Antwerp and Amsterdam. This continued after the Portuguese regained possession of Pernambuco and Bahia. Yet the Dutch took over more than sugar plantations: they also seized the trade in enslaved people from the Portuguese and, in 1637, captured Elmina Castle (in present-day Ghana), a major centre for the purchase, confinement, and shipment of enslaved Africans.

The Dutch, who were fighting the Spanish king and considered themselves ‘more enlightened’, had few qualms about entering the trade in enslaved people, appearing in the sugar chronicles both as those who took sugar plantations to the Caribbean and as major transporters of enslaved Africans from the African coast to the Americas. The sugar plantation model that the Dutch took to Guyana and the Caribbean islands was then adopted by British planters in Barbados and French planters in Saint-Domingue and Martinique. The Dutch acted not only in their state interests as the Dutch Republic, but also as experts who could be hired by planters from other colonial powers.

The Dutch, French, and British married capital to the practice of slavery in sugar plantations and to the modern division of labour. They grew sugarcane, processed it to the brown-loaf stage in the colonies using enslaved labour, and transported it for the final processing to white and more refined sugar in the European cities. British, French, and Dutch capitalists made money by selling sugar to the working and middle class in their home countries, making it a product for mass consumption. They also re-exported it to the global market, establishing sugar as a global commodity.

The plantation model of sugar production, which emerged in the late fifteenth-century Mediterranean, was adapted to the capitalist organisation of production and colonial trade in the ‘New World’, particularly in the Caribbean islands. The capitalist production of sugar was consolidated on the plantations through both the cultivation of sugarcane and the organisation of its processing into sugar. Underlying both the production of sugarcane and its conversion to sugar was enslaved labour – an unholy marriage of capital with Atlantic chattel slavery. This differed from sugar production in much of Asia and Africa, where peasants cultivated the cane and small mill owners crushed it and converted the juice to sugar.

Sugar Production on the Plantations

Sugarcane production on colonial plantations was brutal and labour-intensive, relying on a mix of skilled trades and field labour and organised through what was known as the ‘gang system’. Under this system, enslaved people were driven in supervised work gangs for long, continuous days. By contrast, the ‘task system’, more common in rice- and indigo-growing regions such as coastal South Carolina and Georgia, assigned a daily quota of work, after which some time might remain – within strict coercive constraints – for other activities.³⁰ Planters adopted various methods to increase the profitability of the enslaved-labour sugar economy, from preparing the fields for cultivation to irrigation and planting, cutting and harvesting the cane, transporting it to the crushing sites, processing it, and producing and refining the sugar.

Sugarcane cultivation, whether in the Caribbean or in Louisiana, preferred the gang system because of the nature of sugar plantations. Sidney Mintz explains how the production on sugar plantations was unique: ‘These were, of course, agricultural undertakings, but because so much of the industrial processing of the cane was also carried out on the plantations, it makes good sense to view the plantations as a synthesis of field and factory’.³¹ The agricultural production and the initial processing of the crop into ‘industrial product’ were both performed on the plantation itself. As a result, the same enslaved people were assigned different tasks across the production cycle, from planting and tending sugarcane to harvesting it, crushing it for juice, and boiling that juice down into brown sugar and molasses. This is unlike the system on cotton plantations, where the crop was only partly processed on site and then sent to textile mills – especially in Britain and later New England – for further manufacture.

Though rooted in slavery, the gang system extracted surplus through forms of calculation that resemble modern capitalist management. Enslaved people were thought of as capital assets, and their maintenance was calculated to minimise subsistence costs while accounting for replacement. Detailed plantation account books were kept and compiled into reports – much like today’s spreadsheets – by which the owners, quite often in distant Britain, could look at the financial return on investment. Time and motion studies, beloved of Taylorist factory management models, were preceded by similar studies of the plantations worked by enslaved labour in the Caribbean and later in the Antebellum South.³² The replacement value of the enslaved African was market-driven, meaning that if their price rose in the market, the need to keep them alive would rise; if the price fell, the intensity of their exploitation – and risk of death – would increase. The lifetime calculations of the plantation manager therefore took into account the replacement price of a new enslaved person and were as market-driven as modern capital’s considerations today.

In practice, the gang system divided enslaved people according to age and physical capacity. The first ‘gang’ consisted of young men and women in their late teens who would do the most physically taxing work for ten to twelve years, after which they were relegated to the second gang. After perhaps twenty years in the second gang, a person who was by then about forty – if they survived – would be worn out and would join other elderly people and young children in the third gang (also known as the ‘grass gang’), which weeded the crops and gathered grass to feed the animals.³³

In the early summer, the first and second gangs prepared the fields for planting by clearing, burning, and turning over the soil with hoes. Gangs also had to construct and maintain irrigation networks. Then, in the late summer and early autumn, the first gang would plant the sugarcane, often using the backbreaking ‘cane-holing’ process of digging planting holes across the field by hand. A first-gang enslaved person was expected to dig between sixty and one hundred holes each day, with two cane plants planted in each hole. First- and second-gang enslaved people then carried huge, heavy baskets of animal manure on their heads to the holes and placed it around each plant. One acre of sugarcane plants required as much as 1.25 tonnes of manure.

Once harvested – five or six months after planting in the case of the more fertile plantations – the cane had to be processed quickly to prevent the sugar content from declining. As a result, during the harvest season, when the cane was crushed and boiled, enslaved people in the sugar mills and boiling houses laboured shifts of eighteen to twenty hours, six days a week. In Brazil, religious observance formally required the engenhos³⁴ to suspend work on Sundays and holy days. However, this requirement was not universally honoured, and enslaved people were often forced to continue working through Sundays and holy days. The enslaved people would become so exhausted that ‘as sleepy as an engenho’ became a widespread refrain, and losing limbs to machines became routine.³⁵ Other major activities included transporting cane to the crushers, carting heavy timber for the furnaces to boil the juice, and shipping the sugar and other products including rum to ports.

In the Caribbean, Sundays were not days of rest for enslaved people. They spent them working their own allotments, known as ‘provision grounds’. Without the food they grew on these small plots, they would have succumbed to the highly deficient diet supplied by the plantation kitchen. William Taylor, a critic of slavery, testified that if an enslaved person used ‘every Sunday for repose, he could not maintain himself or his family by working the twenty-six days [a month] he was allowed by law’.³⁶

Each year, a planter bought newly imported enslaved people from Africa to replace those who had died. A Barbados planter named Edward Littleton estimated that a sugar planter who owned a hundred enslaved people and put them to work growing and processing sugarcane would kill them all in nineteen years. Bosma, quoting the Anglican clergyman Reverend Robert Robertson, estimated that two-fifths of newly arrived enslaved people would die within one year of their arrival.³⁷

There is enough evidence to show that the mortality rate among enslaved people on sugar plantations was higher than that of other enslaved-labour plantations, whether cotton, coffee, or tobacco.³⁸ Slavery disincentivised replacing labour with machines on both cotton and sugar plantations, where living conditions were brutal. Yet the enslaved population on cotton plantations increased in spite of this (while on the sugar plantations of Louisiana it decreased). This is partly due to the multiple production processes integrated with sugarcane cultivation, where milling, concentration of the cane juice, and crystallisation of the sugar all involved enslaved labour. Another reason was the poor diet of enslaved people, as the owners factored the cost of feeding them against their replacement cost – the cost of buying new enslaved people. With a ban on trade in enslaved people in the early nineteenth century, the cotton plantations considered children born into slavery to be an economic ‘output’ – that is, as a way of reproducing their labour force and property internally. Louisiana sugar plantations sought the same result, but because mortality there was so high, births did not replace deaths.³⁹

Equipment was required not only to crush the sugarcane but also to process it, all of which had to be constructed, operated, and regularly maintained. Early plantations used hand-operated presses to extract juice from the cane, but these were eventually replaced by more efficient three-cylinder presses powered by animals, and later by wind or, more commonly, water. As a result, plantations were typically established close to rivers or streams to harness water power.⁴⁰ The wind or water drove large rollers through which enslaved people fed the cane back into the crushers. This was dangerous work, for these enslaved people were often exhausted, and sometimes they did not let go of the sugarcane in time and their arms were drawn into the rollers. When this happened, an axe was used to chop off the crushed arm. In some sugar plantations, one-armed men and women were a familiar sight.⁴¹

Proximity to ports and rivers was essential, as it lowered the cost of transporting sugar and other plantation goods. Depending on the size of the plantation, mills needed between sixty and two hundred workers, most of them enslaved, to operate.⁴² The peak labour requirement during the harvest season determined the number of enslaved people needed on a plantation.

Enslaved people were also burdened with the exhausting job of gathering the timber needed to fuel the refinery furnaces. In most Caribbean plantations, firewood was easily available. The exception was Barbados, which had limited availability of timber. Here, bagasse – the fibrous residue left after sugarcane was crushed – was used as fuel, a practice most likely imported from Egypt.

Those who had the skills to operate and maintain the machinery in sugar mills were in high demand. Some skilled mill workers were drawn from the enslaved labour force, but it was only their chief supervisor, the ‘sugar master’, that enjoyed a generous salary. Over time – as the colonies’ populations evolved – mixed-race European locals as well as freed, and sometimes even enslaved, people with the requisite technical skills were put to work in these positions in most Caribbean plantations.

Enslaved women had to do gruelling work in the fields, some with their newborn children on their backs. They also suffered from extreme malnutrition, which resulted in high miscarriage and infant mortality rates. The harvest season was the worst, as the standing cane had to be cut and processed quickly, which meant that enslaved Africans were subjected to even more intense exploitation. Cutting the cane, taking it to the crushers, crushing it for juice, and boiling it had to be handled simultaneously: enslaved people barely had time to eat.⁴³ Women were fully involved in crushing the cane alongside men, where losing concentration meant risking anything from fingers to an arm – or their lives – to the milling machine.

We can identify the following characteristics of the technology used to maintain slavery-based sugar plantations:

• The introduction of machines – such as windmills, watermills, and steam engines – often intensified the exploitation of enslaved people.
• Technology could either be labour-saving or lead to more intense exploitation of labour, since technological improvements were determined by social relations.
• Enslaved people were seen as expendable, since planters often found it cheaper to replace those who died than to keep them alive. Sugar plantations often had to acquire new enslaved people because the brutal demands of sugar production killed workers at such a high rate. Unlike cotton and tobacco plantations, where processing was less tightly integrated into plantation labour, sugar estates required the crop to be processed on site almost immediately after harvest.⁴⁴

After being harvested, the sugarcane was fed through rollers into a crushing device to extract its juice. This liquid was then boiled in large cauldrons and, through a process called curing, separated into molasses and crystallised sugar. The resulting mixture was poured into sizeable clay pots or moulds, where it hardened into cone-shaped sugar loaves.

Many consumers in Europe came to prefer white sugar to the brown sugar that forms naturally. To create a whiter product, a thick mixture of clay and water was placed on the broad side of a cone-shaped sugar mould as the molasses dripped out. Water would drip down from the clay, through the cone, and wash the molasses or other materials from the sugar. Once completely drained, the sugar loaves were removed from the moulds, dried on racks in a large room, trimmed into their final shape, and wrapped in paper. The final processing to whiten sugar took place in British or Dutch towns. White sugar was perceived to be purer and more desirable to European consumers, especially as racial discourse increasingly linked whiteness to value during the consolidation of modern plantation slavery.⁴⁵ In a modern sugar plant, sugar is ‘bleached’ to whiten it from its natural brownish state.

Why was the final step of refining not carried out on the plantations or in the British Caribbean? The answer lies largely in British colonial policy. Tax policy – particularly after India became a British colony – helped remove any incentive to refine sugar further in the Caribbean. As Bosma notes, high duties on refined sugar penalised technological upgrading and made the export of muscovado the more profitable option.⁴⁶

The sugar industry adapted to the widespread demand for many types of sugar. Sugar was sold to consumers at all stages of refinement, including muscovado, refined, and double-refined white sugar. The more refining sugar required, the more expensive it became. In the seventeenth century, sugar’s by-product, molasses, also became profitable; it was not only a sweetener but an ingredient for the increasingly popular spirit, rum.

Innovations took place both in the cultivation of sugarcane and the methods used for processing it into sugar, including applying steam power and using better cylinders (such as the two-roller horizontal mill), which were further adapted with protruding iron bars to enhance the crushing capacity, as well as vacuum pans, centrifuges, and double- to quintuple-effect evaporation.⁴⁷ There were also important advances in the transportation systems that linked cultivation to processing, including the use of movable and fixed rails – often powered by steam engines – as well as conveyor belts. There were several modifications in the agricultural sphere as well, such as developing new cane varieties, altering planting distances and ploughs, improving drainage and irrigation, and applying manure and fertilisers.⁴⁸

Vacuum pans – sealed vessels used to boil and concentrate cane juice or syrup at lower temperatures by reducing air pressure – were first developed in Britain for refining imported raw cane sugar and were adopted more widely in colonial cane sugar production only later. Meanwhile, beet sugar production in Europe, especially in France, expanded after British blockades cut off access to raw cane sugar from the West Indies. On West Indian plantations worked by enslaved labour, planters had very little incentive to introduce such capital-intensive equipment: expanding the plantations with additional enslaved people was both the ‘cheaper’ and more ‘efficient’ option for capital, with efficiency under capitalism understood as the efficiency of money in producing a required output, not the efficiency of the process itself. In the Caribbean, because land was ‘free’ – a consequence of genocidal violence against the Indigenous population – and enslaved labour was cheap, there was no incentive to improve the efficiency of sugar production. The only exception was improving the efficiency of crushing, since the cane could not otherwise be processed within the short ripening season. Hence, better crushers were introduced in the early nineteenth century in the form of wind-powered mills in Barbados and steam power in British Guiana (today’s Guyana) and Jamaica. This helps explain the different trajectories of vacuum pans and centrifuges. Even when vacuum pans made inroads in Java, Indonesia, during this period, they were not considered necessary on enslaved-labour plantations in either the British Caribbean or Louisiana. British colonial tax policy reinforced this: refined sugar attracted higher duties than raw sugar, making further refining in the Caribbean less profitable.⁴⁹ Centrifuges, by contrast, reduced the time needed to separate molasses from sugar from months in clay cones to a few hours. Introduced in the 1830s, they quickly became standard practice even on enslaved-labour plantations.⁵⁰

Technology mattered, but it does not explain the profitability of Caribbean sugar on its own. To understand that profitability, we need to turn from the machinery of the plantation to the wider colonial system: the linked markets for sugar and enslaved people, the organisation of refining and re-export in Europe, and the policies that bound the colonies to the ‘mother country’.

Slavery and Sugar: Market Production, Exports, Re-exports, and Profits

Sidney Mintz argued that sugar production, though based on enslaved labour, was profoundly industrial and modern, with planters and owners of enslaved people using modern capitalist methods to organise production, measure productivity, and calculate returns.⁵¹ By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sugar had become one of the most important and profitable commodities of the ‘New World’.

There were three different markets for Caribbean sugar. Initially, it was only produced for the international market, centred on the colonial and European ‘mother country’. Later, local and regional markets developed in and around the Caribbean. Local markets were small, self-contained, and generally located inland, while regional markets centred around large cities such as Lima and Mexico City as well as cities throughout New England. The international market for Caribbean sugar was the most competitive, with the refining and re-export market based in Lisbon, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and various towns in England and France.

Initially, with Brazil under the Portuguese as the primary producer of raw sugar in the Americas, Lisbon emerged as the largest market for re-exporting raw sugar to refining centres, and it remained so for a long time. From Lisbon, the Dutch transported the sugar first to Antwerp and Amsterdam to be refined and then to the global market. Antwerp was home to the biggest sugar refinery in the sixteenth century but, by the seventeenth century, had lost the sugar battle, first to Amsterdam and then to various towns in England. By the eighteenth century, sugar refineries proliferated in Britain, from Plymouth to Glasgow and London to Liverpool. These refineries used large open copper boiling pans and a large amount of coal to produce heat and were precursors to the factories of the Industrial Revolution. They were among the earliest factory-like workplaces in Britain and a direct link between slavery’s sugar and the great divergence between Asia and Europe.

The sugar bakers of Britain existed long before the textile mills associated with the Industrial Revolution. Not surprisingly, they were also major centres of the trade in enslaved people. During the Great Plague of 1665, a number of sugar refineries moved from London, then in the grip of plague, to other English ports. West Indian ships carrying sugar used docks in other ports of England to avoid contagion. This helped expand the refining of sugar throughout Britain. This expansion helped widen access to refined sugar beyond elite consumption.

Though those refining sugar were referred to as bakers, the process of baking sugar involved what today would be considered factory work. The term ‘factory’ originally referred to a place of commercial activity tied to the work of a merchant’s agent, or ‘factor’, such as a trading post or collection centre, including sites where enslaved people were bought and sold. Only later did it come to mean a place of manufacturing. Sugar refining already had the features associated with industry – concentrated workplaces, heat-intensive processing, specialised equipment, and disciplined labour. Yet, because it was inseparable from slavery, it rarely appears as a starting point for the Industrial Revolution in Europe’s own historical narrative.

The scale and direction of Caribbean sugar exports show how tightly the plantations were bound to the British refining industry. David Eltis’s data on Barbados from 1665 to 1701 shows that sugar products accounted for 91.2% of the island’s total exports in 1665–1666, 91.6% in 1688 and 1690–1691, and 95.6% in 1699–1701. He also estimates that between 1682 and 1701, Britain was the destination for more than 95% of Jamaica’s sugar exports.⁵² Driven in part by its pairing with tea and coffee, sugar consumption in Britain increased significantly over the eighteenth century, while the re-export of refined sugar to the Americas, including the Caribbean, proved highly profitable. Variable tariff rates offered the level of protection needed to support the operations of numerous sugar refineries in cities such as Bristol, Glasgow, and London. This meant that colonial policy worked in such a way that refined sugar production in Britain was protected by higher tariffs against refined sugar imports, whereas no such protection was provided for sugar refining in the Caribbean colonies. After its conquest of India, for instance, Britain added an additional 25% tariff to protect its refiners and their Caribbean sugar plantations from competition from India.⁵³

This was a part of the larger British colonial policy under which colonies could only produce raw materials for the ‘mother country’ and finished goods would only be produced in the colonial centre. The famous guideline was that not even a nail was to be manufactured in the colonies (one exception – oddly enough, given the example – was iron because shipping iron ore to England was bulky and therefore expensive). In other words, British policy was to ensure that industrial production did not develop in the colonies so that they remained dependent on the mother country. Instead, the colonies were to provide raw materials or products to facilitate industries in Britain.⁵⁴

Eltis and others argue that slavery-driven plantation economies expanded at rates on par with industrialising Britain and the US, despite their contrasting foundations.⁵⁵ By comparing the prices of sugar and enslaved people to calculate the average productivity of an enslaved person, they demonstrate that sugar production using enslaved labour was highly profitable. The analysis was carried out based on records from approximately 230,000 enslaved Africans transported to the Americas between 1674 and 1807 – about 6% of the total number of enslaved individuals disembarked in the Americas through transatlantic voyages during that era.⁵⁶ To assess changes in both the demand for enslaved labour and total factor productivity in Caribbean slavery-based agriculture from 1674 onward, the researchers combined estimates of enslaved populations and import figures with data on enslaved person sale prices.⁵⁷ Along with this, the rising price of sugar resulted in a considerable increase in the demand for enslaved labour, making the trade in enslaved individuals ever more lucrative.

In Jamaica, for instance, the growth of the enslaved population was closely correlated to the success of sugar production. Between the 1720s and 1788, the enslaved population in the five leading sugar-producing parishes increased more than sixfold.⁵⁸ This expansion was driven by rising sugar output and the high returns that planters and merchants received, especially in newly settled areas such as the northwest coast, and the number of enslaved Africans transported to Jamaica peaked in the prosperous early 1790s.

Later debates around Eric Williams’s thesis often narrowed his broader argument to a specific question: whether wealth extracted through the trade in enslaved people and the plantation system was reinvested in Lancashire’s cotton mills and other industries central to the Industrial Revolution.

Even when scholars recognise the substantial output growth of plantation economies, it is often contrasted with arguments that enslaved labour-based systems saw little to no long-term productivity improvements, that slavery and plantation agriculture faced bleak future prospects, and that Britain’s decision to end the trade in enslaved people stemmed from the economic downturn of the sugar industry.⁵⁹ The impulse behind this argument appears to be an ideological necessity to prove that capitalism with ‘free’ labour is a more efficient form of production than slavery. By this logic, the idea that plantation slavery operated according to ‘sound’ capitalist economics – with enslaved people treated as machines – must be countered.

Findlay builds on Williams’s thesis by citing economic historian Stanley Engerman, who estimated that, in 1770, close to 40% of the capital used for Britain’s commercial and industrial expansion derived from profits from the trade in enslaved people.⁶⁰ The combined profits from the trade in enslaved people and sugar constituted as much as 5% of British national income. Yet this figure vastly underestimates the total profits that Britain usurped from the trade in enslaved people and sugar. To this, the profits from sugar refining and the re-export of sugar from Britain to the global market must be added. Another way to assess returns is to compare profits on sugar plantations with those in the mother country. Investments in the colonies were four to seven times more profitable than those in England.⁶¹

In a recent study on the significance of slavery and plantation agriculture to the British economy, Klas Rönnbäck calculates the total value added by Britain’s sugar production and trade. This value-added approach captures the surplus appropriated at each stage of the sugar value chain, from the cultivation of sugarcane on Caribbean plantations to the refining, re-export, and final sale of sugar in Britain. On this basis, Rönnbäck estimates that the total value added to the British economy increased dramatically from £0.5 million⁶² during the first decade of the eighteenth century to £5.5 million a century later. The value of this trade also depended on what economists call ‘intermediate goods’ – in this case, the enslaved Africans transported from Africa to the Caribbean and treated as inputs in the production of sugar.

Rönnbäck’s approach shows that the surplus appropriated by Jamaican planters who owned enslaved people rose from 40% of subsistence costs in 1750 to 100% in 1790, meaning that, by the end of this period, the surplus they extracted was equal to what they spent on the subsistence of enslaved people. By looking at the trends in the prices of different grades of sugar during the same period, Rönnbäck also shows that there was a fourfold difference between the price of muscovado sugar in Jamaica and that of refined sugar in England, completely out of proportion to the cost of transport and refining. This indicates that the price differential was most likely a consequence of a form of transfer pricing – that is, the setting of internal prices to shift profits between the colonies and England. Simply put, there was a huge markup on refined sugar, allowing refiners in Britain to retain the profits of producing sugar in Britain. This is apparent from the high import duties on finished sugar, which hit imports of Indian sugar into Britain, and the low import duties on raw sugar from the plantations, which discouraged refining in the colonies.

Findlay has also shown that innovations in production techniques and technology significantly increased output on the plantations.⁶³ These included developing new varieties of sugarcane with higher yields, such as the Otaheite strain, introduced from the Pacific islands (such as Tahiti) in the late 1700s, along with advancements in milling technology, enhanced water management, and a growing trend toward agricultural specialisation. In parts of the Caribbean, sugar colonies increasingly shifted towards monoculture, relying on imported food rather than cultivating it locally. Overall, infrastructure also improved in many of the colonies reliant on enslaved labour, making it easier and more efficient to move export goods to ports. These improvements also supported the development of financial systems that expanded access to credit for plantation owners. Thus, many of the characteristics associated with capitalist expansion and rising productivity were already present in the slavery-based sugar plantation system.

These productivity gains translated into high returns not only for planters but also for Britain. From 1713 to 1775, Caribbean planters’ gross receipt from sugar exports to Britain rose by a factor of 3.2, driven by rising demand for sugar in England and by the profitable re-export of refined sugar to other parts of the world, which gave Caribbean sugar a vast market.⁶⁴ By 1774, raw sugar accounted for one-fifth of all British imports, surpassing all other imported goods by a wide margin. In the same period, sugar production in the Americas rose from approximately 50,000 tonnes in 1700 to around 200,000 tonnes by the close of the American Revolution. Between 1700 and 1800, British sugar imports increased sevenfold, from 430,000 hundredweight (about 21,845 metric tonnes) to three million hundredweight (about 152,407 metric tonnes), helping to make Britain a major centre, if not the centre, of the global sugar trade.⁶⁵

The Trade in Enslaved People and the Rise of Shipbuilding in Britain

Most of the sugar imported into Britain came from Caribbean plantations worked by enslaved labour. As these plantations expanded significantly from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, they required growing numbers of enslaved people. Portugal and Britain accounted for about 70% of all enslaved Africans transported to the Americas. Between 1640 and 1807, British ships forcibly transported an estimated 3.1 million Africans, of whom roughly 2.7 million survived the Atlantic crossing and were taken to British colonies in the Caribbean, North America, South America, and elsewhere.⁶⁶ The major centres for the trade in enslaved people in Britain were Glasgow, Bristol, Manchester, and London. All these towns were also major centres of shipbuilding, as the demand for ships used to transport enslaved people was the prime driving force for Britain’s shipping industry.

An important dimension with respect to the lucrative and fundamentally capitalist nature of the trade in enslaved people, and of the production system under slavery, is what economists refer to as internal markets of enslaved people – that is, the domestic trade in enslaved people within the colonies or within the Americas. Like the export and re-export of sugar, this trade was organised through distinct stages, each shaped by calculations of profit. Shipping ports were not only important as destinations for enslaved people but also commercial centres where they were bought, sold, and resold like other commodities. The profitability of the enslaved-labour system thus arose not only from plantation production but also from these successive transactions in enslaved people.

Kingston, Jamaica, is an illustrative case. The trade in enslaved individuals turned the city from a simple port into a central hub for ‘processing’, where captives were initially disembarked, then sold and allocated throughout the island. It was widely understood that for British merchants seeking their fortunes overseas, trading goods for enslaved Africans, and subsequently selling enslaved people in the Americas, offered better financial prospects than safer investments at home. Based on an estimated average price of £30 per enslaved person during the eighteenth century, the overall value of the enslaved population could have reached nearly £25 million – an amount that closely matched Jamaica’s total recorded wealth in 1774.⁶⁷ A similar dynamic existed on cotton plantations in the United States. As shown by bank data, the value of the plantation was set based on the number of enslaved people that laboured there. Plantation owners procured loans and capital from the banks by pledging enslaved persons as collateral.

To reduce the possibility of financial disaster once the enslaved Africans had landed, British merchants employed so-called ‘slave factors’ (merchant agents who managed the sale and distribution of enslaved people). The terms ‘factor’ and ‘factorage’ are linked to this older commercial meaning of ‘factory’, which later came to mean a site of manufacturing. A factorage was a yard or business through which goods were received, held, and sold – in this case, enslaved people treated as commodities. One such factor in eighteenth-century Jamaica was Thomas Hibbert, whose family was prominent in the cotton industry. He came to Kingston, Jamaica, in 1734, established a business specialising in the sale of enslaved people and later co-founded the London-based West Indian trading firm Hibbert, Purrier, and Horton. Between 1764 and 1774, Hibbert’s operation handled cargo for sixty-one ships and was involved in the sale of 16,254 enslaved Africans.⁶⁸

In the Caribbean, factors based in port towns not only traded enslaved people as commodities but also bought and held them, assessed and sorted them, managed ‘seasoning’ – the process of restoring their health from the brutal ocean voyage – and organised their sale and resale to maximise their price. Factorage was a skilled and risky business because profits depended on timing sales to planter demand, extending and collecting credit, and managing illness and death in captivity, all the while keeping holding costs down. Economies of scale ensured that much of the trade in enslaved people was concentrated in relatively few hands and dominated by a small number of merchant houses. Between 28 September 1751 and 27 May 1752, thirty-one ships carrying enslaved people arrived in Jamaica carrying 7,123 enslaved Africans who had survived the Atlantic crossing. These captives were delivered to nine factorage firms, but their sale was highly concentrated: three firms handled 83% of those arrivals.⁶⁹ Slave factors were eager to sell enslaved individuals swiftly and at the highest possible price, since delays meant increased expenses for food and upkeep. As a result, they aimed to time sales to coincide with periods of strong buyer interest and when full payment could be secured without delay. The most favourable moment for selling enslaved people was typically at the start of, and throughout, the sugar harvest, when demand from planters was at its highest.

Like other commodities, the trade in enslaved people included a retail dimension, with merchant lots or yards operating in tandem with the bulk sales conducted directly from ships. Between arrival and being put to work, most enslaved people spent time in the port towns as the property of merchants (the factors in the trade in enslaved people) who acclimatised them to slavery and to the specific islands where they had been brought. The initial buyer was also responsible for treating ill individuals with the aim of reselling them at a profit. The movement of enslaved Africans – from disembarkation at ports to holding yards in cities, and eventually to towns or plantations – intensified their suffering, especially through the frequent and often irreversible separation of family members.

Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the market for enslaved people changed in several ways: a growing share of captives was sold through mercantile partnerships rather than directly by ship captains; enslaved people were often held for longer periods in port towns or factorage yards before being sold; and sales increasingly moved away from the earlier ‘scramble’ system – a brutal method in which buyers rushed to claim enslaved people at preset prices – toward more negotiated transactions.⁷⁰ By the end of the eighteenth century, as Trevor Burnard and Kenneth Morgan note:

Slaves were sold neither by auction nor by ‘scramble’ but by careful negotiations between astute, experienced, and knowledgeable buyers and well-informed sellers who studiously evaluated the risks that they had to take in order to gain the profits that had spurred them to enter the trade. The slave market was competitive, complex, and sophisticated: a very modern institution dealing with an age-old and particularly grim trade.⁷¹

As the demand for enslaved people expanded across the Atlantic world, prices rose significantly. Slave factors as well as the states in Africa involved in the export of enslaved people set prices in response to the ever-growing demand. The price of enslaved people was quoted against goods exported to Africa, including guns, gunpowder, and cotton textiles from India. Eltis and Jennings showed that between 1701 and 1750, the value of Britain’s gross barter terms of trade with Africa – measuring the relative worth of British exports to Africa against African exports to Britain – increased from a base index of 100 to 112, before declining sharply to 40 in 1800. According to Eltis and Jennings, while a single enslaved person could be exchanged for just two muskets in the early 1700s, by the end of the century that number had risen to at least fifteen.⁷² These figures suggest that the profits more than compensated for the rising prices of enslaved people.

This same logic appears in Ronald Findlay’s work as well. He argues that firearms, a key import in Africa in this period, could be regarded as an ‘input’ in the ‘production’ of enslaved people – that is, the exchange of enslaved people for firearms was shaped by hard economic calculations.⁷³ As states in Africa began to face diseconomies of scale (declining access to captives due to the brutality involved in raids to capture enslaved people and the destruction of the societies they targeted), the price of enslaved people went up. For those supplying them, the rising demand for enslaved people generated higher prices and greater profits, despite the brutality of their capture. The point of emphasis here is that the market of enslaved people, at both the demand and supply ends, was characterised by clear capitalist economic calculations. Hence, the trade in enslaved people can be described as ‘primitive’ only in its brutality, given the ‘sophistication’ of its economics.

Colonialism, the Trade in Enslaved People, Sugar, and the Financial System

As we have discussed, the rise of modern capitalism is intrinsically linked to plantation economies based on enslaved labour, with sugar plantations among the most important in terms of their impact on the global economy. In the earlier sections, we discussed the nature of the sugar economy that emerged in the ‘New World’. Here, we will focus on the larger global dynamics in the rise of Western Europe and its emergence as the driver of global capitalism.

Many theories have been proposed to explain this rise of the West and the decline of the rest. Most Eurocentric theorists have argued that capitalism as a world system started in Western Europe and that its integration of science into production was the dynamic force that saw it conquer the world. Within the Marxist tradition, Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory and Andre Gunder Frank’s dependency theory have been influential, though both depart from Marxist approaches that stress the centrality of the state to the development of capitalism, including in its imperial phase.

In this study, we do not focus on that debate directly. Rather, we emphasise that the current configuration of power and the emergence of modern capitalism date back at least around 500 years. Three points are central here:

1. The rise of merchant capital, naval power, guns, and gunpowder matters only in relation to state power and its use in trade and colonial expansion.
2. The encounters between the West European core and the other three continents (the Americas, Africa, and Asia) were profoundly different, especially between 1500 and 1800, when a handful of West European countries emerged as the major imperial powers. In the Americas, this encounter was primarily genocidal: entire civilisations and social structures were destroyed. The Americas also supplied the silver – particularly from Bolivia and Mexico – that financed Western Europe’s trade with Asia, especially with India and China, the largest economies in Asia at the time.
3. The trade in enslaved people from sub-Saharan Africa provided the Western imperial powers not only with labour for the colonies but also with a ‘commodity’ that contributed to the rise of capital in Britain, the Netherlands, and France. Enslaved people were taken to the Americas and the Caribbean to produce plantation crops, of which sugar was both the most important and the first global commodity. If we add silver as a form of commodity money, then the role of enslaved labour in the silver mines and plantations of the Americas makes the trade in enslaved people a central pillar in the rise of modern capitalism. This becomes even clearer when we consider that sugar, the other major traded commodity, was inseparable from the enslavement of people and the extraction of unpaid labour.

The rise of a capitalist financial system was intrinsic to the trade in enslaved people, its ties to the emerging colonial powers, and the rise of sugar as a global commodity. One instrument that linked the trade in enslaved people to the growth of the financial system was the asiento, a licence from the Spanish Crown that authorised traders to participate in the sale of enslaved Africans to Spanish colonies. First issued in 1513, the asiento was, until 1595, given to an individual or group of any nationality in the form of a contract to import a specified number of enslaved people in return for a royalty payment. For Spain, the major destinations of enslaved people were initially the Bolivian and Mexican silver mines. The asientos were later granted to foreign joint-stock companies: first to Portuguese companies, then in 1685 to the Dutch, in 1702 to the French, and from 1713 to 1739 to the British South Sea Company. The British South Sea Company teamed up with the Royal Africa Company, owned by the British Crown. Securing the asiento allowed Britain to dominate the trade in enslaved people from the 1740s onwards.⁷⁴

The asiento was one element in the rise of a global reserve currency. Spain also introduced a common currency called the real de a ocho in the mid-sixteenth century. Also known as the ‘piece of eight’, or the Spanish silver dollar, this currency was essentially commodity money and came to be accepted for commercial transactions throughout Asia, the Americas, and much of Europe. International trade from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries was largely conducted in silver, making the Spanish dollar globally in demand. Through the asiento system, the Spanish Crown helped organise the supply of enslaved labour to its American colonies, especially to the silver-mining zones such as those in Potosí, Bolivia. The silver extracted there was then minted into the real de a ocho, which became a widely accepted medium of international trade. It was Spanish silver that significantly expanded the global commodity market. Spain used this silver to trade with China through the Manila galleon route – the transpacific trade route linking Acapulco in Spanish America to Manila in the Spanish Philippines – as well as through other European countries engaged in trade with West and South Asia. As Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez write, ‘The singular product most responsible for the birth of world trade was silver’. This undergirded the global trade in goods, allowing Europe – Spain in particular – access to Chinese, East Indian, and Indian markets.⁷⁵

Silver mined in Spanish America – especially in Mexico and Potosí, in present-day Bolivia – accounted for 80% of the world’s supply of silver between 1494 and 1850. The Spanish silver dollar was primarily commodity money, its value equivalent to its weight in silver. The British pound sterling and the US dollar were, and are, primarily reserve currencies rather than commodity money. Given that the cost of producing silver was low compared to its market value, and that there were very large deposits of silver in Potosí, Spanish silver functioned in the same way that the British pound or the US dollar did later.⁷⁶

China had a strong demand for silver, which it received in large quantities by exporting silk and tea to European countries. At the same time, China imported cotton textiles from India, which it financed with the silver that flowed from Europe. After the British victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, Britain no longer had to send silver to India to pay for imported textiles; instead, it financed these goods using land taxes collected from Indian peasants, effectively reversing the earlier flow of silver from Britain to India. Britain’s deficit with China, however, continued, since its heavy imports of Chinese goods were still paid for with silver. That flow was reversed only later, when Britain began selling opium forcibly grown in India to the Chinese – a trade also driven by the barrel of the gun during the Opium Wars of 1839 to 1860.

With Spain no longer dominating the Atlantic trade in enslaved people, the Dutch guilder became the Atlantic world’s reserve currency in the seventeenth century.⁷⁷ Amsterdam’s near-monopoly over European sugar refining – first with sugar from Brazil and later with sugar from French Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) – and its central role in the transatlantic trade in enslaved people – with as much as 20% of the trade in enslaved people to the Americas and the Caribbean – were consolidated after the Dutch secured the asiento in 1675, with Elmina in present-day Ghana as a major hub. In other words, the Dutch guilder rose to this position because the Netherlands controlled a major share of the global trade in two major commodities: enslaved people and sugar, with the sugar islands of the Caribbean and Brazil driving demand for both commodities.

Later, the Royal African Company and Britain took over the trade in enslaved people in the Atlantic from the Dutch and became major suppliers of sugar. With the expansion of British Caribbean sugar plantations and Britain’s growing share in the trade in enslaved people, the British pound sterling emerged as the global reserve currency and London became the world’s major financial centre.

The origins of the world’s financial system lay not only in sugar and slavery but also in the way the asiento linked the trade in enslaved people to silver extraction and Asian trade. The asientos expanded the trade in enslaved people and the supply of Spanish silver to the world market, creating a global financial system that tied together the trade in enslaved people in Africa, the mining of silver in the Americas, and the trade with Asia, particularly China, India, and Southeast Asia.

We have considered some of the implications for global trade in the two major ‘commodities’ that came to define the emerging world market from the sixteenth century onwards: enslaved people and sugar. This period also saw a major increase in the circulation of gold and silver, mined in the Americas under Spanish rule. It was the thirst for gold and silver that powered Spain’s empire in the Americas. We have not focused on the genocide committed by the Spanish and other European countries, or their destruction of existing systems of production since that history demands more detailed treatment than is possible here. Instead, we have focused on the impact of the trade in enslaved people, sugar, and the emergence of reserve currencies: the Dutch guilder in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, followed by the British pound sterling. These developments predated the Industrial Revolution and show the hollowness of the thesis that it was the West’s leadership of the Industrial Revolution that created its hegemony over the world. Examining a longer arc of history shows that the West’s rise was instead rooted in genocide, slavery, and colonial plunder. The modern financial system must be understood as inseparable from the genocide in the Americas, the trade in enslaved people, and the plantation system built on enslaved labour by the major European powers.

Notes

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The various publishers joining this publication work to keep alive this legacy, fundamental to the struggles of the peoples of the Global South in their quest for emancipation and the construction of socialism. We thank the Fidel Castro Center, in the person of its director René González Barrios, who selected and organized the speeches presented in this book.

In a context in which the U.S. imperialist offensive seeks to strangle Cuba’s economy, its people, and its revolution, disseminating Fidel’s ideas and the policies implemented by the revolution, through this publication, is a form of solidarity. In doing so, we seek to strengthen internationalist bonds in the construction of a society free of class domination.

‘There can be nothing more anti-Marxist than dogma… nothing more anti-Marxist than the petrification of ideas’.

– Fidel Castro, closing speech, Cultural Congress of Havana, 12 January 1968¹

‘I make revolution, therefore I exist, therefore we exist’.

– René Depestre, commission I, Cultural Congress of Havana, 1968²

On the morning of 4 January 1968, in the Hotel Habana Libre, Cuban president Osvaldo Dorticós opened the Cultural Congress of Havana. Over the following 9 days, 470 delegates from 70 countries would fill the commission rooms. Together, they sought to understand how imperialism operates through culture in all its dimensions and what it would mean to build an anti-imperialist front capable of confronting and dismantling it.³

The congress took place at a moment when revolution felt not only possible but imminent. Vietnam was fighting the most powerful military on Earth to a standstill. Armed liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique were building new societies in the zones they had already liberated.⁴ Across Latin America, guerrilla movements were multiplying in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. The peoples of the Third World were in motion on every front. The grief over Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s murder in Bolivia three months earlier had only sharpened the collective resolve of the delegates and the movements they represented. The question was no longer whether imperialism could be defeated but by whom and on what fronts.

The Cultural Congress of Havana was organised across five commissions that mapped the fronts on which the cultural battle was being waged: Culture and National Independence (commission I); the Integral Formation of Man (commission II); the Responsibility of the Intellectual (commission III); Culture and Mass Media (commission IV); and Artistic Creation and Scientific-Technical Work (commission V).⁵ As Dorticós observed in his opening statement, it was ‘the first time, as far as we know, [that people] from all continents, belonging to different professions’ had been brought together around a common cultural mandate.⁶ The decision to invite not only cultural workers such as artists and writers but also doctors, economists, sociologists, scientists, technicians, and intellectual workers of all backgrounds was a deliberate political choice, insisting that culture was not merely an auxiliary to political and military struggle but a front of anti-imperialist struggle in its own right.

The congress was not confined to commission rooms and speeches: it reverberated across the city through billboards, posters, and radio broadcasts. In the lead-up to the congress, the Instituto del Libro (Institute of the Book) published popular editions of works by several participating writers, and films by some of the delegates were screened in cinemas across Havana. On the evening of 9 January, the exhibition Del Tercer Mundo (From the Third World) opened at the Pabellón Cuba in Vedado. Conceived as a cinematic journey rather than a conventional exhibition, it used light, sound, montage, and movement to guide visitors through the unfinished history of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Visitors moved through six zones that told the unfinished story of the Third World, from the myth of ‘virgin’ lands, through the violence and deprivation of imperial domination, and to the revolutionary struggles of the present. The exhibition drew on neon animations, comic strips, satirical film montage, and sound effects that included a horror tunnel of hunger and rotating light boxes that multiplied Cuban photographer Alberto Korda’s iconic image of Che alongside the question: ‘And we, the exploited of the world, what is our role?’ The exhibition, produced collectively by over a hundred people, was visited by more than 250,000 during its three-month run, with hours that allowed students and workers to attend on their way home, as if visiting a popular cinema.⁷

The mass participation and cultural breadth of the congress embodied its foundational argument: that culture contains the totality of how a society produces and reproduces human life. As the congress’s general declaration concluded: ‘if the defeat of imperialism is the unavoidable prerequisite for the achievement of an authentic culture, the cultural fact par excellence for an underdeveloped country is the revolution’.⁸

The discussions that took place over those nine days produced one of the richest collective analyses of cultural imperialism of the twentieth century and a vision of anti-imperialist culture whose scope and ambition continue to challenge movements today to think of culture not merely as art or propaganda but as a terrain of struggle across every dimension of social life. Yet the congress has been little-studied and virtually absent from many historical accounts of the period ever since. This dossier presents a synthesis of some of those discussions, organised into five sections: the diagnosis of how cultural imperialism operates, the praxis of culture within active liberation struggles, the theoretical formulations that emerged from the congress, the vision of the new human being, and the role of the intellectual worker in the revolution.

‘I make revolution, therefore I exist, therefore we exist’ – René Depestre, Commission I, Cultural Congress of Havana, 1968.

Building Towards the Cultural Congress of Havana

The congress was the third in a sequence of internationalist events held in Havana. The first was the Tricontinental Conference (January 1966), which brought together revolutionary forces from Africa, Asia, and Latin America to build a political-military alliance against imperialism and created the Organisation of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL). In August of the following year, the meeting of the Organisation of Latin American Solidarity institutionalised armed struggle as the principal strategy of continental liberation. In 1968, the Cultural Congress of Havana extended the strategy into an ideological and cultural terrain that had, for two decades, been the object of a massive and largely covert imperialist offensive.

The congress was shaped by a material necessity to combat not only direct military aggression led by the United States (such as the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion) but also a longstanding cultural and information war. In fact, it was convened as the direct counter-formation to the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), the US’s flagship cultural operation during the Cold War. With an express purpose of constructing cultural hegemony, the CCF promoted the ideas that there is no alternative to the Western capitalist order, that revolutionary movements are threats to ‘freedom’, and that intellectuals should be autonomous, apolitical critics. Founded in 1950 with operations in thirty-five countries, it published more than twenty prestigious literary and political journals (Encounter in London, Preuves in Paris, and Cuadernos in Latin America, among others), sponsored conferences, funded academic exchanges, and cultivated an international network of intellectuals committed, whether knowingly or not, to a liberal anti-communist consensus.⁹ Though the revelation in 1967 that the CCF was funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) discredited the organisation, the infrastructure it had built remained intact, from journals, foundations, and academic networks to habits of thought. Eric Hobsbawm, a British Marxist historian and a delegate, later described the Cultural Congress of Havana as the CCF’s ‘exact opposite’: where the CCF presented itself as a defender of intellectual autonomy while operating under imperial patronage, the Cultural Congress of Havana sought to establish the cultural infrastructure and programme for those fighting against imperialism.¹⁰

The idea for the Havana congress was born from Casa de las Américas (House of the Americas), an institution founded in April 1959 that had become Cuba’s principal cultural bridge to Latin America and the Caribbean through its journal and annual literary prize. In January 1967, the journal’s collaboration committee issued a declaration to gather intellectuals from across Asia, Africa, and Latin America in response to the 1966 Tricontinental Conference’s call for an active front against cultural intervention in the Third World. This proposed gathering became the 1968 Cultural Congress of Havana. Between October and November 1967, a National Preparatory Seminar brought together 1,343 Cuban writers, artists, scientists, and technicians in the same five-commission structure that the international congress would later adopt, with months of collective intellectual and organisational work taking place before a single international delegate arrived.¹¹

The congress’s invitation strategy was deliberately broad: Trotskyists and surrealists sat alongside members of communist parties; editors of New Left Review sat with militants of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA); existentialists and anti-psychiatrists sat alongside dependency economists and liberation theologians; and the 212 delegates from ‘developed’ nations sat alongside the 205 delegates from underdeveloped nations, including 53 from socialist countries.¹² Though the Cuban strategy sought to build an anti-imperialist front that reached the progressive sectors of the imperial centre, structural decisions ensured that Third World perspectives set the direction of the proceedings. To this end, the heads of all commissions were delegates from Third World socialist and national liberation projects. The testimony of delegates speaking from active liberation struggles carried a political and moral weight that framed the entire congress.¹³

The congress convened at a moment of sharp contradictions. Two days before the opening, Fidel Castro announced that the Soviet Union would reduce petroleum supplies to the island. Days after the closing, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba convened to act against a ‘microfaction’ of party members accused of seeking to subordinate Cuba’s revolutionary strategy to Moscow’s line.¹⁴ After the conference, the Organisation of American States (OAS) compiled an extensive classified report that called the congress a ‘subversive action of international communism’, detailing the attendees as well as their political affiliations, travel histories, and interventions at the congress.¹⁵

The Diagnosis: How Imperialism Operates Through Culture

Though the delegates came from a broad range of colonial histories and stages of struggle, they shared a diagnosis of cultural imperialism in their time. Imperialism, they argued, operates through a systematic offensive across every dimension of society and culture, including the colonisation of consciousness, control of information, extraction of intellectual labour, ‘brain drain’ of doctors and scientists from the Third World, and control of knowledge production.

During the congress, Roberto Fernández Retamar, a Cuban poet who would later lead Casa de las Américas, offered a structural account of the global order and the intellectuals it produced. The world, he argued, is divided not into ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ countries but into underdeveloped countries (países subdesarrollados) and what he called ‘underdeveloping’ countries, or countries that underdevelop (países subdesarrollantes) – countries whose own development depends on actively producing underdevelopment elsewhere. For Retamar, intellectuals in these ‘underdeveloping’ countries acquired knowledge through the same system: one built on the exploited labour and wealth of the Third World. Western science and art, he argued, ‘also belong to the exploited countries upon which they have been built’. Returning them, he said, would be ‘not a form of paternalism but a way of restoring to them what had been torn away’. For Retamar, this meant that left intellectuals from imperial centres have a responsibility to place their knowledge – scientific, economic, linguistic, and technical – at the service of the liberation movements whose peoples made that knowledge possible. If reparation was what Retamar demanded of intellectuals in countries that underdevelop, what he demanded of those in underdeveloped countries was the inverse: to seize the coloniser’s knowledge and its products and use them for their own liberation.

In 1971, three years after the congress, Retamar’s formulation would crystallise in his landmark essay Calibán. In it, he claimed the figure of Caliban – the enslaved subject in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, whose island Prospero has colonised – as a symbol of Latin America and the Caribbean: ‘Prospero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, enslaved Caliban, and taught him his language in order to understand him: what else can Caliban do but use that same language – today he has no other – to curse him?’¹⁶

In the years that followed, Caliban became a shared figure through which intellectuals across Latin America and the Caribbean explored colonial domination, language, revolt, and historical agency. The congress helped to consolidate this reworking by bringing Caribbean anti-colonial thinkers including Retamar, C. L. R. James, and Aimé Césaire into dialogue in Havana.¹⁷ In 1969, for instance, Césaire published Une Tempête (A Tempest), an anti-colonial rewriting of Shakespeare’s play, and the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite published his poem ‘Caliban’. Together with Retamar’s essay, these works contributed to an important cultural and political inversion, placing the Third World – as the collective colonised subject – at the global centre, not periphery, of history.

This struggle over language, representation, and historical agency was part of the congress’s broader diagnosis of cultural imperialism. At the congress, Fernando Martínez Heredia, who had founded the leading journal Pensamiento Crítico (Critical Thought), argued that the most insidious layer of imperialist domination was cultural colonisation.¹⁸ This form of colonisation, he said, ‘penetrates every order of life and influences even those who are fighting against it’, producing a ‘mental mould of castration’ – an inability to envisage a future attainable through their own efforts.¹⁹ This ‘mental castration’ is produced over a long period of time and across several fronts, among which is the media apparatus. During the congress, the Cuban historian Moreno Fraginals described a vast imperial communications system: 850 hours per week of US shortwave broadcasting to Latin America, two radio networks controlling more than ninety per cent of listeners, and single-frequency radios preset to US stations that circulated across the region. For Cuban writer Edmundo Desnoes, mass media was imperialism’s ‘secret weapon’ – effective precisely because it was invisible.²⁰

The Indian economist Lajpat Rai showed how educational and cultural institutions had also been dominated by imperialist interests. In his country, he said, ‘The universities, institutes, schools, [and] social and cultural organisations… are infested today with North American cultural agents in the guise of visiting professors, education experts, [the] Peace Corps, and even CIA agents’.²¹ He documented a ‘programme of political castration of intellectuals’, echoing the words of Martínez Heredia, with the Asia, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations, and the now-exposed CCF, operating openly inside the Indian academy.²²

A third front of the imperialist cultural offensive operated through the historical record and the physical archive. Delegates from the Arab world, the Korean peninsula, and southern Africa brought testimonies of cultural erasure. Gisèle Halimi, a Tunisian-born lawyer who had defended Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) members during the war of independence, brought her own testimony of cultural colonisation to the congress. Raised under the French colonial education system in Tunisia, she described the exclusion of Arab history and culture and how ‘beauty, intelligence, [and] freedom could only be French values; the source of all culture, civilisation, was France’.²³

Speaking from a country still reconstructing itself, Kim Youn Seun and Pak Hai Chin of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), barely fifteen years removed from a war in which US bombing destroyed virtually every standing structure in the north, offered the congress the concept of juche (주체). Often translated as ‘self-reliance’, juche refers to the capacity of a colonised people to become the subject of their own history rather than the passive object of imperial domination. ‘Without the complete liberation and independence of the country’, the DPRK delegates told the congress, ‘no hope can be had of a true national culture, nor can one speak of the integral formation of man’, capturing, in a single sentence, the link between the congress’s diagnosis of cultural imperialism and its horizon of the new human being.²⁴

What these testimonies described, across continents, was a single integrated colonial apparatus that captures how a society narrates itself to itself – its broadcasts, its universities, its language, its archives. Various delegates pointed out that this apparatus is also inextricably linked to the economic structure and extractivist logic of imperialism. As Alex La Guma, a novelist and former political prisoner of South African apartheid, put it: ‘We are the world’s leading gold producers, but our miners earn forty cents for eight hours of work’. While South African surgeons had performed the world’s first heart transplant in Cape Town just weeks before the Havana congress, eighty per cent of the population lived at starvation level. La Guma’s point was not to condemn scientific achievement itself but to expose the contradiction of apartheid society: immense wealth and technical capacity existed alongside mass deprivation and racial domination. The Bantu Education Act (1953) gave this system an explicitly cultural form, imposing inferior, segregated education on Black South Africans and preparing them for subordinate labour under apartheid.²⁵

The Havana congress also discussed imperialism’s material extraction of human capacity. Dr. Horacio Zalce, a Mexican doctor who presented at three of the congress’s five commissions, traced the pipeline of brain drain in his field: doctors trained at public expense in underdeveloped countries were drawn to the United States, subjected to ‘transculturation’ (the gradual adoption of another culture’s values, habits, and ways of life), and either absorbed into the imperial centre or sent back to societies where no work matched their specialisation. In Dr. Zalce’s words, ‘raw material has been exported, processed abroad, and then stolen’.²⁶ Similarly, the Cuban delegate José Fernández-Britto Rodríguez reported that between 1956 and 1965, some 40,000 Latin American scientists and technicians emigrated to the United States.²⁷ Meanwhile, Cuban researchers Aníbal Rodríguez and Fernando Barral described the colonisation of the production of knowledge about the Third World itself, in which Latin America supplied ‘scientific raw material’ – data and researchers – to US think tanks, such as the RAND Corporation, the Special Operations Research Office, and the Hudson Institute. Those institutions then returned the ‘finished products’ of that research to the region in the form of political, economic, intelligence, and military intervention.²⁸

Across the five commissions, delegates described the colonised intellectual, the colonised doctor, and the colonised scientist as raw material that is extracted, processed, and stolen. Every doctor in the periphery who is trained in the public sphere and ends up practising in the imperial centre represents a transfer of economic value – years of social investment captured through the structure of imperial dependence itself. cution of Commission IV (Culture and Mass Media), concluded, ‘the mass culture industry is not limited to superstructural functions; it is today an integral part of the economic production system’.²⁹

‘If the defeat of imperialism is the unavoidable prerequisite for the achievement of an authentic culture, the cultural fact par excellence for an underdeveloped country is the revolution’. – General Declaration of the Cultural Congress of Havana, 1968.

Praxis: Liberation as an Act of Culture

The congress rejected the notion that culture is something to be restored or created only after liberation has been won. On the contrary, delegates speaking from inside the wars of national liberation argued that culture is the substance through which liberation is built, creating, in the process of struggle, new subjects, languages, institutions, and knowledge. National liberation, in this view, is not the precondition for cultural renewal – it is itself an act of culture.

Vietnam, then divided between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North and the US-backed Republic of Vietnam in the South, was represented at the congress by two delegations: one from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and one from the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF), the revolutionary front fighting the southern regime and its US backers. Cù Huy Cận, the vice-minister of culture of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and one of the country’s most celebrated poets, reported on the importance of building cultural life despite US bombardment. ‘The suppression of the peoples’ national culture’, he warned, ‘is the watchword of conquerors’. Tư Huỳnh, a renowned painter and representative of the NLF, described how the NLF’s monthly reports recorded the number of inhabitants freed from illiteracy alongside the number of enemy soldiers killed.³⁰ In a territory where an underground tunnel could serve as both school and shelter, culture and liberation were inextricably linked. In the resolution of commission IV (Culture and Mass Media), delegates noted that Vietnamese cinema teams worked from cellars in the most heavily bombed provinces. ‘Song drowns out the sound of the bombs’, they wrote.³¹

From the liberated zones of Portuguese-occupied Africa, where Angola’s armed struggle against colonialism had entered its seventh year and the wars in Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique were also advancing, the Angolan poet Mário Pinto de Andrade – co-founder and first president of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola – spoke of the cultural transformation underway in the liberated zones, where schools, printing presses, artists’ workshops, and revolutionary songs were emerging.³² A ‘semantic revolution’, he said, was breaking open colonial Portuguese, reshaping it through African linguistic structures, and generating new literary forms. Similarly, Abílio Duarte, a Cape Verdean leader of the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde), spoke of the foundational blocks of the new society within the shell of the old. ‘The armed struggle’, Duarte declared, ‘is the most important cultural event that has taken place in our country since the beginning of colonisation’.³³

From Cape Verde to Cuba to Vietnam, across continents and distinct national liberation traditions, cultural life was seen not as something merely to be preserved against destruction or postponed until victory but the very medium through which liberation was being built. What linked these struggles was a shared understanding drawn from lived practice: that culture is the substance of struggle itself and that national liberation is, indeed, an act of culture. As the resolution of commission III declared, ‘Every struggle against imperialism and neocolonialism automatically becomes a struggle for the people’s access to culture: national liberation struggles thus take the beautiful and heroic form of the defence of knowledge and beauty’.³⁴

The Synthesis: Revolution as a Total Phenomenon

Alongside the diagnoses of imperialism and testimonies from active struggles, the Havana congress generated theoretical formulations for understanding culture, revolution, and the human subject. The debates at the congress were as far-reaching as the delegates that attended it, ranging from dependency theory and the relationship between science and culture to the terms on which anti-imperialist solidarity could be built. Among the interventions that generated the sharpest debate was a reckoning with négritude, a literary, philosophical, and political movement that asserted that Black peoples possessed a distinct cultural identity forged in the experience of slavery and colonialism that demanded recognition against the universalism of the West. The Havana debate spoke directly to questions still relevant today about the relationship between racial and cultural identity and class struggle.

At the congress, the Haitian poet René Depestre traced the origins of négritude as ‘the cultural operation through which Black intellectuals of Africa and the two Americas became conscious of the validity and originality of Black-African cultures’. At its origin, it reflected a double alienation of Black people, both as workers on the capitalist market and as the subjects of racialised dehumanisation. For Depestre, it expressed ‘the consciousness of this double alienation and of the historical necessity of overcoming it through revolutionary praxis’.³⁵ But separated from class analysis, négritude would soon be appropriated for counter-revolutionary uses.

In Haiti, Depestre said, ‘pseudo-sociologists’ like then dictator François Duvalier, commonly known as ‘Papa Doc’, isolated the racial question from economic development, reducing Haitian history to ‘a chaotic succession of conflicts solely between mulattoes and Blacks’.³⁶ The Black petty bourgeoisie had used this interpretation to convince the masses that they were now in power when reality could not have been further from the truth. Depestre saw what happened when négritude moved from an anti-colonial literary revolt into state ideology in the form of what became known as noirisme, the essentialist racial ideology employed by Duvalier that turned négritude’s defence of Black culture into the justification for dictatorship, terrorising the Haitian people and the left in the name of Black authenticity. Placed under house arrest, Depestre left for Cuba in 1959 at Che Guevara’s invitation.³⁷

Depestre also pointed to the well-known formulation of Léopold Senghor, Senegal’s first president and a founding thinker of négritude, that ‘emotion is Black, as reason is white’. For Depestre, the problem was not négritude’s original affirmation of Black cultures but the way such formulations could essentialise racial identity when separated from class analysis, opening the door for for Black bourgeoisies across Africa and the Americas to exploit Black workers ‘in the name of a common spirituality’.³⁸ Separated from the concrete demands of revolution, négritude had become what Depestre called ‘an unacceptable Black Zionism’.³⁹ Rather, Depestre asserted, the struggle against racism must be grounded in revolutionary practice. Only by doing so, and only through revolution, he said, could négritude be ‘incorporated into the socialist revolution’ and find ‘its transcendence’ through a historical process in which ‘white and Black and mulatto cease each day more to be opposed to one another’. The new Black Orpheus, he continued, ‘will be revolutionary or will not be at all, for he is a contemporary and an ally of Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara’.⁴⁰

Where Depestre had traced négritude’s historical capture, Guinean writer and delegate Condetto Nénékhaly-Camara made a sharper philosophical claim: the values that négritude attributed to Blackness – courage, creativity, and spiritual depth – were not racial properties at all but part of ‘the common patrimony of Humanity’. To essentialise them was to hand the ruling elites of newly independent Africa the same mystifying instrument that colonial racism had used. The Havana debate was, in effect, a warning against the cultural nationalisms that would gain traction across newly independent Africa and the Caribbean. The work of building an anti-imperialist culture, therefore, requires a class analysis at its centre, without which any cultural front could dissolve into the very identities imperialism had constructed.

At the congress, the testimony of the South African poet Dennis Brutus pointed to the same problem in another form. Whereas Depestre and Nénékhaly-Camara warned against racial essentialism, Brutus showed how racial domination organised every sphere in which human beings develop. Shot in the back by police in Johannesburg in 1963 and later imprisoned on Robben Island for eighteen months beside Nelson Mandela, Brutus, a co-founder of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee, showed how apartheid extended its dehumanisation even into sport. In the lead up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Brutus and others successfully campaigned for apartheid-era South Africa to be banned from participating. Apartheid’s racial contradictions were visible elsewhere in sport and public life, as evidenced by South African-born weightlifter Precious McKenzie being prevented from representing his own country at the Commonwealth Games, where he instead won three gold medals for England and then a fourth for New Zealand. ‘There can be no discussion of the broad development of man’, Brutus concluded, ‘while racism is permitted and tolerated in sport’.⁴¹

Taken together, these interventions showed that racism could not be overcome either by liberal inclusion or by cultural essentialism. To resist the reduction of social struggle to fixed identities, culture had to be understood in its totality. The Syrian philosopher Antun Maqdisi, a co-founder of the Arab Socialist Movement, provided a framework within which the congress’s diverse interventions found common ground.⁴² Revolution, he argued, is a ‘total phenomenon’ that must transform ‘the meaning of existence’ and ‘man as man’. He continued: ‘A revolution and a revolutionary education is a future that makes itself present, that incarnates itself, and by that very fact casts a new light on the past’.⁴³ His insistence on totality – on revolution as a transformation encompassing consciousness, the body, institutions, knowledge systems, and every dimension of social life – gave philosophical expression to the fact that culture, in its full breadth, is an essential front where liberation is won or lost.

‘A revolution and a revolutionary education is a future that makes itself present, that incarnates itself, and by that very fact casts a new light on the past’. – Antun Maqdisi, Commission II, Cultural Congress of Havana, 1968.

The Horizon: The New Human Being

If revolution is a total phenomenon, then its horizon is the formation of the new human being through revolutionary practice. This was the topic of commission II, whose title, Integral Formation of Man, announced a programme that Che Guevara had outlined in ‘Socialism and Man in Cuba’ in 1965. In his closing speech to the congress, Fidel Castro called it ‘the magnificent pamphlet that Che left us… where he expressed his idea of how the new man must be, the man of tomorrow, the man of the twenty-first century’.⁴⁴

The Havana congress translated Che’s vision into concrete terms. Along these lines, the Cuban delegate Eduardo Lara described work not only as an economic necessity but as a means of forming the new human being, citing both Che’s characterisation of work as a process that ‘purifies the best in man’ and Marx’s perspective that work is ‘the only method of producing complete men’.⁴⁵ Under Cuba’s revolutionary government, Che’s vision became praxis in the form of voluntary labour, mass participation in agricultural work, and brigades organised to clear thousands of hectares of unproductive land. These were not simply productive measures but instruments of human transformation intended to break down the division between manual and intellectual labour and the social hierarchies and prejudices associated with it. Other Cuban interventions extended this argument into the scientific, technical, and other fields, insisting that the formation of the new human being could not be separated from the development of technology. In a collective paper entitled ‘The New Man’ presented to commission II, the Cuban delegation named Che as the clearest embodiment of this ideal: ‘a worker not driven by the physical necessity of selling himself as a commodity, capable of acquiring the qualities of the human being of the future, free from the burdens of the past, who gives everything of himself without expecting any material reward, guiding each of his actions with the deepest feelings of love for the people and the oppressed of the whole world and with eternal hatred for the oppressive and criminal enemy’.⁴⁶

The resolution of commission II defined the new human being in terms that exceeded any narrow conception of culture: someone who was ‘ideologically, scientifically, technically, and culturally prepared to participate actively and consciously in the construction of the new society’ and ‘capable of carrying out productive manual tasks or intellectual activities without distinction’.⁴⁷ Health, sport, science, manual labour, military defence, and artistic appreciation were not supplementary to this vision but constitutive of it and essential to the defence of any revolution. Rather than suggesting a fixed blueprint, in its general declaration the congress insisted that the new human being ‘will change with the epochs, will transform with the pace of science and technology and of ceaseless imagination’.⁴⁸ This transformative and dynamic vision of the new human being necessitated a continual process of rehumanisation.

That process also had to confront the gendered subordination embedded in bourgeois social relations. Cuban delegates Elena Díaz and Natasha Klein pointed out that the formation of the new human being required the liberation of women from the objectification and subordination inherent in bourgeois social relations. Their intervention extended the congress’s broader argument about human transformation into a terrain that had been raised but not fully elaborated: ‘Real and effective women’s liberation can begin only from one premise: the removal of the bourgeois socio-economic structure that eliminates the oppression of man by man, of which discrimination against women is an inherent consequence’.⁴⁹ Women’s liberation was not an addendum to the revolutionary programme but a structural precondition of the integral human being the congress envisioned.

Intellectual Workers and the Revolution

Fidel Castro’s closing address raised a question that had run through every commission: what role should intellectuals – or ‘intellectual workers’, as he called them – play in the revolution? In the commission dedicated to this question, ‘responsibility of the intellectual’, many delegates challenged the tendency to demand that intellectuals become guerrillas while asking nothing equivalent of workers, technicians, teachers, or athletes. The Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti criticised the assumption that other professions fulfilled ‘a necessary function within the revolutionary sphere… [whereas] the writer or the artist only occupies the role of artículos suntuarios [luxury goods]’. The commission’s resolution developed the same argument, insisting that ‘the artist’s work is not a luxury but a social necessity’ and linking it to the congress’s vision of forming the new human being. ⁵⁰Revolution, the resolution asserted, ‘creates the conditions for the concept of the “intellectual” as a member of a cultural elite to be extinguished. A sustained and multifaceted effort will make it possible, in the future, for every person to become an integral human being – that is, an intellectual in the broadest sense of the term’.⁵¹

The view of the ‘luxury’ intellectual would not disappear by subordinating the intellectual to military action. Rather, the distinction between intellectual and non-intellectual would be overcome as the people as a whole gained access to intellectual life. In the same commission, C. L. R. James – a Trinidadian intellectual who had spent decades at the centre of Pan-African, Marxist, and anti-colonial debates – pushed the argument further. The function of the congress, he declared, should be to ‘prepare the way for the extinction of intellectuals as the personification of culture’. ⁵² In other words, the intellectual as a separate social category had to be abolished and knowledge had to return to the people who produced the material conditions that made it possible.

In his closing speech, Fidel drew these arguments together. He began by noting that the strongest response to Che Guevara’s death had come not from organisations or parties but from ‘intellectual workers’, who he described as ‘honest, sensitive men and women who had the attitude to assimilate, to understand, to admire’. Intellectuals had shown greater combativity than ‘other organisations from which greater militancy was expected’. The intellectual, then, was not a ‘luxury good’ – a notion Benedetti had criticised – but neither was it a figure to be elevated above the struggle. In his closing address, Fidel read in full a statement that had been delivered by a group of Catholic priests in commission III declaring that ‘it is Marxism that provides the most exact scientific analysis of imperialist reality’ and that Camilo Torres Restrepo, killed fighting with the Colombian guerrilla, ‘gave the highest example of a Christian intellectual committed to the people’. ‘How’, Fidel continued, ‘when we see sectors of the clergy becoming revolutionary forces, can we resign ourselves to seeing sectors of Marxism becoming ecclesiastical forces?’⁵³

‘Marxism’, he continued ‘needs to develop, to emerge from a certain rigidity, to interpret with objective and scientific sense the realities of today, to behave as a revolutionary force and not as a pseudo-revolutionary church’.⁵⁴ This image served as a synthesis of many of the testimonies shared throughout the congress: Marxism had to be interpreted and applied according to the concrete conditions and necessities of each struggle in order to realise its revolutionary potential. Culture, on this account, cannot be seen as a domain administered by bureaucracies, whether capitalist or socialist, nor constructed as a ‘pseudo-revolutionary church’. As Fidel put it in his closing speech, it had to be understood as a site of active struggle – ‘a Vietnam in the field of culture’ – and such struggle demanded a permanent revolution in thought within and across revolutionary movements and the institutions of culture themselves.⁵⁵

In fact, the delegates refused to let the congress end as a record of analysis alone. Through the Appeal of Havana, they translated the congress’s conclusions into a programme of practical anti-imperialist action.⁵⁶ This appeal called intellectuals, artists, scientists, teachers, and students to break institutional ties with US imperialism, refusing scholarships, invitations, and other forms of cooperation against what it identified as the enemy’s method: ‘A systematic effort tends to mobilise technicians, men of science, and intellectuals in general in the service of capitalist and neocolonialist interests and objectives’.⁵⁷ When the delegates left the Hotel Habana Libre, they carried with them a diagnosis, a body of theory, a vision of the new human being, and a programme of action. They returned to countries at war, under occupation, building socialism, or fighting to breathe within the institutions of the imperial centre.

The Echoes of Havana ’68

The Cultural Congress of Havana did not end when delegates left the Hotel Habana Libre. The energy of those nine days was channelled into a decade of revolutionary cultural production that constituted, in practice if not in name, the anti-imperialist front that the congress had called for. In March 1968, just weeks after the Havana congress closed, the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association published the first issue of Afro-Asian Writings, later renamed Lotus, a trilingual journal that, until 1991, would carry forward the kind of literary solidarities the congress had embodied. Cabral’s ‘National Liberation and Culture’ (1968) extended the framework that the PAIGC delegates had brought to Havana to a broader theorisation on national liberation. The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) elaborated the vision of the formation of the new human being into a method. The Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America (1971) became the continent’s counter-history. Retamar’s Calibán (1971) helped invert the existing political paradigm, placing the Third World at the centre of history and cultural production. The Guyanese historian Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) later developed, in historical and materialist terms, one of the congress’s central diagnoses: that colonialism had not merely exploited Africa but actively produced its underdevelopment.

This wave spread across artistic fields and traditions. In the realm of cinema, Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino released La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968) and issued their manifesto ‘Hacia un tercer cine’ (Towards a Third Cinema, 1969), which had an explicitly anti-imperialist cinematic programme. In the realm of theatre, the Brazilian playwright Augusto Boal’s Técnicas Latino-americanas de teatro popular (Latin American Techniques of Popular Theatre, 1975) declared that Latin American nations, previously ‘satellites of metropolitan art’, must become ‘the centre of our artistic universe’ and that the goal was not to distribute finished cultural products but to ‘popularise the means of production’ of art itself.⁵⁸ Nueva Canción (New Song), a Latin American movement of politically committed music rooted in popular and folk traditions, carried the struggle into song through the work of Chile’s Víctor Jara, Argentina’s Mercedes Sosa, and Cuba’s Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés. In southern Africa, inspired by Ramona Parra Brigade exiles of the 1973 coup in Chile, the cultural brigades of Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) and the paintings of the Mozambican artist Malangatana Ngwenya fused artistic production with armed liberation.⁵⁹ OSPAAAL’s poster art, designed in Havana and distributed worldwide through the Tricontinental magazine, gave the Tricontinental movement its visual language. The wave spread across the world of literature, from Ghassan Kanafani writing on literature and resistance in Palestine to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o turning to the indigenous language of Gĩkũyũ to write against neocolonialism in Kenya. These projects, and many others like them, show the breadth of the cultural front that Havana helped consolidate. Across the world, they each carried forward the congress’s central insight: that culture was not a secondary reflection of political struggle but one of its decisive fronts.

The Cultural Congress of Havana took place in January 1968, months before the student revolt in Paris’s Latin Quarter became the most famous symbol of global 1968. Yet the cultural front that exploded in the years that followed was rooted not in the university occupations of the European metropole but in the liberation struggles of the Third World. In this sense, it was Havana ’68, not the more acclaimed Paris ’68, where a ‘Vietnam in the field of culture’ was sparked. Despite this, it largely receded from the historical record along with the world that had produced it. Why, then, return to it now?

The questions the congress posed are no less urgent today. Can we develop a national culture under colonial and neocolonial domination? Is it possible to consider the formation of the new human being without a radical transformation of society? What is the responsibility of the intellectual to their medium and to the world? What should be the role of mass media and communication in relation to anti-imperialist struggle?⁶⁰

As imperialism has reached the dangerous and decadent stage of hyper-imperialism, the mechanisms that the congress identified have metastasised with the New Cold War on the Global South.⁶¹ The media apparatus exposed at the congress has become a platform monopoly, algorithmically colonising attention and desire and manufacturing consent for the imperial order. The brain drain that the congress diagnosed has been compounded by the extraction of data and digital labour, the raw material of Silicon Valley’s war economy. The ‘cultural agents’ of the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom have reappeared in the NGO-isation of knowledge production. This includes the academic networks that seek to demonise or discredit alternative political and economic systems to the Western capitalist order, from the socialist projects in China, Cuba, and Venezuela to the countries asserting their sovereignty from Western domination in Iran, Russia, the Sahel, and beyond.

The Havana congress diagnosed cultural production as part of the economic system itself. Today, as US economic hegemony enters relative decline, Washington seeks to offset that decline through intensifying militarism. The cultural front is increasingly drawn into the same logic, as culture wars, manufactured consent for confrontation, and the war machine itself operate as a single integrated apparatus.

The Havana congress was an intervention in the cultural Cold War. If the Congress for Cultural Freedom sought to produce a global intelligentsia committed to the idea that there is no alternative to the Western order, the Havana congress sought to produce the opposite: an international front of new intellectuals, scientists, doctors, educators, and artists committed to the construction of sovereign alternatives, building towards socialism. How can that example provoke us today and push people’s movements to think broadly and strategically about culture as a terrain of political struggle and to build an anti-imperialist cultural front adequate to our moment? What would it mean to do this now – to refuse the compartmentalisation that relegates ‘cultural work’ to art and propaganda while treating health, science, education, sport, and knowledge production as separate, technical domains outside the scope of political strategy? What would it mean to build institutions, networks, and forms of collective intellectual production that are embedded in the movements of the present, as the congress was embedded in the liberation struggles of its time? Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has sought to carry this tradition forward, accompanying the political struggles of today, cultivating the new intellectuals that these struggles demand, and working from within the trenches of the battle of ideas and emotions.⁶² The work of recovering the Cultural Congress of Havana is part of this effort, not as an exercise in historical nostalgia but as a contribution to the strategic thinking that movements need now.

Dorticós opened the congress by declaring that to create in a country undergoing revolutionary development ‘is not only to create a literary or artistic, scientific or technical work. It is to create a more beautiful whole – one that, in the final analysis, benefits from that scientific, literary, or artistic creation. It is to create a new people, a new country, a new society!’⁶³ To return to the Cultural Congress of Havana is to return to that proposition – and to insist that every dimension of human life is a front of imperialism and therefore a front of resistance. The battle of ideas and emotions continues, and the cultural front – in its totality – remains to be built.

‘A Vietnam in the field of culture!’ – Fidel Castro, closing speech, Cultural Congress of Havana, 12 January 1968.

Notes

Bibliography

Let us imagine Mariana, a political economist in São Paulo mandated by the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) to work through precisely this question for the movement’s own political education. In addition to working through the canon, she puts the question to an AI tool such as ChatGPT or Gemini. It returns a familiar kind of answer: a definition of the terms, a tidy summary of the relation, and a gesture towards the present. But for a researcher accountable to a movement like the MST, it is not enough.

That failure is not surprising. A serious answer to the question is more complicated than it first appears. It cannot be a definition. It has to trace the development of one of Marx’s central insights: that the growing social productivity of cooperative labour is, in the same motion, the process by which that productive power is stripped from the producers and turned against them as capital. A meaningful answer has to hold a contradiction open instead of resolving it into a tidy summary. It also has to remain faithful to what Marx actually wrote, across the Grundrisse (1857–1858), the Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, and the three volumes of Capital (1867–1894), texts he returned to across more than two decades.

A question like Mariana’s exposes, in a single stroke, why the Marxist corpus defeats the ordinary AI assistant and what it would take to build one that does not. RedMarx, the system introduced in this article, is built to meet exactly that challenge.

Marxist thought is one of the most consequential intellectual traditions of the past two centuries. Across the world, and especially in research institutions in the Global South, it remains a working framework rather than an academic curiosity. Marxist political economy supplies the categories through which researchers read agrarian crises, extractive economies, financialised states, labour regimes, and the international division of labour.

And yet anyone who has tried to ground a piece of analysis directly in Marxist sources knows the difficulty.

The corpus is vast. The collected works of Marx and Engels alone run to scores of volumes and millions of words, multiplied many times over by Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Mariátegui, Mao, Nkrumah, Jones, First, Amin, and others. The categories themselves are dialectical: ‘value’, ‘class’, ‘state’, ‘imperialism’, and many more carry no static definition but acquire their meaning through the relations they describe and the historical moment in which they are deployed. A researcher like Mariana cannot simply quote a sentence from Capital (1867–1894) and treat the matter as settled. She must know which formulation to deploy, from which work, under which conditions, and how later writers extended or contested it.

Large language models change the calculation, but only under strict conditions. A researcher no longer needs to search manually through every page of every relevant volume to verify how a concept is treated across the corpus, if, and only if, she has a system that searches the original works faithfully, surfaces the relevant passages, and tracks where every claim came from. The ‘if and only if’ clause is pivotal. A generic chatbot will paraphrase, summarise, and, as is by now well documented, fabricate: one widely cited study found that 55% of the bibliographic citations generated by ChatGPT-3.5 were entirely fabricated.

Moreover, a meaningful tool must produce dialectical analysis, not reproduce books. It must reason over the corpus and return its own argument, pointing the reader to where each claim can be checked instead of reprinting long passages from the original works. The result must be interpretive: a line of reasoning the researcher can stand behind, never a substitute copy of the source.

These questions deserve more than a generic chatbot can offer, and so Global South Insights (GSI), a research project of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, developed RedMarx to meet that need. RedMarx is a research system configured for work in the Marxist tradition. The sections that follow explain the problem it was built to solve, the architecture GSI developed, and the evidence from its use.

1. The Problem RedMarx Is Built to Solve

No serious research tool can be built on the promise that AI will simply ‘read Marx for you’. The difficulty is not only that the corpus is large, but that generic tools fail in predictable ways when they encounter it. They flatten dialectical movement into definitions, blur later interpretation into the primary voice, smooth over political and translational disputes, and mistake retrieval for understanding.

1.1 Why the Marxist Corpus Resists Generic AI

Generic AI fails first by flattening development into definition. The treatment of the state in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) is not the treatment in The Civil War in France (1871), and neither maps directly onto Lenin’s reformulations in State and Revolution (1917). In the Grundrisse (1857–1858), ‘contradiction’ carries a Hegelian sense of the motor of development; by Volume I of Capital (1867), it has become a structural tendency towards crisis. A useful research tool has to hold these formulations side by side, recognise their historical specificity, and trace how a category develops, instead of collapsing them into a single averaged paraphrase.

Take a single question put to two systems: how does a commodity come to express its value in another? Google’s NotebookLM, benchmarked against RedMarx, answered with one tidy sentence – in the simple form, ‘the coat serves as a particular equivalent for the linen, reflecting the linen’s value in the coat’s bodily form’ – and moved on. The statement is accurate and inert. The equivalent form has been named and then left as a static fact of exchange.

RedMarx, given the same question, did not stop at naming the equivalent form. It unfolded what Marx called the three peculiarities of the equivalent form as a chain of reversals: use-value ‘becomes the form of manifestation, the phenomenal form of its opposite, value’; concrete labour ‘becomes the form under which its opposite, abstract human labour, manifests itself’; and private labour ‘takes the form of its opposite, labour directly social in its form’. Each step is a particular, concrete, private determination standing in for its universal, abstract, social opposite – and only by tracing that movement does the ‘enigmatical character of the equivalent form’ come into view, along with its connection to the money-form (Capital, Volume I (1867), Chapter 1, Section 3).

One system mentions the equivalent form while the other shows why it is the seed of the money-form. That gap, between a label and a logical chain, is exactly the gap generic tools cannot close on a dialectical corpus.

A second failure follows from a generic tool’s tendency to silently blend later commentary into the primary voice, presenting a 1970s reading as though it were Marx’s own. For a researcher, that distinction matters as she needs to know whether a category is being formulated by Marx, extended by Lenin, Luxemburg, or Amin, reconstructed through dependency theory, or debated in contemporary scholarship.

Finally, the corpus is politically contested, and much of it exists only in translation, where the choice of words is itself a political act. There are partisan editions, hostile translations, and theoretical traditions that treat the same texts in fundamentally incompatible ways. A research system that smooths over these tensions in the name of producing a confident answer ends up misleading the researcher.

How sharp these failures are became clear the hard way. In GSI’s first experiments, the system retrieved the correct passages from the correct texts, and the human experts still rated the answers as shoddy and careless in how they handled Marxist concepts. The problem was not retrieval but interpretation. Pulled out of the surrounding scholarship, an isolated passage of Marx leaves even a capable model reasoning from first principles rather than from the established understanding of what the passage means. It reads the words at their ordinary, plain-English face value, without the technical sense the tradition has given them, and loses the conceptual context that makes the passage intelligible. Solving that turned out to require the rest of the system described below.

1.2 What Researchers Actually Need

In practice, a researcher approaching the Marxist corpus needs four things that generic AI tools do not provide, each taken up in Section 2. The first is faithful retrieval of original passages rather than paraphrase. When a section of an article rests on Marx’s argument in the Grundrisse (1857–1858), the researcher needs the actual paragraph, in context, with its chapter and section identified. This is the job of MetaRAG retrieval (Section 2.2).

The second is a dialectical, historically aware analytical scaffold, a way to see the conceptual structure of the question before drafting, including which categories are in play, how they relate, which earlier formulations are foundational, and which later developments extend or revise them. This is the work of the knowledge graph (Section 2.1). The third is interpretation anchored in established scholarship rather than reasoning from scratch, so the system reads a passage the way the field reads it instead of reading an isolated chunk without the conceptual context that gives it meaning. This is the work of the research loop and its embedded skills (Section 2.3). The fourth is traceable, section-level citation in the final output, so that any reader or reviewer can follow each claim back to the exact passage that supports it. This is a precondition for serious academic and political work (Section 2.4).

RedMarx is built around these requirements, applying them in proportion to the task. The goal is not to turn every sentence into a forensic fact-check, as one would for a factual report, but to give the researcher a rigorously sourced foundation for deep, dialectical thinking about complex theory.

2. How RedMarx Works

RedMarx takes a research question as input and produces a research report as output. RedMarx is built on MetaRAG – GSI’s institutional retrieval-augmented generation infrastructure – configured for work in the Marxist tradition. MetaRAG is ‘meta’ in a precise sense. Rather than acting as a single research agent, it is the layer that builds research agents on demand. Faced with a question, it probes the available knowledge, works out what a strong answer would require, and assembles the right combination of search, analysis, and writing strategies for that particular question.

In GSI’s AI for Social Science architecture, MetaRAG is the verified retrieval-and-augmentation substrate on which the institute’s research systems are built; RedMarx is what that substrate becomes when a research team points it at a particular body of knowledge and shapes it with that field’s own concepts. With MetaRAG’s methodology and toolchain, a domain expert who supplies good source material, a sound analytical framework, and a carefully constructed knowledge graph can build a systematic research engine of her own, without writing code. Mariana’s question, on the relation between the socialisation of labour and the rising organic composition of capital, offers a useful thread for following what happens in between, including the role human experts play in shaping the system at each step.

2.1 The Knowledge Graph: A Dialectical Skeleton for Analysis

RedMarx’s most distinctive feature is its use of a layered conceptual knowledge graph of Marxist political economy, which serves as the analytical skeleton for every research question.

When RedMarx receives a question, it does not begin by searching the corpus but by reasoning over the knowledge graph. The graph encodes the major categories of Marxist political economy – value, labour, capital, class, state, imperialism, mode of production, and others – as a layered, relational structure rather than a set of flat tags. Categories are organised hierarchically from general to specific, dialectically through a concept’s opposites and developments, and historically through the reformulation of a category across periods and traditions. These relations are drawn from a controlled vocabulary of social-scientific predicates – ‘contradicts’, ‘mediates’, ‘reproduces’, ‘commodifies’, ‘alienates’, ‘exploits’, ‘determines’, ‘transforms into’, and others – so that the graph captures genuinely Marxist relationships rather than generic ‘is-related-to’ links.

For Mariana’s question, the graph yields a skeleton before any text is fetched: socialisation of labour stands as the real social content, while organic composition of capital – the ratio of a firm’s investment in machinery and materials to its investment in labour – is its value-form expression. The two are linked through cooperation, machinery, and the division of labour to the concentration and centralisation of capital, and onward to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. That structure is the analytical plan, the dialectically and historically aware scaffold on which the rest of the research hangs.

Discovery chains RedMarx traverses for Mariana’s question, from a knowledge graph of 35 concepts and 32 relations

The graph, a carefully constructed analytical map rather than a dictionary, is built and maintained by GSI’s domain experts to reflect the actual structure of the tradition. This is where expert labour is most concentrated, and two features deserve emphasis. The first is historical disambiguation: each concept carries a time-period annotation – a category traced ‘1844 → 1857 → 1867’, for instance – so the graph can distinguish the early formulation from the mature one instead of averaging them. The second is sense-splitting, when the same term appears in two distinct theoretical settings with little overlap in meaning. In such cases, the graph splits it into separate senses rather than fusing them, letting the system respect the dialectical movement of Marx’s vocabulary instead of erasing it. The impact of this expert curation was evident when GSI tried to extract concepts from a given source document. When guided by a generic, default ontology, the extraction pipeline drew only a handful of concepts while the purpose-built Marxist ontology helped draw several hundred concepts from the very same text.

This step matters because it makes the system’s analytical assumptions visible, allowing Mariana to inspect the skeleton before any retrieval happens and adjust it if a category is missing or misplaced. The graph is a working object, not a black box.

2.2 MetaRAG Retrieval: Going Back to the Original Texts

Once the skeleton is in place, RedMarx hands each of its nodes – each concept, each claim – to MetaRAG, configured here against a curated corpus of Marxist works. That corpus is itself an artefact of careful expert preparation. The source volumes are digitised through a two-pass vision-language reading process, with one model reading each scanned page and a second refining and cross-checking it. This allows tables, formulae, and the original printed page numbers to survive intact, so that every passage can later be cited back to the book and page it came from.

The instruction to MetaRAG is straightforward. For every concept and every position identified in the skeleton, locate the original passages in the corpus and return them with their chapter and section identifiers. Do not paraphrase. Do not summarise. The downstream analysis depends on having the real text in front of the system, not a synthesised approximation.

A second, subtler commitment operates here too. When RedMarx moves from finding a passage to analysing it, it does not reason from the isolated snippet. Chunks do the work of finding – they are how the system locates the relevant passage – but they are not the unit it then reasons over. Having used the chunk as a pointer, the system discards it and ingests the entire surrounding source document – the full chapter rather than the fragment – so that the author’s overarching argument frames the reading.¹ This is the practical answer to the loss of conceptual context described in Section 1.1, since meaning is no longer artificially confined to the unit that happened to match the query.

This is where the difference between RedMarx and a generic chatbot becomes most visible. A generic system will produce fluent prose about Marx’s theory of ground rent without ever consulting Volume III of Capital (1894). RedMarx is constructed to refuse this shortcut. The retrieval step is the foundation, and everything downstream is built on direct engagement with the sources.

2.3 The Research Loop: Reading the Way a Scholar Reads

Faithful retrieval is necessary but not sufficient. As GSI’s early experiments showed, a system can hold the right passages and still interpret them carelessly. RedMarx therefore wraps retrieval in an iterative research loop – plan, harvest, analyse, synthesise – that works through a question the way a researcher like Mariana would: scoping it, gathering evidence, assessing whether the evidence is sufficient, and only then drafting.

Two things give this loop its rigour. The first is an embedded expert method. How RedMarx investigates a Marxist question – how to navigate the corpus, how to disambiguate a contested concept, how to read a passage against the consolidated scholarship rather than from first principles – is not hard-coded. It lives in editable instruction documents, distilled from the primary and secondary literature through retrieval work carried out with domain experts. These documents capture how an experienced scholar interrogates a Marx text. Because they are plain documents, a domain expert can revise the system’s method directly by adding an interpretive framework, which will take effect immediately.

This is also how the team corrected an early failure in which the system merely stacked retrieved points in a flat list, like a student reciting facts, instead of building the logical relations between them. Teaching the system, through these documents, to write as serious scholarship demands turned a stack of retrieved points into a genuine argument.

The second is a human checkpoint. After the system has scoped the question and surveyed the available evidence, it pauses for the researcher to review and approve the direction before committing to full analysis. The human is not a spectator at the end of an automated process but is in the loop at the decisive moment. Work in progress is preserved at every step, so the path from question to report stays auditable rather than opaque.

2.4 Synthesis: Faithful to the Text, Footnoted to the Section

The final stage takes the conceptual skeleton, the retrieved primary passages, and the researcher’s question, and produces a synthesised research report.

The synthesis is bound by a strict requirement that every substantive claim that rests on a source must carry a footnote that identifies the source down to the chapter and section. Because each retrieved passage arrives already tagged with its origin, citations are born with their sources rather than reconstructed afterwards. This removes the risk of the fabricated or mismatched citation that plagues generic tools. A single footnote in a RedMarx report resolves not merely to a book but through its full structure – Book → Part → Chapter → Section → Subsection – so that ‘Marx on the form of value’ becomes, concretely, a pointer to Section 3, ‘The Form of Value or Exchange Value’, in Volume I of Capital (1867). The reader of a RedMarx report, whether a colleague, a reviewer, or a critic, can follow each substantive claim back to the precise passage in the original work that grounds it.

For academic work, this satisfies the rigour that serious scholarship requires. For political work, it matters because claims about what Marx, Lenin, or Gramsci argued must be checkable, particularly when those claims are contested. A report whose footnotes resolve to chapter and section is a report that can be defended.

Traceability serves thought; it is not an end in itself. The footnotes exist so that a researcher can build on the sources with confidence, shifting energy from the hunt for passages to argument, judgement, and the dialectical work that is the point. On Mariana’s question, for instance, citation is only the starting point. What matters is the argument RedMarx is able to sustain: that the rising social productivity of labour is the very process through which labour is subordinated to capital. Where Marx’s texts leave that tension genuinely open, the system marks it as such, with sources on both sides, rather than forcing the corpus into a resolution it does not contain. That is the register RedMarx is built for.

3. Current Status: Evidence from Use

RedMarx is being trialled by GSI researchers, who have so far run it on 16 substantive questions of the kind reproduced throughout this article, across 29 logged sessions – five of those questions selected for the controlled four-system benchmark reported below, the other 11 developed as full research reports – and judged the results to be strong.

That judgement is not merely impressionistic. In a controlled benchmark, five expert-selected questions on Marxist political economy were scored by human evaluators against a six-dimension rubric – comprehensiveness, representation of contradictions, terminological precision, dialectical exposition, critical reflexivity, and analytic depth. Together, these produced 118 structured pass/fail checks per system.

RedMarx’s full configuration scored 118 out of 118, or 100%. A leaner configuration of the same system, running on the substantially cheaper Kimi K2.5 rather than a frontier model, scored 97.5%. Claude Opus 4.7 with no retrieval at all scored 83.1%, and NotebookLM scored 50.8%. The decisive gap appeared not in surface vocabulary, where every system could name the categories, but in the dimensions that test Marxist understanding: surfacing internal contradictions, maintaining critical and historical reflexivity, and sustaining analytic depth. There, the weaker tools produced clean taxonomies that sanded off Marx’s critical edge. NotebookLM’s result should be read as a mismatch of purpose rather than a simple failure: it is built to answer in seconds, where RedMarx is built for analyses that take 10 to 15 minutes. One difference did not need a rubric to detect: across the same five questions, the two retrieval systems produced 216 references resolving to a named chapter or section, and the two systems without retrieval produced none at all. The benchmark matters because it tests the difference between summarising Marxist vocabulary and reasoning dialectically with it.

These claims can be checked against the answers themselves. Four questions are published in full – each with RedMarx’s answer, the knowledge graph and discovery chains behind it, and a general AI tool’s answer to the same question – in GSI’s GitHub repository.

The benchmark was run on a restricted, canonical slice of Marx on which even an unaided model performed respectably. That performance is expected to fall away – and the value of retrieval and the knowledge graph to grow – as the corpus expands to Lenin, Mao, and lesser-known texts that demand reasoning across authors. That expansion is the subject of the next section.

The intention is not to keep RedMarx as an internal tool. The conditions that produced it – the difficulty of the Marxist corpus, the inadequacy of generic AI, the centrality of dialectical thinking, and the need for source fidelity – are not unique to one institution. RedMarx will prove useful to other research collectives, party intellectuals, popular educators, and independent scholars who work within or alongside the Marxist tradition.

4. The Road Ahead

A research system is never finished. Several directions of work are already underway, in rough order of immediacy.

Deepening quality and the research loop: The nearest-term work is on rigour itself. The aim is to mature the research loop so that the system can review its own draft, identify what is missing, return to the sources, and try again for a limited number of rounds before a human reviews the result. In other words, the system should begin to ask of its own work what a careful researcher would ask: is the argument complete, are the sources sufficient, and has anything important been missed?

Broadening the corpus: In parallel, GSI is steadily integrating further primary sources and well-curated secondary literature. Marxism is not a closed canon but a living tradition, with major contributions across languages, regions, and historical moments. GSI will continue to add carefully selected works, with attention to translation quality, editorial provenance, and licensing, scaling the corpus from the political economy core towards the wider canon of Lenin, Mao, and others, so that RedMarx’s retrieval reflects the full breadth of the tradition rather than a narrow slice. Because so much of that tradition lives in translation, expanding across languages is a central part of this work, not an afterthought.

Richer analytical frameworks and information-gathering strategies: Beyond the current knowledge graph, GSI is developing additional analytical frameworks – conjunctural analysis, world-systems decomposition, value-chain analysis, and social-formation analysis – that a researcher can invoke when the question calls for them. Each brings its own way of reading the corpus.

Cross-traditional and cross-temporal research methods: Some of the most important contemporary questions cannot be answered from inside a single theoretical school or a single historical period. RedMarx is being extended with methods that allow comparison across traditions – reading dependency theory and world-systems theory against each other on the same question, for example – and across time. These methods help trace how a category evolves from its classical formulation through its mid-century reconstruction to its contemporary use.

Connecting to deeper research: Finally, RedMarx does not have to work alone. A faithfully sourced, dialectically structured analysis of a theoretical question is exactly the kind of input that a larger research process needs. Work is underway to let RedMarx feed its grounded output into more comprehensive research systems, so that rigorous theoretical reasoning becomes a building block of larger investigations rather than an endpoint.

The deeper reason for building the instrument in-house, rather than waiting for commercial platforms to serve the field, is that ownership shapes possibility. When the system belongs to the institution that uses it, the methodology embedded in it can be the one that institution actually believes in. The researcher can ask the system harder questions, configure it for finer-grained work, and, most importantly, direct human attention to the questions that only humans can answer. The mechanical work of locating passages, cross-checking citations, and mapping conceptual relations can be entrusted to the system. What remains for the researcher is the harder and more valuable work of judgement, synthesis, and political imagination.

5. The System Retrieves; the Human Thinks

A tradition is kept alive not by being quoted but by being thought with. For a century and a half, the Marxist canon has demanded more of its readers than any single lifetime can give: more volumes than one scholar can hold in view, more contexts than one mind can keep straight, more debates than one career can master. The danger is not that the texts disappear, but that the collective capacity to read them as a whole begins to thin. RedMarx is built against that attrition.

It also matters who builds the instrument. The capacity to work with a tradition is not a neutral convenience; it is infrastructure. When the tools that mediate access to the canon are built on someone else’s terms and behind someone else’s paywall, they shape the questions researchers can ask and the sources they can reach. Building RedMarx is a way of refusing that dependence; it is a small act of reclamation that returns part of the means of reading the tradition to those who work within it and gives a movement more control over the conditions in which it thinks.

RedMarx is also built by people, for people. Movement leaders and cadre posed the political questions the system exists to answer; scholars chose the most authoritative sources; retrieval and domain experts shaped the dialectical framework together; those who know the tradition drew the knowledge graph by hand; and AI specialists engineered the research loop that binds it together. No part of RedMarx thinks on its own; every part extends someone’s thinking. The human is its origin and its end – the question begins in a real political need, as Mariana’s mandate from the MST did, and the answer is meant to be carried back into a real argument and put to work. What looks like a machine is, in truth, a collaboration among experts from different fields, each multiplying the others’ reach.

RedMarx should not be mistaken for magic, or for a substitute for the disciplined reading that serious scholarship has always required. It is not a shortcut around that labour but a tool for absorbing the mechanical work of locating passages, checking citations, and mapping conceptual relations. Ultimately, judgement, synthesis, and political imagination remain the domain of the researcher. The system retrieves; the human thinks. That division of labour is not a weakness of the tool but the reason for building it.

Researchers and organisations interested in RedMarx, or in adapting the approach to another body of work, can write to GSI at contact_gsi@thetricontinental.org.

Notes

¹ Full-document ingestion processes a large volume of text for each answer, and so requires a model with a one-million-token context window. This currently restricts RedMarx’s full configuration to frontier models; the leaner configuration described in Section 3 runs on smaller models at significantly lower cost.

Imagine this: you and a teammate are writing a book together. Your teammate drafts the outline first, then you add and revise content. If every update is shared by manually sending files back and forth, your computers quickly fill up with copies like ‘final-v2-real-final’. Even worse, if your teammate updates something without telling you, and you edit the same part, you’ll have to manually compare and decide whose version to keep.

To solve this, you decide to use a ‘middleman’ to manage all versions in one place: always fetch the latest version before editing, submit changes after editing, and roll back whenever needed. Git plays exactly that ‘version middleman’ role.

Install Git

Install Git with an Agent

Open your Agent tool, enter the following, then wait for the task to finish:

Please help me install and config git, my name is 'Your Name', my email is 'email@example.com'.

Git does not strictly require a real username or email. It will still work with ‘Your Name’ and ’email@example.com’. But once you push to the cloud, others can see your commit identity, so it’s better to use your real nickname and email.

Basic Git Operations

Open Visual Studio Code (VS Code), choose a working folder, then click the branch-like Source Control icon in the left sidebar.

At first, there is no version history yet. Only projects tracked by Git will record file history, so it’s best to initialise your repository early. Click Initialise Repository to turn the current folder into a tracked repository.

This is the main Git workspace. The CHANGES area at the top is for reviewing and handling edits, such as staging or undoing. The GRAPH area below shows commit history. You can think of each commit as a reviewable and shareable snapshot.

After creating a test file in the folder, you’ll see ‘U’ next to the file name. That means the file is untracked. Git doesn’t know what baseline to compare against yet, so you need to add it to tracking first.

Click the ‘+’ button shown below to add the file to the staging area (Staged Changes).

Now the file moves into Staged Changes, and the left-side symbol becomes ‘A’, meaning this is a newly added file (Added).

Now change the text to ‘hello, this is a new text’.

Back in the Git panel, the file changes to ‘M’, meaning it has been modified. The diff editor on the right shows changes: red means deleted content, green means added content.

In this case, ‘hello, this is the original text’ is removed and ‘hello, this is a new text’ is added.

Git tracks changes line by line. Even if you change just one word, Git may show it as deleting the old line and adding a new one.

If you’re not happy with the file and delete it, you’ll see a file with ‘D’ in ‘Changes’, meaning it has been deleted.

To undo this action, click the undo button highlighted below to restore the file.

You can also click Unstage Changes to move staged content back to the ‘Changes’ area.

When you’re satisfied with content in ‘Staged Changes’, write a commit message and click Commit to save a new version.

Note that a commit message is required. For example, you could use messages such as ‘Create the initial version’ or ‘Revise Part B of Article A’. A clear commit message helps others understand what this commit changes without having to inspect the content.

If you don’t enter a commit message and try to commit, VS Code will open a new tab prompting you to provide one before the commit can be completed.

In this tab, enter your commit message below the lines beginning with ‘#’, then save and close the tab and click Commit again.

You can now see this new commit in the Graph view.

If your project has a complex directory structure or includes a large number of files, locating a specific file in the default interface can become difficult. Fortunately, you can adjust the display settings to make navigation easier. In the following example, we created a folder and a subfolder, each containing a file.

In the default view, it is not immediately clear which files belong to which folders. As the number of files increases, navigating the list becomes increasingly difficult.

To display the files in a hierarchical directory structure, click ··· → View & Sort → View as Tree. The file list will then be organised like the VS Code File Explorer, allowing folders to be expanded and collapsed.

The commit history can also be displayed as a tree. Click ··· → View as Tree in the graph view to switch the commit history to a hierarchical tree layout.

When comparing a file with its previous version, VS Code displays the differences in the inline view by default when the available editor space is limited. If you prefer the traditional side-by-side comparison, click ··· → Use Inline View When Space Is Limited to disable the automatic inline view. The changes will then be displayed in two editor panes whenever space permits.

Remote Repositories

Many platforms provide remote Git repository hosting services, such as GitHub, GitLab, and GitCode. In this section, we will introduce the two most widely used platforms: GitHub and GitLab.

Before connecting to either of these repositories, we will first introduce the most common Git authentication method: SSH keys.

Although the name may sound a little technical, the idea is actually quite simple. You can think of an SSH key as a special digital key generated by your local computer. After you register it with the remote repository, your computer can recognise itself automatically, allowing you to connect to the repository and use Git more conveniently without signing in every time.

Configure Git Identity (SSH)

Method 1: Get an SSH Key with Agent

Open your Agent tool and enter:

Please generate a SSH key for me and show me the public key to configure on gitlab.

Once the task finishes, you’ll see the public key content ready to copy.

Method 2: Get an SSH Key with Terminal

Exposing your SSH key to an agent may pose security risks. This section explains how to generate and use an SSH key without relying on the agent.

Open Terminal and run the following commands. Replace ‘you@example.com’ with your email (keep the quotes).

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C 'you@example.com'
cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

If prompted with ‘Enter file in which to save the key…’, just press Enter.

Then you’ll see one line starting with ‘ssh-ed25519’ – that’s your public key.

GitHub

Now we can connect to a remote repository using the SSH key we generated earlier. GitHub is currently the world’s largest code hosting platform and is widely used for open-source software development. It hosts countless popular and influential projects. Before proceeding, you’ll need to create a GitHub account if you don’t already have one.

Create a GitHub Account

Open https://github.com/signup?source=login to create a GitHub account. You can sign up using a Google or Apple account, or simply register with any other email address by completing the registration form.

After signing up and logging in, you will be taken to your GitHub dashboard.

Add Your SSH Public Key to GitHub

Click your profile avatar in the upper-right corner and select Settings.

In the left navigation panel, open SSH and GPG keys, then click New SSH key.

Enter a descriptive title for the key, paste your SSH public key into the Key field, and save it by clicking Add SSH key.

Create a New Remote Repository

Click your profile avatar and navigate to Repositories.

Click New to create a new repository.

Enter a repository name, choose its visibility, and then click Create repository. A Public repository can be viewed by anyone, while a Private repository is accessible only to you and collaborators you explicitly invite.

Connect a Local Repository to a Remote Repository

There are two common ways to connect to a remote Git repository:

• SSH: the repository URL begins with ‘git@’. This method requires you to configure an SSH key on your machine. Once set up, you can authenticate securely and perform operations such as ‘push’, ‘pull’, and ‘fetch’ without entering your credentials each time. It is the method most commonly recommended for regular management.
• HTTPS: the repository URL begins with ‘https://’. This method does not require an SSH key and is generally easier to set up. But some environments or workflows may have authentication restrictions.

In this example, we will use SSH to connect to a remote repository. On the repository page, click SSH, and copy the repository URL.

Open Agent and enter the following, then paste the copied SSH URL into the chat and wait for the task to finish:

Please help me push this folder to this Git repository.

Connect to an Existing Git Repository

On the repository page, click SSH, and copy the repository URL.

Choose a local working directory and open Agent. Enter the following, then paste the copied SSH URL into the chat:

Please clone this project for me.

Once the task is complete, the repository will be cloned to your local machine.

A cloned repository is typically ready to use without any additional configuration.

As long as your GitHub account has permission to access the repository, you can pull the latest changes from the remote repository and push your own commits whenever needed.

Push and Pull

After connecting your local repository to a remote repository, you’ll typically keep the two in sync as you continue working.

Click Push to upload your local commits to the remote repository. Click Pull to download the latest changes from the remote repository and update your local copy.

GitLab

This section introduces GitLab. Unlike GitHub, GitLab provides an open-source Community Edition that can be deployed on your own servers at no cost.

GitLab offers a comprehensive feature set, making it a popular choice for internal development environments in many organisations. If you need to self-host your development platform or retain full control over your data, GitLab is generally a better choice than GitHub.

Create a GitLab Account

Most organisations that use GitLab host their own GitLab server. In these cases, the system administrator usually provides you with an account, so you simply sign in using the company’s GitLab website.

GitLab also offers an official cloud service similar to GitHub. However, some advanced features require a paid subscription, so it is generally less popular than GitHub for public repositories. If you only want to learn GitLab or follow this tutorial, you can use the official GitLab cloud service.

Open the following website and sign in: https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in/

After signing in, you’ll see the GitLab home page. Since GitLab is open source, the interface may look different depending on the version or deployment. However, the workflow remains largely the same, with only minor differences in the locations of some buttons.

Add Your SSH Public Key to GitLab

Click avatar →  Preferences →  SSH Keys to enter the key configuration page.

At this point, you’ll see no SSH keys configured yet.

Click Add new key to create a new key entry.

Paste the public key you copied into the ‘Key’ input box, then click Add key.

After this, the key is active.

Create a New Remote Repository

Open your Git hosting platform, then click Projects →  New project.

Click Create blank project.

Fill in the following:

• Set Project Name, preferably the same as your local project folder.
• Choose your username under Project URL.
• Visibility Level controls who can see the repo: ‘Private’ (invite only), ‘Internal’ (visible to users in the same organisation), ‘Public’ (visible to everyone).
• In Project Configuration, it’s recommended to uncheck Initialise repository with a README. Otherwise, the remote repo starts with a README and your first push may fail due to mismatched histories.

After filling in everything, click Create project.

Connect a Local Repository to a Remote Repository

There are two common ways to connect to a remote Git repository:

• SSH: the repository URL begins with ‘git@’. This method requires you to configure an SSH key on your machine. Once set up, you can authenticate securely and perform operations such as ‘push’, ‘pull’, and ‘fetch’ without entering your credentials each time. It is the method most commonly recommended for regular management.
• HTTPS: the repository URL begins with ‘https://’. This method does not require an SSH key and is generally easier to set up. But some environments or workflows may have authentication restrictions.

In this example, we will use SSH to connect to a remote repository.

Inside the repository page, click Code → Copy URL, and copy the URL on the right side of Clone with SSH.

Open Agent, enter the following, then paste the copied SSH URL and wait for completion:

Please help me push this folder to this Git repository

Connect to an Existing Git Repository

Inside the repository page, click Code → Copy URL, and copy the URL on the right side of Clone with SSH.

Choose a working directory and open Agent. Enter the following, then paste the copied URL into the chat box:

Please clone this project for me.

After the task completes, the project will be cloned locally.

A cloned project usually needs no extra setup. As long as you have repository permission, you can push to and pull from the remote repository.

Push and Pull

After connecting your local repository to a remote repository, you’ll typically keep the two in sync as you continue working.

Click Push to upload your local commits to the remote repository. Click Pull to download the latest changes from the remote repository and update your local copy.

Conclusion

Git helps you replace scattered local copies with a structured workflow: initialise a repository, commit meaningful changes, and sync them with a remote repository. That single workflow does three jobs at once. It tracks your work, so every version stays in the history and mistakes can be undone. It transports it, so the same project can be pulled down onto a new laptop, a colleague’s machine, or a server without anyone zipping up folders. And it shares it, so other people can read, review, and build on what you’ve written.

So once your project lives on GitHub, your collaborators no longer wait for you to send them a file. They clone the repository, pull your latest commits before they start, and push their own when they finish, and every change arrives with a name, a date, and a message explaining what it was for. There are no more ‘final-v2-real-final’ copies and no guesswork about whose version is newer, because there is one shared history and everyone works from it.

In 1977, if you drove out to the northern shore of Lake Aasee in Münster, then part of West Germany, on a warm afternoon you would find three concrete pool balls the size of small cars resting on the grass by the shore: Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Pool Balls. The sculptures were originally installed that year for the first Skulptur Projekte Münster (Sculpture Projects Münster), one of West Germany’s landmark experiments in bringing contemporary art into public space, whose language of abstraction, Pop art, and enlarged consumer objects was largely removed from depictions of everyday working-class life.

In that same year, across the border, the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR) was marking the twenty-fifth year of its own public art programme. One of its most ambitious examples still stands in Berlin. Cross Alexanderplatz in Berlin today and look up. On the Haus des Lehrers (House of the Teacher) – the twelve-storey building designed by Hermann Henselmann’s collective and completed in 1964 – Walter Womacka’s Unser Leben (Our Life) wraps around the tower as a monumental ceramic-tile frieze, or horizontal mural band, its roughly 800,000 hand-cut tiles forming a 125-metre-long, seven-metre-high panorama of socialist life in the DDR. Begin with the northern face: a woman lectures at a chalkboard; a brigade meets around a table; a worker leans over an atomic model beside a young couple with a child; a peasant swings a scythe. A parabolic mirror. A rocket. A dove. Behind and between them: hands, banners, a red flag.

Walter Womacka, Unser Leben (Our Life), 1962–1964.

Womacka finished the frieze while the DDR was still staffing its schools and factories with antifascists who had survived the Nazi concentration camps of Buchenwald and Ravensbrück. Thirty-six years after the dissolution of the state that commissioned it, the frieze is still on Alexanderplatz – its colours as bright as if Womacka had just stepped down from the scaffolding. This Art Bulletin is about the East German programme that put works of art like this one into everyday public view, the socialist traditions it belonged to, and what has been destroyed and preserved in the time since.

Baubezogene Kunst (Building-Integrated Art)

The DDR was founded in October 1949 out of the rubble of Nazi defeat, in the Soviet occupation zone, and set about a rapid programme of land reform, mass nationalisation, and antifascist reckoning. Meanwhile, the Federal Republic of Germany, across the western border, was quietly restoring Wehrmacht officers to the Bundeswehr, West Germany’s newly created armed forces, and Nazi jurists to the judiciary. On 22 August 1952, the DDR Council of Ministers of East Germany passed the Verordnung über die künstlerische Ausgestaltung von Verwaltungsbauten (Ordinance on the Artistic Design of Administrative Buildings), an ordinance obliging state construction projects to spend one to two per cent of the approved budget on ‘works of volksverbundener, realistischer Kunst’ (realist art connected to the people) inside and outside of buildings. Schools, kindergartens, town halls, hospitals, cinemas, department stores, apartment blocks, transformer stations, the lobbies of factory canteens: all of them were to include art within or on them, and the state had to pay for it.

In German, this was called baubezogene Kunst (building-integrated art). The West Germans, working from the same Weimar-era antecedent, ran a parallel Kunst am Bau (art in architecture) programme. The political difference lay not in the mechanism but in what the two states asked their artists to put on the walls, and for whom. A related contrast appeared in 1955, when the first documenta exhibition opened in the West German town of Kassel, just a short drive from the East German border. Founded by Arnold Bode, documenta became one of the world’s major recurring exhibitions of contemporary art and was understood from its beginning as West Germany’s aesthetic counterweight to state-regulated Socialist Realism – the official artistic doctrine of the socialist bloc, which called for realist, accessible representations of workers, peasants, and socialist construction. The exhibition foregrounded the abstract painters – Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, and later Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning – whom the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) international programme were also promoting through the same postwar decade. In opposition to this logic, the DDR built public art for a working class that was itself building socialism.

Over four decades, the DDR commissioned an estimated ten thousand such works. Larger works were awarded by open competition and often produced by artist collectives, which is one reason individual authorship matters less in this tradition than in bourgeois art history.

The programme can be understood as part of the comprehensive transformation of society, reducing the gap between art and production, between artists and workers. This ethos was best summarised by SED First Secretary Walter Ulbricht in 1958, at the Fifth Party Congress of the SED, when he stated, ‘[The working class] must storm the heights of culture and make it its own’. The following year, this idea was taken up at the first Bitterfeld Conference, held on 24 April 1959 in the Kulturpalast (Palace of Culture) of the Bitterfeld Chemical Combine, where a worker-writer named Werner Bräunig gave the movement its motto: ‘Greif zur Feder, Kumpel!’ (Pick up the pen, comrade!). The conference called on writers to enter factories, painters to join brigades, and workers to go into studios. In this vision, the state’s walls became the newspaper of the people, and Womacka’s Unser Leben on Alexanderplatz was one of its front pages.

Walls in Dresden and Eisenhüttenstadt

Take a train just two hours south from Berlin to Dresden. On the west façade of the Kulturpalast, designed by Wolfgang Hänsch and completed in 1969, is a mural thirty metres long and ten and a half metres high, made of 466 concrete panels coated with coloured glass splinters: Der Weg der roten Fahne (The Way of the Red Flag), created between 1968 and 1969 by a collective of teachers and students from the Dresden Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Dresden Academy of Fine Arts) around Gerhard Bondzin. The mural reads left to right as a history of the German workers’ movement – the 1848 revolutions and the publication of the Communist Manifesto; the founding of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD); the November Revolution and the murdered revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; the German volunteers of the Spanish Civil War; the resistance to Nazism; and the founding of the DDR in October 1949.

Gerhard Bondzin and collective, Der Weg der roten Fahne (The Way of the Red Flag), 1969.

The composition can be seen clearly from the Schloßstraße boulevard: a woman at the centre with a raised arm stands before a factory gate, alongside armed workers at a barricade and soldiers with red flags where the swastika once appeared. The concrete panels render these figures in the primary colours of a strike leaflet enlarged to architectural scale. The Bondzin collective completed the mural in the summer of 1969 for the DDR’s twentieth anniversary. It has since been designated a cultural monument, though the Kulturpalast around it has been remade twice, first in the early 1990s and then again in the 2012–2017 renovation, which transformed the concert hall into a home for the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra.

Travel northeast and you will reach Eisenhüttenstadt, where the DDR built Stalinstadt – its first planned socialist city – from 1950 onward on previously undeveloped land around the Eisenhüttenkombinat Ost steelworks, drawing a whole generation of post-war refugees into a new industrial centre. A short walk from the town hall, on the north façade of what was then the Magnet department store on Lindenallee (then Leninallee), is a second Womacka mural completed in 1965: Frieden durch technisches Wissen, technischen Fortschritt (Peace through Technical Knowledge, Technical Progress). A worker’s hand releases a white dove against an industrial backdrop of state flags; on the sleeve are images of tools, workers, and technological labour. It is an image of peace – the peace of a country that had lost between five and seven million people in the Second World War, whose western neighbour had already been rearmed within NATO by 1955, and whose own children were being taught in kindergarten to recognise the dove as part of a shared visual language of peace.

Walter Womacka, Frieden durch technisches Wissen, technischen Fortschritt (Peace through Technical Knowledge, Technical Progress), 1965.

World Peace and Internationalism

The dove recurs across DDR public art. Ortraud Lerch’s Friedenstaube (Peace Dove) in Berlin brings the symbol to the façade of an everyday apartment building with a glass mosaic. The lineage was legible: Picasso’s dove, lithographed for the 1949 Paris Peace Congress, was translated into ceramic, glass, and enamel across the DDR’s public buildings by artists working in a state whose antifascist self-understanding made peace a matter of policy.

Ortraud Lerch, Friedenstaube (Peace Dove), 1977.

The dove was not the whole of the DDR’s visual language of peace. Over time, that symbol was joined by images of people from different countries, linking peace to anti-colonial liberation, socialist internationalism, and Völkerfreundschaft – friendship among peoples.

Willi Neubert’s enamel painting Internationale Solidarität (International Solidarity) was originally located at the Stadthalle, or civic hall, in Suhl, Thuringia, but was removed in the early 1990s. It was reinstalled in Thale in 2010, the industrial town where Neubert had long lived and worked. The work shows peace and liberation not as a finished condition but as something won through struggle: beneath the wings of a dove, the world appears as a field of international solidarity.

International class struggle, the dynamic process of liberation, and Völkerfreundschaft took many forms across DDR public culture. The DDR’s own resources were limited, yet it supported liberation movements and young nation states across the globe through material projects that included building schools, hospitals, and factories; training thousands of students free of charge; and printing and shipping movement magazines as well as providing offices for some liberation movements in East Germany. A significant part of this solidarity work was raised and sustained by ordinary people through mass campaigns at workplaces, schools, and neighbourhoods.

‘Solidarität üben!’ (Practise Solidarity!) was a rallying cry of the Solidaritätskomitee der DDR (Solidarity Committee of the DDR), the central body that tied this work together. It informed people about anti-colonial and liberation struggles and called for donations through nationwide campaigns, using posters and informational materials created by visual artists to explain, encourage, and publicise this solidarity work. Practising solidarity meant two things at once: knowing what was happening in the world and acting on it.

For example, between 1965 and 1989, the Solidarity Committee channelled approximately 1.3 billion DDR marks in humanitarian aid raised from the population to Vietnam, including ambulances, printing presses, and support for the Krankenhaus der Deutsch-Vietnamesischen Freundschaft (Vietnam-GDR Friendship Hospital, today Việt Đức Hospital) in Hanoi, still one of Vietnam’s leading surgical centres. Across such campaigns, solidarity was made visible through posters, stamps, exhibitions, and other printed materials. In this way, internationalism was not confined to speeches or state agreements. It appeared on city walls, in printed images, and in everyday acts of giving, making solidarity visible as part of a hopeful future.

Willi Neubert, Internationale Solidarität (International Solidarity), 1977–1978.

What Was Destroyed and What Survived

After 1990, the reunified Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland, BRD) set about undoing much of the DDR’s public cultural infrastructure. That year, the West German painter Georg Baselitz declared publicly that ‘there are no artists in the DDR’; the ensuing Bilderstreit – literally, ‘image dispute’, the post-reunification battle over how to judge East German art – ran through the newspapers for a decade. A large share of the baubezogene Kunst (though no one has a precise count) was painted over, dismantled during renovations, or removed with the buildings themselves, often under the claim of clearing away ‘DDR propaganda’.

The Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic) – the DDR’s parliament and cultural centre on the site of the former Berliner Stadtschloss – became the most visible symbol of this process. Closed in 1990 allegedly because of asbestos contamination (though most of it had already been extracted), it was voted for demolition by the Bundestag (the federal parliament of Germany) in 2003 and demolished between 2006 and 2008. With it disappeared the building that had housed the Palast-Galerie (Palace Gallery), a permanent exhibition curated by Fritz Cremer – whose sculpture of Bertolt Brecht stands in front of the Berliner Ensemble – under the title Dürfen Kommunisten träumen? (Are Communists Allowed to Dream?). The gallery included works by many important DDR artists; after 1990, these works were transferred to federal custody and warehoused. The site is now occupied by the Humboldt Forum, a museum and cultural complex housed behind the reconstructed façade of the Hohenzollern palace – a return to the centre of Berlin that has been widely contested as both an erasure of DDR memory and a restoration of Prussian imperial imagery. It opened in phases from 2020 and cost roughly 680 million euros.

Where art and architecture survived the first two decades after the end of the DDR, there now appears to be greater recognition of their historical and cultural value, as well as a growing desire to preserve them. Perhaps thirty years of austerity have increased people’s desire to be reminded of their humanity and dignity – and of socialism. The Kunstarchiv Beeskow in Brandenburg, an archive and collection, holds over twenty-three thousand works of DDR-commissioned art removed from public buildings after 1990. A series of major reassessment exhibitions – Kunst in der DDR (Art in the DDR) at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 2003, Abschied von Ikarus: Bildwelten in der DDR – neu gesehen (Farewell to Icarus: Visual Worlds in the DDR – Seen Anew) at the Neues Museum Weimar in 2012, and Behind the Mask: Artists in the GDR at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam in 2017 – has moved the debate a certain distance from where Baselitz left it.

These reassessments are not only about recovering artworks from storage or restoring murals to public view. They also reopen the question of what the DDR attempted to build: a society in which art was not treated as a luxury object for private ownership but as part of the everyday education, dignity, and imagination of the working class.

The DDR is also being read again within the socialist tradition through the research of the Berlin-based Zetkin Forum for Social Research and the Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR (International Research Centre on the DDR). Together with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the centre publishes the Studies on the DDR series, which re-examines the history, principles, and lived experiences of this socialist state for progressive movements today.

Warmly,

Zetkin Forum for Social Research

The history of the last two hundred years is the history of the rise and contestation of two such key currencies: the British pound sterling in the nineteenth century, and, far more expansively, the US dollar from the twentieth century to the present.

The current global order, underpinned by the dollar, grants the United States what has appropriately been called an ‘exorbitant privilege’: the power to issue the currency that the rest of the world needs as a store of value, means of payment, and unit of account.¹ This allows the United States to finance its deficits, consume more than it produces, and project its military power simply because its public debt is treated as the safest asset on the planet. It also enables the United States to host the world’s most important financial market, shaping expectations that extend far beyond the financial sphere and influencing investment and production worldwide. In turn, these financial flows establish key conditions that determine the direction of global finance and limit the autonomy of dependent and subordinated countries.

National currencies exist within a hierarchy defined in relation to the dollar. For countries of the Global South, this architecture imposes a high cost. Their currencies are treated as volatile financial assets, and their economies are held hostage to the discipline imposed by international financial capital. The need to accumulate dollars as a defence against speculative attacks and to guarantee imports results in a perverse net transfer of wealth from the Global South to the Global North, particularly to investors and speculators in Western Europe and the United States. Given these structural features of contemporary capitalism, understanding the rise of the dollar, the mechanisms of its present domination, and the structural limits facing any alternative is therefore a central task for those who seek a more just and cooperative international order.

Money, Value, and the Need for a World Currency

In any society based on the division of labour and the exchange of commodities, money emerges as a practical necessity. When different producers specialise – one growing wheat, another making cloth, yet another extracting ore – they need to exchange their products with each other in order to meet their needs. But direct exchange, or barter, presents obvious difficulties: the farmer who wants cloth must find a weaver who at that same moment wants wheat, in the exact amount, and accepts the proposed exchange ratio.

Money solves this problem by functioning as a universal equivalent: a special commodity that everyone accepts in exchange for any other. With money, the farmer can sell wheat to any buyer, keep the value received, and later buy cloth from any seller. Money thus fulfils three basic functions: it serves as a means of circulation, facilitating exchange; a unit of account, allowing the value of different commodities to be compared; and a store of value, allowing wealth to be preserved for future use.

In Marxist analysis, money is not an arbitrary invention or a mere technical instrument. It is the material expression of a social relation called value. The value of a commodity corresponds to the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. When millions of independent producers exchange commodities on the market, they are, in practice, comparing quantities of human labour. Money is therefore the form through which that comparison becomes possible and visible. It represents social labour in condensed form.²

Within a single country, the use of money is relatively simple: there is a national currency, issued and guaranteed by the state, which all inhabitants recognise and accept. But what happens when producers in different countries want to trade with one another? Let us consider a concrete example. A Brazilian company exports coffee to Germany. The German importer has euros, while the Brazilian exporter needs reais to pay workers, suppliers, and taxes. How can these two currencies be reconciled? The problem unfolds on several levels. First, an exchange rate must be established: how many reais are equivalent to one euro? Second, there must be a mechanism to convert one currency into the other. Third, both parties must trust that the currency they receive will hold its value and be accepted by others.

When international trade was small-scale and sporadic, such problems could be resolved on a case-by-case basis, often with universally accepted precious metals such as gold and silver. But as the world market expanded, that solution became insufficient. As international trade grew, there emerged a need for an organised system to settle accounts between countries. It is not practical for each individual transaction to involve either the physical transfer of gold or the direct conversion of one currency into another. A clearing mechanism is needed. Imagine that, over a given period, Brazil exports US$100 million in coffee to Germany and imports US$80 million in machinery. Rather than making two separate transfers, the two amounts are offset against each other, and Germany only needs to transfer the net difference of US$20 million to Brazil. This is the principle of clearing.

For such a mechanism to work on a global scale, involving dozens of countries and currencies, a common reference point is required – a currency that everyone accepts as a unit of account and means of payment for settling balances. Historically, that role was first played by gold and later by the national currencies of economically dominant countries. The advantages associated with controlling the reference currency are anything but simple. They include:

1. the possibility for the issuing state to expand its capacity for debt and spending disproportionately in relation to other national states;
2. the use of the currency as an instrument of foreign policy and domination through control over key channels of international liquidity, as in the case of economic sanctions; and
3. the advantages granted to the international operations of its banks, which, because they operate within a fractional reserve system backed by a currency that can be expanded, occupy a privileged position in the circuit of global high finance.

This gives rise to fundamental questions: who issues this reference currency? Through what mechanisms does it become dominant? What are the consequences when a country’s national currency is elevated to the status of a world currency?

The World Market Expands and Imperial Currencies Take Hold

Since the sixteenth century, the expansion of the world market has been driven by colonial conquest, the trafficking of enslaved people, the seizure of land and natural resources, and the imposition of unequal trading relations on subjugated populations. Originary accumulation, which Marx analysed in the first volume of Capital, was a global and violent process.³ As capitalism consolidated itself as the dominant mode of production, the volume of international trade grew exponentially.

In the eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution intensified this process: the European powers needed raw materials from across the world, such as cotton, minerals, and agricultural products, and sought markets for their manufactured goods. This growth made the problem of an international currency increasingly urgent. With thousands of daily transactions between dozens of countries, an organised international monetary system became indispensable: a set of rules, institutions, and practices that defined how currencies relate to one another, how payments are settled, and how trade imbalances are adjusted. The solution adopted in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected the power structure at the time: a world divided among competing colonial empires. Each imperial power organised its own monetary zone, integrating its colonies and spheres of influence into a system of trade, credit, taxation, and payments centred on its national currency.

As the leading industrial, commercial, and financial power of the nineteenth century, Britain made the pound sterling the principal currency of international trade, enforcing its system of ‘imperial preferences’ on the rest of the world. The so-called gold standard, which prevailed from the 1870s until 1914, was in practice a sterling-gold standard: sterling was the currency in which most trade contracts were denominated, major commodities were priced, and international loans were issued.

The sterling system’s dominance as an international currency was made possible by draining wealth from the colonies. India maintained large current-account surpluses (meaning that it earned more from exports and other external payments than it spent abroad) with continental Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan, but it ran a current-account deficit with Britain (meaning that it paid more to Britain than it received from it). This was partly because of British exports to India and, above all, the obligations imposed by the British on the colony, including ‘gifts’ of huge sums of wealth transferred from British India to the metropole.⁴ As S. B. Saul writes in Studies in British Overseas Trade 1870–1914, ‘The key to Britain’s whole payments pattern lay in India, financing as she probably did more than two-fifths of Britain’s total deficits’.⁵

The British colonies – from India to Africa and the Caribbean to Oceania – were integrated into the metropole’s monetary zone through the British system of imperial preferences. Their exports were quoted in sterling; their imports, largely supplied by Britain because of the metropole’s trade monopoly, were paid for in sterling; and their banking systems operated with sterling as their reference currency. Colonial populations were forced to obtain sterling to pay taxes and buy essential goods, which subordinated them entirely to the terms of trade set by the metropole.

The French colonial empire – stretching across North and West Africa, Indochina, and islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean – constituted its own monetary zone based on the franc. To this day, remnants of that structure survive in the CFA franc, used by fourteen African countries and tied first to the French franc, then to the euro.⁶ Although they did not possess a formal colonial empire comparable to those of the European powers, the United States exercised economic hegemony over much of the Americas from the late nineteenth century onwards. An early expression of this ambition was the Monroe Doctrine (1823), often summarised by the phrase ‘America for the Americans’, which opposed further European colonisation or intervention in the Americas while asserting the United States’ claim to regional pre-eminence. The dollar circulated widely in Central America, the Caribbean, and parts of South America, often imposed through military interventions and the presence of US companies that controlled strategic sectors, such as the United Fruit Company in Central America. Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal also maintained their own colonial monetary spheres, although on a smaller scale.

The result was a fractured international monetary system. There was no world currency but rather several competing regional currencies, each dominant within its own sphere of influence. Though sterling was the most important globally, it was not universal. This system reflected the structure of imperialism as analysed by Lenin and other Marxists in the early twentieth century: a world divided among rival capitalist powers, each controlling its own bloc of colonial and semi-colonial territories. The tensions between these blocs – the struggle for markets, raw materials, and fields of investment – were among the primary causes of the First World War (1914–1918).⁷

The war destroyed this order. It demanded colossal expenditures, financed through monetary issuance and indebtedness. Most countries suspended gold convertibility. Britain, once the world’s great creditor, emerged as a debtor. The United States, which entered the war late and supplied the Allies, became the primary international creditor.

The interwar period (1918–1939) was marked by failed attempts to restore the gold standard, chronic exchange-rate instability, competitive devaluations – the so-called currency wars – and the collapse of international trade following the crisis of 1929. The Great Depression showed that a disorganised international monetary system was incompatible with the ‘stability’ of capitalism.

The Second World War (1939–1945) created the conditions for a radical reorganisation. The United States emerged from the conflict as the only major power whose economy was not only intact but strengthened. Though global power was now shared with the Soviet Union, the United States stood out as the leading capitalist power: it was willing to keep capital flows relatively open, allow foreign claims on US assets, and use its currency as a world currency. By the end of the war, the United States held around two-thirds of the world’s gold reserves and its industry accounted for nearly half of global manufactured output – not to mention that its territory had not been devastated by the war.⁸ This asymmetry of power allowed the United States to impose a new international monetary architecture. At the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, a system was created that, for the first time in history, established a single national currency as the axis of the world monetary system: the US dollar.

The Bretton Woods system marked the transition from a world of competing monetary zones linked to rival empires to a single, dollar-centred monetary order led by the United States. This process represented the shift from an inter-imperialist system, characterised by rivalry between multiple powers, to an imperialist model of unipolar order led by the United States in which one dominant power organised the system as a whole.⁹ This transition was neither automatic nor purely economic. It was the result of war, the destruction of rival powers, the military occupation of former empires such as Germany and Japan, and the construction of a vast network of military bases, alliances, and international institutions under US leadership.

How the Dollar Became Hegemonic

The real consolidation of the dollar as the dominant currency was the result of a strategic project meticulously carried out by the United States during and immediately after the Second World War. The rise of the dollar was not a historical accident; it was the result of three decisive strategic moves.

I. Financing the Wars

The United States used its position as an ‘arsenal of democracy’, a term coined by US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, to structure global dependence on its currency. Initially, the Cash-and-Carry rule of 1937 required buyers of US supplies to pay immediately in dollars or gold and transport the goods themselves, a condition that favoured countries with access to hard currency, gold reserves, and naval capacity.

Later, the Lend-Lease mechanism allowed the United States to supply allied countries with military equipment, food, fuel, and other goods on credit or deferred payment rather than requiring immediate purchase. But it also had a deeper structural effect: by the end of the war, the Allied powers and dozens of other countries had accumulated massive debts denominated in dollars. Given their wartime vulnerability, dependence on US supplies, and limited bargaining power, the United States could impose the currency in which its credits would be denominated. This created a permanent structural demand for the US dollar. Countries now had to export real goods or contract new debts to obtain the dollars required to settle their debt obligations.¹⁰

II. Control over Oil

The second pillar was to secure control over the energy source that would fuel postwar industrial capitalism. Oil transformed the logic of conflict from the First World War onwards. It became the central natural resource of the international system, and control over producing regions became a core element of global geopolitical disputes. More specifically, oil became the main fuel of the armed forces and assumed a decisive position in the world transport matrix, and its derivatives, such as fuel, plastics, fertilisers, synthetic materials, and petrochemicals, came to be widely used across countless production chains. This had further implications for international relations: oil became a recurring instrument on the diplomatic chessboard, functioning as a mechanism of pressure, retaliation, deterrence, support, or strategic backing. In other words, states could use access to oil, oil prices, and control over producing regions to reward allies, punish adversaries, and shape geopolitical outcomes.

By 1940 the United States was the dominant oil power, accounting for 63% of global oil production.¹¹ As it became clear that the future centre of gravity of oil production would shift to the Middle East, the United States acted decisively. As early as 1933, US companies had acquired exploration rights in Saudi Arabia. In 1943, President Roosevelt incorporated the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia into the ‘dollar monetary territory’, authorising the financing of Ibn Saud’s kingdom through Lend-Lease. The United States’ intense diplomatic and military activity in the region, which consolidated its dominance over Saudi Arabia, laid the basis for oil from this new nerve centre to be priced and traded in dollars, a process that was institutionalised in the 1970s through the petrodollar system. Saudi Arabia was thus transformed into a US zone of influence and economic space and incorporated into the dollar’s monetary sphere.¹² This decision compelled most countries, especially industrialised and energy-importing nations, to join the dollar’s monetary territory. In order to buy energy, they first had to obtain dollars.

In this sense, the imposition of a monetary architecture on the global oil market was more decisive than direct control over production. From the 1970s onwards, this move was institutionalised through the ‘petrodollar’, especially with the oil shocks (the sharp increases in oil prices that followed the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the oil embargo by Arab members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC). Oil-producing Arab states used oil as a political weapon and OPEC price increases helped quadruple the price of oil, pushing the world economy into a severe crisis. In this context, the Nixon administration negotiated a secret agreement with Saudi Arabia. The terms were: the Saudis would sell oil exclusively in dollars and invest their surpluses in US Treasury securities (US government debt instruments such as Treasury bonds). In return, the United States would guarantee military protection to the Saudi kingdom. The other OPEC countries soon followed the same model. By tying the world’s main commodity to its currency, the United States structurally expanded the international reach of the dollar.

III. The Bretton Woods System

In 1944, at Bretton Woods, the United States formalised and institutionalised its hegemony, especially in the economic sphere. In 1945, the Yalta Conference helped reorganise the geopolitical and military order after the war by setting the terms for the occupation of Germany, the division of spheres of influence in Europe, and the postwar balance between the major powers. In monetary terms, the Yalta agreements stipulated that German war reparations would be accounted for in dollars.

At Bretton Woods, two opposing visions of the postwar order collided. The British proposal, led by John Maynard Keynes, was radically different from the one that prevailed. Keynes proposed the ‘Bancor’, a supranational international unit of account that would be controlled by a multilateral body called the Clearing Union. His aim was to create a symmetrical system that would penalise both chronically deficit countries and chronically surplus countries. In essence, Keynes’s proposal sought to prevent the kind of ‘exorbitant privilege’ later associated with the dollar from passing from sterling to the dollar by ensuring that no single national currency could become the anchor of the international monetary system.

Keynes’s proposal was summarily defeated. Given the balance of forces, the US plan, led by Harry Dexter White, prevailed. White’s plan was centred on US power: the dollar would be defined as the international unit of account and would be the only currency with full convertibility into gold, at the fixed rate of US$35 per ounce of gold. All other currencies would maintain convertibility into the dollar at fixed but adjustable exchange rates.

To manage this new order, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, today the World Bank) were created. The capital of both institutions was defined in dollars, and their structure was designed to guarantee US control. The voting power of each member country was linked to its quota or capital subscription. In the IMF, these subscriptions were paid partly in gold and partly in national currency. In the IBRD, part of the capital had to be paid in gold or dollars. Since the United States held the largest share in both institutions, with Britain in second place, an asymmetrical decision-making structure was consolidated. In the case of the IMF, because crucial decisions require a qualified majority of 85% of the vote, the United States acquired, in practice, veto power over fundamental reforms.¹³

The Centrality and Decline of Dollar Hegemony in the Twentieth Century

The Bretton Woods system, sometimes called the dollar-gold standard, consolidated the centrality of the dollar and of the United States in the world economy. But the system could not function by itself. It needed liquidity – enough dollars circulating internationally to allow trade, payments, and reconstruction to take place. The devastated economies of Europe and Japan did not have the dollars needed to import inputs, restart exports, or rebuild cities, infrastructure, and productive apparatuses.

The United States solved this problem through the Marshall Plan for Europe (1948–1952) and the Dodge Plan for Japan (1949), which provided the dollars needed to finance reconstruction. These plans ‘saved’ the Bretton Woods system by ensuring that rebuilding Washington’s strategic allies would integrate them fully into the dollar’s monetary territory from the start. At the same time, the United States encouraged the global expansion of its multinational corporations, which entered these reconstructed markets through dollar-denominated direct investment. Because the dollars supplied were, to a great extent, used to buy goods and services produced in the United States itself, the plans also won domestic support from various economic sectors. In a conjuncture of cooling domestic activity, aggravated by the growth of industrial capacity during the war years in Europe and the Pacific, this external demand helped sustain the US economy.

From a strategic standpoint, the United States not only made possible so-called reconstruction and growth ‘miracles’ in several countries, stabilising regions central to the logic of the Cold War, but also consolidated the hegemonic position of the dollar. In the decades that followed, the areas under its influence experienced a long cycle of expansion and prosperity anchored in the centrality of the dollar.

More concretely, while financing economic recovery in regions central to the containment of the USSR, the United States reinforced the primacy of the dollar by:

1. injecting dollars directly into allied economies through programmes such as the Marshall Plan;
2. significantly expanding its military spending abroad, denominated in dollars, as in the case of the Korean War;
3. unilaterally opening its market to exports from strategic partners, thereby guaranteeing them dollar revenues;
4. accepting that these countries would maintain artificially undervalued exchange rates, using the dollar as their monetary reference; and
5. encouraging outward direct investment from its large corporations, which naturally took place in dollars given the origin of those firms.

In addition, the United States tolerated unilateral controls on cross-border capital movements, accepted the non-convertibility of other currencies, did not react forcefully to protectionist policies, and even sent technical assistance missions. This tolerance was conditional: Washington permitted its allies to use state intervention and trade protections while keeping them within the dollar-centred order.

The Triffin Dilemma

Despite its apparent solidity, the Bretton Woods system contained a fatal contradiction identified by the economist Robert Triffin. The ‘Triffin Dilemma’ exposed the logical flaw in using a national currency as an international one. The contradiction was as follows: for world trade and economic growth to expand, the world needed a growing supply of international liquidity – that is, more dollars. But in order to provide those dollars to the rest of the world, the United States had to run balance-of-payments deficits, meaning that it had to send more dollars abroad through spending, lending, investment, and imports than it received back from abroad. However, by issuing more and more dollars than it held in gold reserves, the United States would inevitably undermine global confidence in the dollar’s convertibility into gold.¹⁴ The system was therefore doomed. If the United States stopped running these deficits – that is, stopped supplying the world with dollars – world trade would stagnate. If it continued, confidence in the dollar would collapse.

During the 1960s, this contradiction became critical. Massive increases in US public spending, driven simultaneously by the Vietnam War and domestic social programmes, led to growing deficits and uncontrolled money issuance. At the same time, US hegemony was being challenged by revolutions in the periphery and by criticism from European allies, especially the French. Even the IMF created Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) in 1969 – a synthetic supranational reserve asset nicknamed ‘paper gold’, whose value was based on a basket of currencies – in an attempt to create a source of liquidity that did not depend on US deficits.

In 1971, the Triffin Dilemma reached a breaking point. With surplus countries, led by France, exchanging dollars for gold, US reserves fell drastically. On 15 August 1971, President Richard Nixon acted. In a unilateral decision that reconfigured a system that had been created multilaterally, Nixon suspended the dollar’s convertibility into gold indefinitely. The dollar-gold standard was dead. The world entered a new era: that of flexible exchange rates, financialisation, and a fiat dollar. The hegemonic currency no longer had any backing in a physical commodity; its value was determined purely by confidence – or, more precisely, by the economic, financial, military, and geopolitical power of the United States.

After 1973, in the face of successive devaluations and instability in the dollar’s value, major capitalist countries adopted a regime of ‘floating exchange rates’. In other words, currencies ceased to have fixed parity with the dollar and their value came to be determined in each national economy’s foreign exchange market, where currencies are bought and sold according to demand, supply, interest rates, trade flows, and expectations about each economy.

The Interest-Rate Shock and Dollar ‘Diplomacy’

Faced with growing challenges to the US economy, especially in the economic and monetary spheres, the United States resorted to what came to be known as the interest-rate coup. In response to domestic inflationary pressures and concern over the weakening dollar, Paul Volcker, then chair of the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, raised short-term US interest rates from around 10–11% in 1979 to nearly 20% by late 1980 and early 1981. This sharply increased borrowing costs across the world because much international credit was denominated in dollars or tied to US financial conditions.¹⁵

According to the Brazilian economist Maria da Conceição Tavares in her seminal text ‘A retomada da hegemonia norte-americana’ (The Resumption of North American Hegemony), before the interest-rate coup the private banking system had been operating largely beyond the control of central banks, especially the Federal Reserve.¹⁶ Transnational branch networks structured a regional division of labour within the firms themselves, often at odds with the national interests of the United States, and fostered growing competition among capitals that proved unfavourable to the US economy. Overall, a world economy without a clearly defined hegemonic pole contributed to the disorganisation of the postwar order and to the growing fragmentation of private and regional interests. From 1979 onwards, with the interest-rate coup, the conduct of US domestic and foreign economic policy moved precisely in the direction of reversing these tendencies and recovering command over international finance.

Tavares used the expression ‘the diplomacy of the strong dollar’ to refer to this unilateral US action, which made deliberate use of US monetary and financial power as an instrument of foreign policy and as a means of reconstructing US hegemony.¹⁷ The rise in interest rates cannot be understood only as a monetary policy measure aimed at dealing with domestic US macroeconomic problems. It was a central move in reasserting dollar hegemony and completely restructuring the international monetary and financial system.

When US interest rates are high, wealthy investors leave their positions in other countries and seek gains from the interest-rate differential offered by US public debt – that is, from the higher returns paid by US Treasury securities compared with assets elsewhere. As a result, the Eurodollar market, which had been developing in Europe outside the control of the US central bank, largely returned to the financial centre of Wall Street. That move reinforced US domination over financial capital and strengthened the power of its banking system. In this sense, the US currency was used as a geo-economic weapon: by controlling interest rates, liquidity, and access to international credit through the dollar-centred financial system, the United States disciplined allies, brought competitors into line, and deepened the dependence of the periphery. Thus, the policy of high interest rates and a strong dollar is not merely economics: it is a strategy of power.

This action, however, had consequences. First, it plunged the United States and the rest of the world into a prolonged recession as higher borrowing costs squeezed firms, households, banks, and indebted states. The result was a wave of bankruptcies, including among firms and even some US banks. Second, it caused a sudden contraction of international credit, inflicting damage especially on the capitalist periphery, which had taken advantage of the period of high international liquidity to accumulate dollar debts at floating interest rates – debts whose costs rose sharply once US rates increased. Third, the interest-rate coup led to the recentralisation of interbank credit and the large international banks in New York under the Federal Reserve’s umbrella, placing the international private banking system more firmly under US monetary command.

Another objective of the interest-rate coup was to bring US competitors in line. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Japan had achieved strong industrial and technological dynamism, generating growing trade surpluses with the United States and appearing to be on a path to becoming the world’s largest creditor as the United States became (and remains) the world’s largest debtor. With high interest rates, the dollar remained overvalued and the enormous returns on US Treasury securities produced a capital inflow into the United States, including from Japan, with Japanese firms and banks buying US Treasury bonds. Even while running trade surpluses, Japan found itself in a position in which it financed the US deficit by buying dollar assets, and its own development became increasingly tied to the US financial system and asset cycle.

When the US trade deficit with Japan exploded and domestic political pressure increased, the second part of the disciplining process began. In 1985, the Reagan administration threatened heavy protectionist measures and forced a coordination agreement in the G5 in what became known as the Plaza Accord. The goal was to bring about a coordinated devaluation of the dollar against the yen and the German mark. The result came quickly: between September 1985 and April 1986, the yen appreciated by around 35% against the dollar, making Japanese exports more expensive, weakening Japan’s trade advantage, and helping contain the yen’s potential as a rival reserve currency.¹⁸ Then came the Louvre Accord of 1987, which sought to stabilise exchange-rate parities after this sharp correction. According to Brazilian economists Tavares and Luis Eduardo Melin, this was not a neutral technical adjustment but a political move aimed at consolidating US power: the United States used its position at the centre of the system to force Japan to accept a strong appreciation of the yen and a reorganisation of its growth pattern.¹⁹

The United States thus compelled Japan to adjust its growth path, exchange rate, and financial policy to suit the interests of US hegemony. This ensured that the yen would not become a rival reserve currency and that Japanese surpluses would be recycled in ways that benefited the financing of the US deficit and US financial leadership. Rather than a rupture, what occurred was Japan’s reabsorption into an order commanded by the dollar: the country retained high productive sophistication but under strong financial and geopolitical constraints defined in Washington.

How the Dollar Sustains Itself

The collapse of Bretton Woods, paradoxically, did not weaken the dollar. On the contrary, it freed the United States from any material constraint on its monetary policy and consolidated a new form of hegemony, no longer anchored in gold but in three new pillars: oil and petrodollar recycling; the depth and liquidity of US financial markets, especially the market for Treasury securities; and the weaponisation of dollar-based finance.

To understand the post-1971 order, it is crucial to turn to the Marxist analysis of financialisation. The abandonment of metallic backing (gold) was a watershed moment. It removed the material restriction on the limitless creation of money, which had previously been a representation of a commodity (gold) but became a representation of itself – mere numbers in computerised accounts. In other words, there was an autonomisation of the world currency. This allowed capital to migrate massively from the sphere of value production (investment in manufacturing, agriculture, and so on, based on the application of social labour) to the sphere of circulation – that of fictitious capital. Fictitious capital is investment in property titles (shares) and, above all, debt titles (mortgages and public debt), whose value is based not on value already produced but on the anticipation of future income. With the unlimited creation of fiat money (money issued by the state that is not convertible into a commodity such as gold), fictitious capital could feed itself, generating more fictitious capital that was no longer tied to the value base of social labour.

Pillar 1: Oil and Petrodollar Recycling

Though this process began in the 1930s and 1940s, as noted above, after 1971 it took on new importance as the United States reinforced its strategic and military alliance with Saudi Arabia and ensured that OPEC would continue to price and trade oil exclusively in dollars. This recreated structural demand: because every industrialised nation needs oil, every industrialised nation needs dollars. It also created a new recycling mechanism. Oil-producing countries in OPEC accumulated enormous dollar surpluses (petrodollars) from oil sales. These were deposited in Wall Street banks and reinvested in US government debt and other dollar assets, helping to finance US deficits.

Pillar 2: The Dictatorship of Liquidity (Treasuries)

Today, dollar dominance rests on a pragmatic fact: the dollar provides access to financial markets deep enough to absorb very large transactions without sharp price movements and liquid enough to allow assets to be bought and sold quickly. The central pillar of this system is US Treasury securities, which are universally regarded as global ‘safe-haven’ assets: high-grade financial assets with minimal credit risk and immediate liquidity. This allows the United States to completely subvert normal economic logic: it is the world’s largest debtor, yet its debt is treated by other countries as the most valuable asset.

In moments of global financial crisis – even crises that originate in the United States itself, as in 2008 – international capital does not flee the dollar; it rushes towards it, seeking the safety of Treasuries. This flight to Treasuries reinforces the Global Surplus Recycling Mechanism (GSRM), an expanded form of petrodollar recycling in which export surpluses – not only oil revenues – are recycled into US financial assets. It operates as follows:

1. The United States absorbs the world’s surplus products, running massive trade deficits with countries such as China, Germany, and Japan.
2. The profits from those exports accumulated by the surplus countries (in dollars) return to Wall Street because those countries recycle the dollars they receive from exports into US public debt.
3. Wall Street uses this inflow of foreign capital to buy Treasuries, financing the deficit of the US government and supplying credit to US consumers so that they can continue consuming imported goods.

Under this system, the rest of the world is forced to finance the twin deficits of the United States – trade and fiscal – thereby subsidising US consumption and, crucially, its global military power.

In Latin America, this process accelerated after the recommendations of the Washington Consensus, which urged countries to give up controls over their capital accounts (the channels through which investment, loans, and other cross-border financial flows enter and leave a country). This means that capital can enter and leave each country freely, but it has direct effects on the volatility of national exchange rates. Countries, in turn, seek to protect themselves from this volatility by accumulating foreign reserves in US public debt. That is why we can say that the dollar is a weapon of extortion against the periphery: to protect their domestic economies from exchange-rate volatility and capital flight, countries in the periphery must accumulate dollar reserves, often in US public debt. In doing so, they help finance the United States’ twin deficits (trade and fiscal), which in turn sustain US military spending, overseas bases, imperialist wars, and so on.

The crisis of 2008 was the moment when the ‘pyramids of private money’ (fictitious capital) built by Wall Street on top of this mechanism collapsed. Yet the crisis did not break the system. Instead, the Federal Reserve acted as the central bank of the world, supplying dollar swap lines (agreements that allowed other central banks to obtain dollars from the Federal Reserve and provide them to their own financial systems in moments of stress). This proved that, in the collapse, dependence on the dollar was total rather than showing that the dollar had become dispensable.

Pillar 3: Currency as a Weapon of War

Because most global trade, finance, and commodity transactions – especially oil – are denominated in dollars and cleared through the US financial system, Washington has gained enormous coercive power. Dollar ‘diplomacy’ is used both to constrain strategic enemies and to reward allies. The United States can impose financial sanctions, freeze the reserves of foreign central banks – as it has done with Iran, Venezuela, and Russia, for instance – and exclude entire countries from the international payments system (SWIFT).

When a country is sanctioned, as happened to Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Russia, and many others, it can be excluded from dollar payment networks and may have its foreign assets frozen. This raises the cost of imports; blocks access to credit and payment systems; obstructs the purchase of food, fuel, medicine, and industrial inputs; and makes ordinary trade far more difficult. The dollar, therefore, is not merely an economic tool: it is a weapon of war, an instrument of geopolitical discipline that ensures US interests prevail.

Is De-dollarisation Already Underway?

Data on the currencies used in trade invoicing and international finance is scarce, and it is published with longer delays than other trade data.²⁰ Even so, the available evidence indicates that the dollar’s predominance exceeds the weight of the United States’ share of global gross domestic product, trade, and international finance, reflecting a structural asymmetry in the international use of currencies.

Sources: BIS Triennial Survey 2025 · SWIFT Watch 2024 · IMF COFER 2024 · Federal Reserve 2025

SWIFT data shows that the dollar is used in more than 80% of trade-finance transactions processed through its network, largely because a significant share of commodity trade continues to be invoiced and settled in dollars. In addition, the dollar still accounts for close to 60% of global foreign exchange reserves. On the other hand, the evolution of global foreign exchange reserves in 2022–2023 was marked by a significant increase in gold purchases by central banks. Considered a safe asset, gold offers protection against geopolitical risks, even though it has limitations as a means of payment. This pattern suggests that the intensification of gold purchases by certain central banks is associated with efforts to mitigate economic and geopolitical risks, especially those related to international sanctions. In China, for example, the share of gold in total reserves rose from less than 2% in 2015 to 4.3% in 2023, while the proportion of assets denominated in US Treasury and agency securities fell from around 44% to approximately 30%, reflecting a recomposition of the country’s reserve portfolio.²¹

Source: World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends: Full Year 2024 (gold.org)

Although a decline in the dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has been observed in recent decades, the data indicates that this movement does not correspond to a direct substitution by another single currency. On the contrary, the reduction has been absorbed by a set of currencies that the IMF classifies as ‘non-traditional currencies’: the Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, South Korean won, Swedish krona, and, to a lesser extent, the Chinese renminbi. Taken together with the increase in gold reserves, this suggests that the process currently underway is not driven primarily by a coordinated political project of de-dollarisation but rather by portfolio diversification strategies adopted by monetary authorities oriented towards risk management and greater security in a context of growing global financial instability.

This movement can be interpreted as a response to the contradictions of US- and Europe-driven financialisation, whose dynamics tend to generate recurring volatility and asset bubbles (sharp rises in prices that often end in collapse). In this sense, reserve diversification (the spreading of foreign-exchange reserves across a wider range of currencies and assets) appears less as a political rupture than as a technical adjustment to the system’s fragilities. This makes the process of transforming the international monetary system both more robust and slower than more immediate geopolitical narratives suggest.

Source: IMF COFER | Federal Reserve, The International Role of the US Dollar, 2025 edition | The CNY series excludes data for the fourth quarter of 2016

An analysis of trade invoicing from 2000 to 2023 shows that the combined share of the dollar and the euro remained broadly stable. The dollar retained its dominant position, while the euro was used predominantly within the European Union. Although China has significantly expanded its share of world exports since 2000, approaching that of the United States, the renminbi remains limited as a currency for international trade invoicing and has not been fully internationalised.

These data demonstrate the resilience of the dollar in trade invoicing. They also show that, although the renminbi’s share of international reserves has grown notably, broader monetary diversification remains limited.

Source: IMF Working Paper (2025), Patterns of Invoicing Currency in Global Trade in a Fragmenting World Economy

Source: IMF Working Paper (2025), Patterns of Invoicing Currency in Global Trade in a Fragmenting World Economy

Source: IMF Working Paper (2025), Patterns of Invoicing Currency in Global Trade; IMF Direction of Trade Statistics (DOTS) Patterns of Invoicing Currency in Global Trade

Advances in financial technology and payment infrastructure are driving the rise of alternative systems of payment, asset custody, and settlement. These are becoming concrete alternatives to the dollar-centred international financial system. Far from being a recent debate, this is the materialisation of new institutional architectures capable of enabling transactions outside of the traditional circuits. Noteworthy initiatives include the Financial Messaging System (SPFS, developed by Russia) and the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS, led by China), which expand the capacity for international settlement in local currencies and reduce dependence on infrastructures dominated by the core countries.

At the same time, the BRICS countries have intensified efforts to strengthen domestic digital payment systems and develop solutions for cross-border operations with the aim of expanding international trade denominated in local currencies and advancing the construction of a more multipolar monetary system.²² China, in particular, has expanded the international use of the renminbi by developing CIPS and participating in central bank digital currency (CBDC) projects.²³ There has also been a rapid global spread of CBDC projects: 137 countries and monetary unions, representing around 98% of world GDP, are at some stage of developing these digital currencies.²⁴

At the same time, initiatives such as mBridge (involving the People’s Bank of China, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, and the Bank of Thailand, with the support of the Bank for International Settlements) and the ACUMER system (developed by the Central Bank of Iran) signal the potential of new digital infrastructures for settlement in local currencies between central banks through CBDCs without the need for traditional intermediaries such as correspondent banks or systems like SWIFT.

Moreover, bilateral currency swap agreements have played a growing role, especially since the financial crisis of 2007–2008. These instruments have been used to provide liquidity in moments of stress and to reduce the costs associated with the accumulation of international reserves. This enables countries to access foreign currencies without relying exclusively on international financial markets. In this sense, currency swaps have become a central component of contemporary strategies for monetary diversification and for mitigating dependence on the dollar.²⁵

In sum, the available data indicates that while the dollar remains dominant and relatively stable in the international monetary system, there are also important changes in the composition and functioning of that system. One significant example is the renminbi, whose share of international reserves rose from virtually zero at the start of the 2010s to around 2.2% in less than a decade – a historically unprecedented development for the currency of a country that still maintains important controls over its capital account. This growth in reserve holdings has not, however, been matched by a comparable expansion of the renminbi’s use in international trade invoicing.

An analysis of de-dollarisation therefore requires a distinction between different dimensions of the international monetary system. In the sphere of foreign exchange reserves, the process is slow and gradual and still far from amounting to a rupture with the centrality of the dollar. In the sphere of bilateral payments there is more dynamism, though still geographically concentrated in specific arrangements, such as transactions between Russia and China, which, according to a report published in November 2025, are settled 99.1% in roubles and yuan.²⁶ Finally, in the field of financial infrastructure, which includes payment, clearing, and settlement systems, the process is still incipient but has a structural character, given that the creation of these platforms tends to reduce dependence on the dollar-centred financial system in a lasting way.

In this sense, the importance of de-dollarisation lies in the direction in which this transformation moves and, above all, in the construction of institutional and productive alternatives capable of reducing the costs of exiting the dollar system.

To De-dollarise Is to Fight for Sovereignty

For the overwhelming majority of countries in the Global South, the international monetary and financial system centred on the dollar is not a safety net but a straitjacket. Insofar as countries need to accumulate international reserves – hard currencies such as the dollar – they are subjected to monetary extortion by the dollar system, since they must maintain those reserves and do so by purchasing US public debt. In doing so, they continue to finance the outsized capacity of the United States to act, including by funding wars. Furthermore, the system is also a mechanism of punishment, since the United States can, through sanctions, blockades, and exclusion from the international payments system, penalise countries that are not subservient to it. In recent decades, Washington has increased economic sanctions against the targets of its foreign policy by 933%.²⁷

In practice, national currencies are not seen as stores of value but as volatile ‘financial assets’. International demand for them is speculative, subject to panic and capital flight. In addition, Global South countries suffer from the structural inability to issue external debt in their own currencies. They borrow in dollars but generate revenue in local currency, creating a devastating currency mismatch: when their currencies depreciate, they must use more local currency to obtain the same amount of dollars needed to service their external debts.

Dollar hegemony is therefore not limited to the dollar’s centrality as a means of payment or store of value. It also expresses itself in the way the dollar’s domestic dynamics are transmitted to the rest of the world. In moments of dollar appreciation, peripheral currencies tend to depreciate, making imports more expensive and putting pressure on domestic inflation, especially in economies that are dependent on energy, food, and intermediate goods. Because a large share of international commodities is priced in dollars, these effects are amplified even in the absence of variations in the real conditions of supply and demand.

In financial markets, decisions in US monetary policy, such as interest-rate hikes, frequently trigger capital flows towards dollar-denominated assets. This causes exchange-rate depreciations, raises the cost of external financing, and restricts the space for economic policy in countries of the Global South, which are often forced to adopt contractionary measures to contain inflation and stabilise their currencies – even in contexts of low growth. In economies with high levels of debt in foreign currency, dollar appreciation immediately raises the burden of that debt in domestic-currency terms, deepening structural fragilities. In order to attract volatile international capital, assets in the Global South must offer much higher interest rates than the ‘safe’ assets of the North. This results in a constant net transfer of wealth from poorer countries to the richest financial centres.

With neoliberal policies and the liberalisation of capital movements, the capacity of states to conduct macroeconomic policy has been weakened. Any government that attempts to implement expansionary fiscal or monetary policies, such as cutting interest rates to stimulate investment, is immediately punished by the ‘market’ through capital flight, which devalues the currency, generates inflation, and can lead to collapse. Governments become hostages to the confidence of financiers. To protect themselves from this volatility, Global South countries are forced to accumulate massive international reserves. Brazil, for instance, held more than US$358 billion in December 2025.²⁸ These reserves are mostly invested in dollar assets, especially US Treasury securities. This is the final paradox: to defend themselves from the system, Global South countries are obliged to finance their oppressor, lending trillions of dollars to the US Treasury at low interest rates.

Dollar hegemony imposes unsustainable costs on the Global South. Dissatisfaction with this destabilising asymmetry is not new, but it has taken on renewed urgency in a world moving towards multipolarity. De-dollarisation has become a long-term structural trend, though one that faces immense structural obstacles. According to the economist Bruno de Conti, several developments may, in the medium or long term, trigger changes in the international monetary and financial system, namely:

1. the redefinition of the role of certain countries in the hierarchy of the world economy;
2. the intensification of geopolitical tensions among the leading powers; and
3. the growing distrust of the dollar, sharpened during the Trump administration, combined with the political willingness of a broad set of countries to seek ways to reduce their dependence on the US currency, whether individually or in coordination.²⁹

The discussion of de-dollarisation, however, cannot be reduced to protection against sanctions or the mitigation of external vulnerabilities. A deeper analysis must ask what purpose de-dollarisation is meant to serve. The replacement of one hegemonic currency by another does not necessarily imply a qualitative transformation of the international order, nor does it guarantee greater stability or benefits for peripheral countries. Historical experience suggests that monetary hierarchy tends to reproduce itself, albeit in new configurations.

De-dollarisation must be understood not merely as a dispute between currencies but as part of a broader debate about the nature of international economic relations. For countries of the Global South, this means shifting the focus away from the mere substitution of instruments and towards the construction of structural alternatives involving new forms of participation in international trade, technological cooperation, productive integration, and political coordination. An effective transformation of the international monetary system would therefore require more than the creation of alternative financial mechanisms. It would require confronting the pillars that sustain dollar hegemony, including the centrality of commodity pricing, the dominance of dollar-denominated financial markets, and the capacity for geopolitical coercion.

De-dollarisation is not an end in itself but part of a broader struggle for economic sovereignty and for the construction of a more equitable international order capable of interrupting the systematic transfer of wealth from the Global South to the centres of power. The struggle for de-dollarisation, therefore, is not merely an accounting adjustment. It is a fundamental political struggle over sovereignty, development, and the right of the peoples of the Global South to organise their economies outside the discipline of imperial finance.

Notes

Bibliography

Nepal’s story reveals a fact: digital space has become part of national territory. If a government cannot establish effective sovereignty in digital space, its capacity to govern in the physical world will also disintegrate.

The cloud sounds weightless, dematerialised, floating above the planet. Tricontinental’s dossier no. 46, Big Tech and the Current Challenges Facing the Class Struggle writes plainly: ‘A data “cloud” sounds like an ethereal, magical place. It is, in reality, anything but that.’ The cloud is a set of extremely concrete, highly centralised infrastructure: server farms, submarine cables, chip fabrication plants, cooling towers – overwhelmingly located on US soil, subject to US law and US corporate control.

For most countries of the Global South, digital sovereignty remains a distant concept. They have not even begun to examine their own situation.

The Cloud Has a Physical Address

What does the landscape of global digital infrastructure look like?

Eighty per cent of Africa’s internet traffic travels through submarine cables owned and operated by European and US companies. The consequences of that dependence became visible in March 2024, when an underwater landslide off the coast of Côte d’Ivoire severed four cables simultaneously. Thirteen African countries along the western seaboard, including Ghana, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire, lost internet access for weeks. Millions of users were cut off. The outage cost Nigeria alone over $590 million in four days. The companies that own the cables assumed no responsibility for the damage to African economies; repair timelines were determined by the cable owners, not by the countries affected. Afterwards, SpaceX’s Starlink rapidly expanded its market share in the region. Once dependency is established, crisis only deepens dependency.

As Bappa Sinha writes in Tricontinental’s Breaking the Stranglehold: How China is Shattering US Technological Hegemony, for over a century, the foundation of imperial power has been monopolistic control over the most advanced means of production, with military force and financial dominance as supporting instruments. From the industrial revolution through the age of digital platforms, successive imperial cores secured global dominance by capturing technological frontiers, extracting monopoly rents, and reinvesting those rents into further technological leadership, sustaining what appeared to be a self-reproducing hierarchy. The imperial core monopolises technology and capital; the periphery supplies labour and resources; unequal exchange continuously transfers value upward. This structure operates without formal colonial rule. When the Global South passed the New International Economic Order resolution at the United Nations in 1974, demanding technology transfer from North to South as a central provision, the response came two decades later through the Uruguay Round of the GATT: reverse engineering and technology transfer were made illegal. As Vijay Prashad writes in The Poorer Nations (Verso, 2012), what replaced the South’s demand was not a New International Economic Order but a North-led New International Property Order.

That order now governs the most advanced means of production of our own era: digital infrastructure. Chip manufacturing is concentrated in Taiwan and South Korea (using US-designed architectures). Operating systems are monopolised by Microsoft, Apple, and Google. The cloud computing market is dominated by Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The global search engine market belongs almost entirely to Google. Countries, businesses, and citizens of the Global South use this infrastructure every day, but its physical location, jurisdiction, and control rest elsewhere.

Data is at the centre of all this. In April 2020, China’s State Council formally designated data as a fifth factor of production — alongside land, labour, capital, and technology. But the economic status of data is deeply ambiguous.

Current international accounting standards do not include data assets on corporate balance sheets. US tech giants, through their global platforms, continuously absorb data generated by users worldwide. No universally accepted method for valuing this data exists; what cannot be measured does not appear on any tax return. Facebook, Google, and Microsoft together avoided $2.8 billion in taxes across twenty developing countries in 2019 alone — a figure researchers describe as ‘the tip of the iceberg’. What is not measured is not taxed. What is not taxed is free.

This ‘unmeasurability’ is itself a mechanism of control. Global South countries cannot even quantify how much value they are losing, let alone assert rights over their data.

Three Structural Challenges, One Structural Trap

The Global South’s digital sovereignty predicament can be decomposed into three structural challenges. They reinforce each other and together constitute a structural trap.

1. Severe external dependence on digital infrastructure

From hardware to software to information security, Global South countries rely almost entirely on the US-provided technology stack. Consider Brazil. Its ICT market is $141.7 billion, 6.5 per cent of GDP (per Brasscom, Brazil’s ICT industry association), yet only 24.8 per cent of its software is domestically produced, per the BRICS Digital Sovereignty Index Report (citing ABES 2024). The cloud computing market is divided among Amazon, Microsoft, and Huawei. When data is stored on foreign companies’ servers under foreign legal jurisdiction, ‘sovereignty’ over that data amounts to a paper claim. South Africa’s situation is even more alarming. Scoring low on digital sovereignty assessments, South Africa is not pivoting toward autonomous construction; its EEIP framework, presented as a general policy for multinational ICT firms, would also address one of the principal regulatory obstacles to Starlink’s entry into the South African market.

2. Digital governance without sovereignty

Many Global South countries have enacted digital governance legislation, yet these measures have done little to alter the underlying relations of technological dependence. Brazil passed its General Data Protection Law (LGPD) in 2020; India enacted its Digital Personal Data Protection Act in 2023. But the gap between legal text and practical effect is enormous. Brazil’s detailed rules on international transfers of personal data only arrived in August 2024, with the ANPD’s Resolution CD/ANPD No. 19/2024 — years after the rest of the law took effect. India’s data protection law allows data to flow freely to any country except those on a government ‘blacklist’. Given US tech companies’ total penetration of India’s digital economy, this is an open door.

A 2020 World Economic Forum white paper went so far as to argue that governments only need ‘remote access’ to data held by companies; where the data is stored does not matter. The substance of this proposal is to maintain the status quo, ensuring Global South countries continue to hand all their data to US tech giants. Passivity in governance rules stems from asymmetry of power. When your infrastructure depends on others, your authority to make rules is limited.

3. Systematic erosion of domestic digital capabilities

This may be the most fundamental challenge. Brazil once pursued an ambitious strategy to build a domestic computing industry. Its 1984 Informatics Law reserved much of the domestic market for Brazilian firms, covering computer hardware, software, databases, and other digital products. By the late 1980s, this strategy had helped create a sizeable domestic computer sector. But under the Collor government in the early 1990s, trade liberalisation and the dismantling of market-reserve policies exposed local firms to foreign competition before they had reached technological maturity. Brazil was thus integrated into the global digital economy increasingly as a market for imported technologies rather than as a producer of them.

India followed a different path but reached a similar outcome. Semiconductor Complex Limited, approved in 1976 and producing chips by 1984, represented an early attempt to build indigenous semiconductor capacity. A major fire in 1989 destroyed much of the Mohali facility and set back the project, but the deeper problem was the absence of sustained state investment and industrial strategy after that rupture. As Taiwan, South Korea, and later China invested heavily in semiconductor fabrication, India’s economic reforms increasingly prioritised software and IT services over manufacturing. The consequences remain visible today: while China’s leading foundries are producing chips at 3-nanometre and below, India’s domestic fabrication capability remains concentrated in legacy process nodes, while advanced chips continue to be manufactured abroad. India became a global centre for software labour while remaining dependent on foreign firms for advanced semiconductor manufacturing.

In both cases, integration into global value chains occurred through subordinate positions: Brazil as a market for foreign digital products, India as a supplier of software services without control over the hardware base. The result was not simply technological backwardness, but the erosion of complete national digital ecosystems.

Industrial hollowing-out leads to brain drain, brain drain leads to declining policy judgment, declining judgment allows Western consulting firms to easily dominate the policy agenda. But what is most worrying is the shift in industrial elites’ own thinking. Nandan Nilekani, Chairperson of Infosys (one of India’s largest IT services firms), stated publicly at Meta’s ‘Build with AI’ summit in Bengaluru in 2024: ‘Our goal should not be to build one more LLM [large language model]. Let the big boys in Silicon Valley do it, spending billions of dollars. We will use it…’ The CEO of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT services company, said something similar. When the leaders of a country’s largest IT companies consider fundamental R&D to be someone else’s business, digital sovereignty is out of the question.

The three challenges reinforce each other. Infrastructure dependence weakens the material basis for autonomous governance. Passive acceptance of governance rules compresses the space for industrial policy. Digital capability gaps fundamentally undermine the capacity to recognise and address the first two problems. Together they constitute a structural trap.

You Cannot Change What You Cannot Measure

Digital sovereignty varies enormously among Global South countries, and a blanket ‘South versus North’ narrative cannot capture this variation. To formulate effective policy, a measurement tool is needed, one that can systematically diagnose each country’s digital sovereignty condition.

The Digital Sovereignty Index (DSI) is such a tool. Developed in 2025 by Xiong Jie — senior researcher at Tricontinental and Secretary-General of the Global South Academic Forum — the DSI decomposes digital sovereignty into four dimensions and sixteen specific indicators, each evaluated on a five-level maturity scale.

Data ownership autonomy is the concentrated expression of digital sovereignty. Without ownership of data, nothing else is possible. This dimension includes four indicators: data ownership legislation (whether the state has established a clear legal framework for data property rights), domestic data storage requirements (whether critical data must be stored within national borders), cross-border data flow protection (whether adequate safeguards exist when data leaves the country), and data value public benefit inclusion (whether value generated by user data flows to the public rather than being extracted as private profit by foreign platforms).

But data ownership cannot be realised in a vacuum. It requires the support of digital infrastructure autonomy. This dimension examines the degree of independence across four layers: basic hardware (chips, servers, storage devices), basic software (operating systems, databases, middleware, cloud platforms), application software, and information security.

Digital space governance autonomy ensures that a country can shape, not merely accept, the rules of digital space. Those rules are currently written through a set of bodies where the US holds structural influence: the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) over domain names and internet addressing, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) over core protocols, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) over technical standards, and the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) over intellectual property — the same framework Prashad names as the ‘New International Property Order’. This dimension measures a country’s capacity to legislate domestically and to contest those international arenas rather than inherit their outcomes.

All three dimensions above depend on digital capability autonomy. This dimension assesses cutting-edge technology R&D, university STEM talent cultivation, industrial engineering capacity, and the degree of coordination between digital technology and national development strategy.

A clear logical relationship exists among the four dimensions. Data ownership autonomy is the concentrated manifestation of digital sovereignty, but its realisation requires infrastructure autonomy as a material foundation and governance autonomy as an institutional guarantee. All three depend on digital capability autonomy as the fundamental support. The structure of the DSI framework itself reveals the operating mechanism of the structural trap: if digital capability is insufficient, infrastructure and governance cannot be autonomous; if infrastructure is not autonomous, data ownership can only be a paper claim.

Each indicator uses a five-level maturity scale: Level 1 ‘Initial’ (the issue of autonomy in this area has not been recognised); Level 2 ‘Aware’ (the importance has been recognised, initial actions are being taken); Level 3 ‘Developing’ (active progress is underway, but significant dependence remains); Level 4 ‘Competent’ (strong international competitiveness); Level 5 ‘Independent’ (largely autonomous, with little constraint from other countries).

In March 2026, the International Communication Research Institute at East China Normal University, the Global South Academic Forum, and the Institute for Digital Economy & Artificial Systems (IDEAS) officially released the BRICS Digital Sovereignty Index Report at the Zhongguancun Forum. The findings are striking: China leads across all four DSI dimensions; Russia and India show strength in specific areas. But most of the newly admitted BRICS member countries — drawn from the broader Global South — remain at the earliest stages on infrastructure and core technologies. The structural trap described above is not an abstraction. It is what the numbers show.

The Same Label, Different Realities

The BRICS Digital Sovereignty Index Report’s assessment results reveal a critical fact: beneath the uniform label of ‘Global South’, countries’ digital sovereignty conditions differ dramatically.

China (DSI average 4.25) is the only country besides the United States with relatively complete digital sovereignty. Most indicators reach ‘Competent’ or ‘Independent’ levels. China’s relative weakness lies in international digital space rule-making, though its influence in international standards organisations has been growing steadily.

Russia (3.25) presents a distinctive case. Western geopolitical pressure and sanctions have pushed Russia to pursue digital sovereignty more aggressively. Russia scores highly on application software (5/Independent), basic software (4/Competent), information security (4), and talent cultivation (4). But it faces a severe bottleneck: chips. Basic hardware autonomy scores only 3 (Developing), with heavy reliance on imports. In 2021, Russia held just 1,973 international patents, 0.35 per cent of the global total. This figure dropped sharply in 2022–23 under Western restrictions.

India (2.94) is a classic case of one strong leg. The digital capability dimension is its bright spot: 2.55 million STEM graduates in 2020, second globally behind China, with a massive IT services ecosystem. But India is severely lopsided: focused on the application layer, doing almost no fundamental R&D. Core hardware and basic software depend heavily on US supply. Data protection legislation was only recently enacted and remains untested. Government investment is limited; brain drain is severe.

Brazil (2.13) appears fragile across all dimensions. After abandoning its domestic ICT industry, both the industrial base and talent pool are thin. Building independent digital infrastructure in the short term would be extremely difficult. The DSI report states bluntly: Brazil’s digital sovereignty remains fragile, highly dependent on Western companies.

South Africa (1.94) has relatively complete data protection legislation and a clear digital strategy on paper, but the gap between paper and reality is vast: weak enforcement, deep dependence on foreign core infrastructure, and domestic R&D constrained by limited resources and brain drain. Policy intent and legal frameworks fall far short of achieving digital sovereignty. Rather than pivoting toward autonomous construction, South Africa’s policy framework would ease Starlink’s entry into its market — suggesting that the political will to pursue digital sovereignty is itself weak.

Placed side by side, several judgments emerge. China is the exception; the rule is that most Global South countries’ digital sovereignty falls far below what outsiders might imagine. Patent data is especially stark: the US holds 21.11 per cent of global patents, China 39.84 per cent, Russia 0.35 per cent, Brazil 0.04 per cent, South Africa 0.01 per cent. The STEM graduate gap is equally telling: China 3.57 million, India 2.55 million, US 820,000, Russia 520,000, Brazil 238,000. The DSI assessment quantifies a reality that has long been treated with vagueness, forcing into view what the dominant powers have preferred to leave unmeasured: the full depth of the Global South’s digital dispossession.

The Window Is Closing

The DSI assessment does more than diagnose the present; it points toward a grim prospect. For most Global South countries, the historical window for independently building a complete ICT industry is narrowing. The capital threshold for the ICT industry is extreme. China and the United States each invest hundreds of billions of dollars annually in AI R&D. India’s national AI programme (IndiaAI) has a budget of $1.25 billion. The gap is two orders of magnitude.

But a narrowing window does not mean no options exist. Sinha notes that China’s development strategy centres on production, not rent extraction. Through long planning horizons, state coordination, mass technical education, and disciplined capital allocation, China has systematically built complete industrial ecosystems across multiple advanced sectors simultaneously. The socialist state has prevented domestic capital from consolidating into monopoly forms capable of extracting sustained super-profits. Firms are compelled to compete on cost, quality, and process innovation rather than relying on intellectual property rents. As a result, China has repeatedly transformed technologies that the imperial core treated as rent-generating monopolies into competitive, low-cost commodities.

This means Global South countries face a choice between two different logics. The US system operates on technological monopoly and rent extraction, using intellectual property regimes, trade agreements, and ‘multi-stakeholder’ governance frameworks to lock the Global South into permanent payment and permanent dependence. The alternative — demonstrated by China’s own development path — is production diffusion and technological democratisation: compressing monopoly rents into competitive costs, transferring capabilities rather than licensing access to them, building industrial ecosystems through state coordination rather than market extraction. South-South cooperation organised around this logic is not another form of dependency; it is the only credible path through a closing window.

The value of the DSI lies in enabling Global South countries to see their own full picture: which dimensions have foundations, which are weak points, where cooperation space exists, which links must remain under autonomous control. Measurement is the precondition for action. With diagnosis comes the possibility of strategy.

In the past, producing a podcast meant choosing a topic, writing a script, inviting guests, recording audio, and spending hours on post-production editing.

For independent creators this was extremely time-consuming. For small teams with limited capacity — no dedicated person to record and produce episodes — podcasting often fell off the agenda altogether. As a result, many valuable ideas were never turned into podcast episodes.

AI changes that.

What Is an AI Podcast?

Simply reading an article aloud is nothing more than text-to-speech.

An AI podcast goes much further. You feed in source material — PDFs, webpages, interview transcripts, and other documents — and the AI first understands the content, identifies the key ideas, reorganises them into a natural conversational script, and finally converts that script into an engaging audio programme.

The most valuable part of the process is therefore not the synthesised voice itself, but the content organisation that happens beforehand. A well-made AI podcast sounds like two people discussing ideas they have already digested and understood, rather than a machine reading directly from a document.

Why Create AI Podcasts?

Research papers, technical blogs, course notes, and industry reports often stay locked in text, out of reach during a commute, a workout, or any other moment suited to audio. When the material piles up, reading all of it is hard to keep up with. Turning it into podcasts lowers the barrier to consuming information — you can listen instead of read.

AI podcasts also make content reuse much easier. A single document or research report can become notes, a blog article, and eventually a podcast, without rewriting everything from scratch each time.

And they dramatically reduce production costs, handling most of the repetitive work so you spend far less time recording, re-recording, and editing audio.

None of this is meant to replace traditional podcasts — it simply puts podcasting within reach when producing one the traditional way isn’t an option.

AI Podcast Platforms

Today there are already several mature AI podcast solutions available. For most use cases, third-party tools with well-designed workflows can already produce podcast episodes quickly and consistently.

NotebookLM

The best known and most capable of these is NotebookLM.

Its Audio Overview feature can automatically generate a podcast-style discussion from PDFs, webpages, video transcripts, and other uploaded materials.

You can access this feature through the NotebookLM web application.

Open the NotebookLM website at <https://notebooklm.google.com/> and click Create new notebook.

Paste a webpage URL into the dialogue box at the top, or upload downloaded documents into the NotebookLM workspace. In this example, we use Chapter 1 (pages 27–59) of Karl Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, published in 1867.

After the file is uploaded, NotebookLM automatically generates a summary, providing a quick overview of the document before you begin exploring it.

Hover over the Audio Overview button to see that NotebookLM can automatically transform the uploaded material into a podcast using AI.

Depending on the size of the source material, generation may take several minutes. For this 33 page excerpt, the process takes approximately 10 minutes.

Once generation is complete, the audio file appears in the lower-right corner. Click the play button to listen to the podcast.

NotebookLM also offers an Interactive Mode, making the listening experience much more engaging. Instead of passively listening, you can interrupt the AI hosts and ask questions at any point during the discussion.

Click Join to enter the conversation. The AI hosts pause the discussion, answer your question, and then seamlessly continue where they left off.

The podcast generated by NotebookLM carries a natural rhythm and clear delivery, weaving a paper’s core ideas into a fluid two-person dialogue. Compared to reading a lengthy research paper from start to finish, this format is far better suited to quickly absorbing the key takeaways during spare moments.

You can listen to the full podcast created by NotebookLM in the Bandung Circuits repository.

Open Source AI Podcast Generators

Compared to mature AI podcast platforms like NotebookLM, the greatest advantage of open-source projects lies in their higher degree of freedom and stronger controllability. Users can freely choose from different large language models according to their own needs, striking a better balance among generation quality, response speed, and cost.

At the same time, most open-source projects support local deployment, so data does not need to be uploaded to third-party platforms, making them more suitable for scenarios that require privacy, security, or corporate data compliance. In addition, such projects usually support custom podcast personas, automation workflows through APIs, and allow developers to extend features or modify source code based on actual needs, unrestricted by commercial platforms.

If you want to delve deeper into AI podcasts, carry out secondary development, or build your own AI podcasting system, open-source solutions undoubtedly offer greater playability and room for expansion.

ai-podcast-creation Skill

The simplest open-source option is the ai-podcast-creation skill. Unlike NotebookLM, which produces a finished audio podcast, it generates the podcast script only. You can then bring that script to life however you prefer — record it yourselves, or convert it to audio with a text-to-speech tool. This suits a team whose hosts still want to voice the episode but would rather save the time writing the script.

Installing the skill is straightforward. Open Agent and enter the following command:

Please help me install this skill:
npx skills add inference-sh/skills@ai-podcast-creation

After installation finishes, restart VS Code to load the skill into your session. You can then generate a podcast script using a prompt such as:

/ai-podcast-creation Please generate a podcast for @project/AI-podcast/Capital-Volume-I-pages-27-59.pdf

The primary purpose of this skill is to generate podcast scripts, with the final output presented as a natural conversation between multiple hosts.

The full script is available in the Bandung Circuits repository.

Open Notebook

Open Notebook has a very clear positioning: it aims to become the open-source alternative to NotebookLM.

Officially, it is defined as an AI platform for research, learning, and knowledge management, not merely a podcast generation tool. As a result, besides supporting AI podcast generation, it also offers common NotebookLM features such as AI Q&A, AI notes, and AI summarisation.

More importantly, Open Notebook is also very friendly to ordinary users. The project provides a complete Web UI, so even without any programming background, you can generate AI podcasts through a visual interface, just like using ordinary desktop software.

Before installing it, there is one prerequisite worth understanding: because Open Notebook runs on your own computer but still relies on external AI models, you will need an API key.

What Is an API Key?

If you plan to try out local AI projects, an API key is essentially unavoidable. Although many AI applications run locally, the core capabilities that actually consume computing resources and determine output quality usually still come from third-party AI services.

Take AI podcasting as an example: the entire generation pipeline typically involves multiple steps such as article comprehension, content summarisation, script generation, and speech synthesis. If you rely entirely on local models to complete these tasks, not only will you need a fairly high hardware configuration, but the generation speed and final quality will often fall short compared to cloud-based models, making the overall cost-effectiveness quite low.

Therefore, most projects will call model services such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic to handle these core tasks, and an API key is essentially the key to accessing these services. Only after configuring an API key in your local project can you successfully invoke the corresponding models. Of course, model providers will charge API fees based on actual usage.

Installing and Configuring Open Notebook

It is recommended to use an AI agent to automatically complete the installation and configuration of Open Notebook. After opening VS Code, simply enter the prompt below.

Set up Open Notebook on this computer.

If Git is installed, clone https://github.com/lfnovo/open-notebook.git. Otherwise, download https://github.com/lfnovo/open-notebook/archive/refs/tags/v1.10.0.zip and extract it.
Follow the instructions in README.md to install dependencies and start the application.

After the installation completes, the Web UI will usually open automatically. If it does not start automatically, you can visit http://localhost:8502 in your browser.

Click the Models button in the lower left corner to enter the model configuration page.

Open Notebook supports multiple model service providers. Below we will use OpenAI as an example for configuration.

First, go to the OpenAI platform to create an API Key.

https://platform.openai.com/api-keys

Note that the OpenAI API and ChatGPT Plus subscription are not interchangeable; the API service requires a preloaded balance before it can be used normally.

https://platform.openai.com/settings/organization/billing/overview

Click Create new secret key to create a new API Key.

Fill in the API Key name, then click Create secret key.

The API Key will be shown only once, so it is recommended to copy and save it immediately. Its format is usually sk-xxxxx.

Then return to Open Notebook and click Add Configuration.

Fill in the Configuration Name and paste the API Key you just saved to complete the setup.

You can click Test to check whether the API can be called successfully. If the test fails, first verify that your API account balance is sufficient.

After confirming the configuration is successful, click Models to start adding models.

Open Notebook requires you to configure four types of models:

• Language (Large Language Model): Responsible for text tasks such as conversation, summarisation, reasoning, and content generation.
• Embedding (Text Embedding Model): Responsible for converting text into vector embeddings, used for RAG, semantic search, similarity computation, and related functions.
• TTS (Text-to-Speech): Responsible for converting text into speech.
• STT (Speech-to-Text): Responsible for speech recognition and transcription.

Below that, all models currently supported by OpenAI will be displayed.

If you are unfamiliar with the differences between these models, you can hand the model list over to AI and let it help recommend the most suitable configuration. (Replace [Model List] below with the actual model list.)

I need to select the most appropriate model for each of the following four task categories from the model list below, and I would like you to explain your recommendations.

The task categories are:

**Language (LLM):** General-purpose text generation, including conversational AI, question answering, reasoning, summarization, and content generation.

**Embedding:** Converting text into vector embeddings for semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), similarity search, clustering, and related applications.

**TTS (Text-to-Speech):** Converting text into natural-sounding speech.

**STT (Speech-to-Text):** Transcribing spoken audio into text.

For each task category, please:

- Recommend the best-suited model.
- Briefly explain why it is recommended, considering factors such as capability, performance, latency, and cost.
- Clearly indicate if no suitable model exists for a particular category.
- If any listed model is deprecated or outdated (for example, `text-embedding-ada-002`), recommend the most appropriate modern replacement instead.

Using the following model list:
[Model List]

In this article, we will use the model combination recommended by GPT to generate a podcast:

• Language: gpt-5.5
• Embedding: text-embedding-3-large
• TTS: gpt-audio
• STT: gpt-4o-transcribe

For example, set Model Type to Language, choose gpt-5.5, then click Add to add the model.

After adding, you can select gpt-5.5 from the Chat Model dropdown above.

Follow the same method to add all the models required by Open Notebook one by one.

Then go to Podcasts → Profiles to configure the corresponding models for your podcast presets.

Here we take tech_discussion as an example; click Edit.

For all configuration items marked with *, select the models you have already added, such as gpt-5.5.

After completing the configuration, check whether the right side still shows Setup required. If this reminder disappears, it means the current template has been fully configured.

Continue configuring the remaining templates until all Setup required indicators have disappeared; then you can officially start generating podcasts.

Creating a Notebook and Importing Articles

First, click New → Notebook to create a new notebook.

Enter the notebook name and click Create New Notebook.

After creation, you will see the new notebook on the Notebooks page on the left.

Enter the notebook and click Add Source to import the article you want to convert into a podcast.

Open Notebook supports three import methods: entering a web page URL, uploading a local file, and pasting text directly. This article demonstrates the second method by uploading a local file.

After the system finishes parsing, the imported article will appear in the Sources section, indicating that the material has been successfully indexed.

Generating an AI Podcast

After importing the materials, click New → Podcast again to create a new podcast project.

The Episode Settings on the right allows you to set the podcast style. Open Notebook provides three default presets:

• business_analysis: A business analysis, financial interpretation, and case study style, generally more formal.
• solo_expert: A solo expert presentation, similar to a lecture or a teacher’s lesson.
• tech_discussion: A two-host discussion on technology, papers, AI, programming, and similar topics, closer to NotebookLM’s podcast style.

In addition to the presets, you can add extra instructions in Additional instructions, such as requesting more humour, adjusting speech rate, controlling the episode length, or specifying the style of expression.

After confirming the settings, click Generate, and Open Notebook will start generating the podcast.

Checking Generation Progress

After the generation task is submitted, click the Podcasts page on the left to view the current task list.

Depending on the article length and model response speed, the entire generation process usually takes a few minutes. When the task is completed, the corresponding podcast will appear in the list.

After the podcast conversion is complete, click the play button at the bottom of the page to listen to the AI podcast generated by Open Notebook online.

If you are not satisfied with the podcast content, host style, or delivery, you can return to Episode Settings, adjust the preset template or modify the Additional instructions, and then regenerate.

Since Open Notebook supports freely choosing large language models and speech models, swapping different model combinations can also yield vastly different podcast results. For users who want to build a personalised AI podcast workflow, this high degree of configurability is one of the greatest advantages of the open-source approach.

You can listen to the full podcast created by Open Notebook in the Bandung Circuits repository.

Conclusion

AI has fundamentally changed the podcast production workflow. Instead of spending most of your time on scripting, recording, and editing, you can now begin with existing documents, allow AI to understand and reorganise the material, generate a conversational script, and finally produce a polished audio programme.

For most creators, the greatest value is not the synthesised voice itself, but AI’s ability to transform complex written material into engaging conversations. Whether you are working with research papers, technical documentation, course materials, or industry reports, AI makes it possible to repurpose knowledge into an accessible audio format with far less effort than traditional podcast production.

Assessment prepared in accordance with the methodological specifications of the Digital Sovereignty Index (DSI v2.0), under the academic cooperation framework of the Global South Academic Forum.

Chapter 1 — Executive Summary

Argentina exhibits a paradoxical pattern of digital sovereignty: a regulatory scaffolding and a software-engineering capability that are comparatively sophisticated for the region coexist with a deep structural dependence on infrastructure, institutional enforcement capacity and capability autonomy — all of it cross-cut by a trajectory of active deregulation that operates as a ceiling factor during the assessment period (2024–2026, Milei administration). The country knows how to legislate on data, and to export software services, but it does not capture the economic value of its data, it does not enforce with deterrent effect, and, in the cross-border flow, it has ceded sovereignty through the adequacy commitment with the United States. The result is a mid-to-low-grade digital sovereignty, without a single indicator reaching the competence level (Level 4), and with two indicators collapsed to the initial level (Level 1).

On the DSI framework’s 1–5 scale, Argentina obtains a sovereignty score of 2.00 / 5.0 (a total of 32 out of 80). The score is computed as the arithmetic mean of the sixteen indicator ratings; no indicator exceeds Level 3. The distribution by dimension reveals that the weakness is concentrated in data ownership.

Table 1.1. Indicator ratings (UNGS_2026 corpus).

Table 1.2. Averages by dimension.

Three principal strengths. First, a mature and long-standing data-protection framework: Law No. 25326 (Personal Data Protection Act), enacted in 2000, has been in continuous force, operated by a functional enforcement authority, and Argentina has retained the European Union’s adequacy status since 2003 ¹ — indicator 1.1 is the only one in the entire matrix that reaches Level 3 on its own legislative merit. Second, a software industry of international scale: revenue of USD 22,221 million and more than 158,000 registered jobs in 2024, with a domestic fintech subsector that commands 88% of digital banking ² — indicator 4.3 is the second and last Level 3. Third, an installed base of policy recognition and bounded technical capacity in Dimension 2: a state GNU/Linux distribution, a national public cloud on open-source code, and citizen platforms authored by the State ³.

Three principal weaknesses. First, the collapse of cross-border flows: the commitment to recognise the United States as an adequate jurisdiction, formalised in November 2025 and February 2026, brings indicator 1.3 down to Level 1 through the mechanism of Principle #7 ⁴. Second, the total absence of data value capture: Argentina gives its public data away for transparency but possesses no fiscal instrument, no B2G mandate, and no recognition of data as an economic asset, which places indicator 1.4 at Level 1 ⁵. Third, a cross-cutting structural dependence in Dimensions 2 and 4: the country does not manufacture hardware, does not control its system-software stack, and exports its most capable talent abroad ⁶.

The cross-cutting finding that orders the entire assessment is the Milei administration’s deregulation trajectory as a ceiling factor. This is not a context that explains low ratings, but an active policy that subtracts capacity: 543 measures that modify or eliminate 2,519 norms across 15,144 articles ⁷, a cumulative real cut of 50.6% in the science-and-technology budget function ⁸, and the cession of sovereignty over data flows. Where other countries build, Argentina dismantles — and the DSI framework, through its trajectory clause and its Principle #7, registers that direction as a ceiling, not as a mitigating circumstance.

Chapter 2 — Methodological Framework

2.1 The DSI 4×4 framework

The Digital Sovereignty Index evaluates the degree to which a country has attained independence in the digital domain: the extent to which its data, its infrastructure, its governance and its capabilities are determined by the country itself and not by foreign actors, jurisdictions, or platforms. The operational definition, set out in the DSI methodological specifications, rests on the word ‘independence’: the index does not measure whether a country aspires to be sovereign, but whether, in fact, it is. The framework organises the assessment into a matrix of four dimensions by four indicators — sixteen indicators in total — defined in the Digital Sovereignty Index specifications coordinated by Global South Insights through the DSI Assessment Team, under the Global South Academic Forum. This Argentina assessment was prepared by UNGS as an associate university, applying those methodological specifications to the national situation: evidence collection from Argentine sources, the local implementation of the assessment pipeline, and the drafting of the analysis in academic Spanish constitute UNGS’s contribution to the global index compiled by GSI.

The four dimensions are: Dimension 1 — Independence in data ownership (1.1 Data-ownership legislation; 1.2 Domestic storage; 1.3 Protection of cross-border flows; 1.4 Data value for public benefit); Dimension 2 — Digital infrastructure independence (2.1 Basic hardware; 2.2 System software; 2.3 Application software; 2.4 Information security); Dimension 3 — Digital governance independence (3.1 Legislative capacity; 3.2 Enforcement capacity; 3.3 Leadership in international technical rules; 3.4 Leadership in international conduct rules); and Dimension 4 — Digital capacity independence (4.1 Frontier research; 4.2 University talent; 4.3 Industrial engineering; 4.4 National strategic alignment).

2.2 The 1–5 scale

Each indicator is rated on a scale of five progressive levels of independence: 1 Initial (the issue has not been addressed; potentially complete dependence), 2 Aware (the importance of independence is recognised and discussions or actions have been initiated, typically at the planning stage), 3 Developing (work is actively underway towards independence, with policies implemented but still with strong external dependence), 4 Competent (international competitiveness and full potential autonomy) and 5 Independent (basic self-sufficiency, with minimal external constraints). The scale is applied per indicator and prohibits decimal ratings: each level must be tied to a defensible path through a four-node decision tree (existence of critical evidence → effective implementation → meaningful enforcement → international competitiveness vs. self-sufficiency).

2.3 Principles, pitfalls, and the decision tree

Rating is governed by seven immutable principles that prevail over the decision tree when they come into tension with it: Facts over Law (effective implementation prevails over legal text), Effectiveness Supreme (laws that cannot be enforced receive lower ratings), Pragmatism (real status, not declared goals), Dependency Penalty (dependence on foreign platforms caps the ceiling), Corporate-Capture Degradation (legislative blocking by Big Tech lowers the rating), Context Explains but Does Not Excuse (geopolitical pressure explains but does not modify consequences), and the Digital Hegemony Reality Check — Principle #7 (designating the United States as an ‘adequate jurisdiction’ significantly lowers ratings). To the principles are added eight pitfalls, or rating traps — among them confusing activity with outcomes, underestimating weaknesses, and geographic presence without control — that must be cleared before finalising a rating, together with a horizontal-consistency check against the anchors of China, Russia, and Brazil.

2.4 The UNGS 2026 corpus

The assessment is grounded in the UNGS_2026 corpus, built by the UNGS agent pipeline. The collector gathered 373 raw pieces of evidence across the three search rounds; the verifier removed 91 for verification failures (invalid URL, lack of content match, or suspected hallucination); the integrator consolidated the remainder by removing 41 duplicates through exact URL match, leaving 241 integrated pieces of evidence (AR-EV-001 to AR-EV-241) plus 31 documented gaps. The composition by type covers regulation, case studies, quantitative data, reports, analysis, policy, and gaps; confidence is distributed across 125 high-confidence items, 80 medium, and 36 low. The share of Tier-1 sources (official domains *.gob.ar, InfoLEG, Boletín Oficial (Official Gazette)) reaches 48.5%, above the 40% minimum but below the 60% target. Each [AR-EV-NNN] citation in this report is traceable to a verified URL in evidence_base_UNGS_2026.json.

2.5 The Principle #7 override mechanism

One methodological element deserves anticipating because it proves decisive for indicator 1.3. Principle #7 does not function as a gradual downward adjustment but as a categorical-collapse mechanism: the active designation of the United States as an adequate jurisdiction for personal-data transfers relocates indicator 1.3’s rating to Level 1, overriding the result that the decision tree would have yielded on its own merits. The reasoning is that ceding adequacy to a jurisdiction without comprehensive federal privacy legislation and with statutory extraterritorial-access regimes (CLOUD Act) hollows out the protective purpose of the indicator, regardless of how sophisticated the rest of the framework may be.

2.6 Limitations

The assessment acknowledges four limitations. First, 31 candidate items were discarded as URL_BLOCKED owing to anti-bot barriers, TLS, or 403 responses (ITU documentary databases, 3GPP partner listings, W3C sources); human re-retrieval is recommended for future runs, since these are transport limits, not veracity limits. Second, indicators 3.3 and 3.4 fell below the sufficiency threshold of 15 pieces of evidence (11 and 12 respectively) after the verifier’s removals, which limits their confidence to Low. Third, several de facto quantitative metrics rest on single Tier-3 sources or on inference (hyperscaler market shares, the brain-drain rate specific to computer science), which reduces confidence without invalidating the direction of the rating. Fourth, two items suspected of hallucination were removed by the verifier and do not appear in the library; this report does not reproduce their claims, in keeping with the anti-hallucination discipline that governs the pipeline.

Chapter 3 — Indicator-by-Indicator Analysis

Dimension 1 — Independence in Data Ownership

Dimension 1 asks who owns, controls, and benefits from the data generated by Argentine residents, firms and institutions. It is the dimension where Argentina displays its sharpest internal contrast: it has the oldest and most recognised data-protection legislative framework in Latin America — the first regional adequacy status before the European Union, in 2003 ⁹ — but that historical asset coexists with a flow protection collapsed by US adequacy and with a categorical absence of value-capture mechanisms. The relevant institutional landscape includes the AAIP (Agency for Access to Public Information) as the enforcement authority and the Law No. 25326 regime as the central piece. The dimension finding is unequivocal: with an average of 1.75, data ownership is Argentina’s weakest dimension, dragged down by the simultaneous collapse of two of its four indicators to Level 1.

3.1.1 Indicator 1.1 — Data ownership legislation

Rating: 3 — Developing. Confidence: High.

Argentina has a general data-protection statute in continuous force since the year 2000 — Law No. 25326 ¹⁰ — operationalised by Decree 1558/2001, verified as in force, and amended on thirty-two occasions ¹¹, and administered by the AAIP, an autonomous statutory body with a permanent National Directorate for the Protection of Personal Data ¹². The authority is not nominal: it issues resolutions of operational substance — security measures, model contractual clauses for transfers, and the tiering of sanctions ¹³ — and exhibits a multi-year activity trace (491 case files and 52 sanctions in 2022) ¹⁴. The framework retains current external recognition: the European Union’s adequacy status was reaffirmed in January 2024 ¹⁵ and Convention 108+ was ratified by Law No. 27699 in 2022 ¹⁶. This conjunction of an operative statute, a functional regulator, and international recognition defines the Level 3 profile.

What prevents an ascent to Level 4 is the conjunction of two independent failures. First: the modernised text is not in force. The reform bill (Message 87/2023), which incorporated breach notification, impact assessments, portability, and the data-protection officer, lost parliamentary status at the end of 2024 after more than thirty months without consideration ¹⁷; the post-GDPR-era provisions remain absent from the text in force ¹⁸. By Principle #1 (Facts over Law), a bill cannot anchor a higher rating. Second: enforcement is not deterrent. The fine cap was never updated by law and stands at around USD 70–100; AAIP Resolution 126/2024 graduated infractions but could not raise the legal ceiling, because an administrative resolution does not amend a law ¹⁹; the total of 2022 fines was some USD 30,621 ²⁰ and the mass leaks of 2024–2025 (Renaper, ARCA, ANSES) were not sanctioned ²¹. By Principle #2 (Effectiveness Supreme), enforcement without deterrent magnitude is capped at Level 3. It does not descend to Level 2 because the statute is in force — it is not a draft — the regulator operates and there is an enforcement trace: Argentina comfortably clears the band of ‘preliminary discussions or planning’. In the comparative frame, 1.1 sits well below the Chinese anchor (Level 5) and groups with Brazil (Level 3): both regimes are transplanted from external standards and their enforcement scaling has lagged, although the Argentine weakness is specific — an obsolete text from 2000 whose modernisation stalled. An ascent to Level 4 would require the modernised text to enter into force and the fine cap to reach deterrent magnitudes on the order of 2–4% of revenue; erosion towards Level 2 would only follow the dismantling of the AAIP or the repeal of the regime in force.

3.1.2 Indicator 1.2 — Domestic data storage

Rating: 2 — Aware. Confidence: Medium.

Argentina lacks a general data-localisation mandate. The personal-data regime (Law No. 25326, art. 12) governs cross-border flows through adequacy and contractual clauses, not through territorial storage, and the AAIP’s own security resolution imposes no geographic restriction whatsoever ²². The only operative sectoral rule is the Central Bank’s prudential regime on third-party control and delegated technology (BCRA (Central Bank of the Argentine Republic) Communication A 7724, updated by A 8401) ²³, which structures the supervision of outsourced services but does not require storage in national territory. Two reform bills explicitly preserve the transfer-based model and decline to introduce a localisation mandate ²⁴. A residual sovereign capacity exists — ARSAT’s Tier III data centre and the national public cloud on open-source code ²⁵ — but it is niche, oriented to the public sector, and undergoing partial privatisation (49%) ²⁶. This configuration — a sectoral-only rule, residual domestic infrastructure, non-localising bills — corresponds precisely to Level 2.

The indicator does not reach Level 3 because that would require effectively enforced localisation in multiple substantive sectors plus a domestic cloud industry with measurable share: Argentina meets neither. The installed national capacity (~32 MW) is orders of magnitude smaller than a single hyperscale facility ²⁷, while the growth of the cloud market is captured by foreign providers — AWS’s Local Zone in Buenos Aires and the OpenAI/Sur Energy 500 MW project under the RIGI ²⁸ — a configuration that the framework rates as geographic presence under foreign jurisdiction (CLOUD Act), not as sovereignty (Pitfall #8). State policy actively incentivises foreign-controlled infrastructure without a localisation counterpart ²⁹. It does not descend to Level 1 because there coexist a sectoral mandate in force, an operative state alternative and documented legislative discussion — the presence of the three elements the criterion requires to clear the initial floor. Argentina groups with Brazil (Level 2): both lack a general mandate and see their markets dominated by hyperscalers, while Russia (Level 4, Law 242-FZ with documented enforcement) marks exactly the regime that the Argentine bills decline to adopt. An ascent to Level 3 would require a sectoral localisation mandate effectively audited in finance and health or government, together with a domestic cloud industry of non-residual share.

3.1.3 Indicator 1.3 — Protection of cross-border flows

Rating: 1 — Initial. Confidence: High.

On paper, Argentina possesses a comprehensive and operationally exercised cross-border transfer regime: article 12 of Law No. 25326 prohibits transfers to jurisdictions without adequate protection ³⁰, Decree 1558/2001 empowers the regulator to assess adequacy ³¹, Disposition 60-E/2016 publishes model contractual clauses ³², AAIP Resolution 34/2019 maintains a granular adequacy list from which the United States was explicitly absent ³³, and the country retains European adequacy status since 2003, revalidated in January 2024 ³⁴. This conjunction of an operative statute, a functional regulator and international recognition defines the Level 3 profile.

However, the Joint Statement of 13 November 2025 and the USTR Fact Sheet ³⁶, formalised by the signing of the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade and Investment on 5 February 2026 ³⁷, commit Argentina to recognising the United States as an adequate jurisdiction for personal-data transfers. By Principle #7 (Digital Hegemony Reality Check) and the indicator’s ‘collapse through extreme permissiveness’ mechanism, an active US adequacy designation caps the rating at Level 1, overriding the narrowing of the decision tree. Sophistication on paper does not anchor the rating; the operational reality of structural deference to a hegemonic jurisdiction does (Principle #1). This is a Level 1 by way of collapse, not by regulatory void: the regime exists and is exercised, but the adequacy designation to the dominant jurisdiction of data platforms removes the only protective barrier — historically, US Big Tech operated via contractual clauses, not by adequacy ³⁸. In the comparative frame, the decisive separator with respect to China (≈5) and Russia (≈4) is exactly the variable that Principle #7 isolates: neither anchor grants adequacy to the United States, while Argentina now does. The result coincides with the BRICS 2025 baseline (also Level 1) by identical collapse reasoning. The only possible upward move would be the non-entry-into-force or the reversal of the US adequacy commitment; without it, no level above 1 is attainable.

3.1.4 Indicator 1.4 — Data value for public benefit

Rating: 1 — Initial. Confidence: High.

Argentina sustains a mature and long-standing open-data programme — Decree 117/2016, Law No. 27275 on access to information, and the datos.gob.ar portal with 1,235 datasets from 42 agencies ³⁹ — together with an active civic-tech ecosystem that reuses public data ⁴⁰. But that programme operates entirely on a logic of transparency and reuse, not of economic value capture from the data. The conceptual distinction is decisive: a robust open-data programme ‘gives data away to enable innovation’, while the indicator measures ‘capturing the value of data for public benefit’. All of Argentina’s substantive positive evidence belongs to the first category.

The indicator’s critical enablers are absent and documented as gaps with Tier-1 search: there is no state recognition of data as a factor of production or economic asset ⁴¹, there is no operative B2G mandate requiring platforms to share datasets of public interest ⁴², there is no fiscal value-capture instrument — the PAIS tax was a consumption tax, excluded by criterion, and was moreover repealed in December 2024 ⁴³, and the OECD’s Pillar One and Pillar Two were not implemented ⁴⁴ — antitrust is not applied to data monopolies — the CNDC (National Commission for the Defence of Competition) maintains a study group without sanctioning power, and none of the eleven concentrated markets under investigation is a digital-native platform ⁴⁵ — and there are no institutional data trusts ⁴⁶. Decree 780/2024, moreover, restricted the scope of active transparency: a regression, not an advance ⁴⁷. By Principle #3 (Pragmatism), aspirational bills do not anchor higher levels; the categorical absence of the critical piece ends the decision tree at Level 1. The indicator does not ascend to Level 2 because there does not even exist governmental recognition of data as an asset — not merely civil-society discourse — in a strategy or bill. The sophistication of the open-data programme places Argentina at the high end of Level 1, above a country with no policy at all, but transparency is not value capture. Against China (Level 4–5: data as the fifth factor of production since 2019), Argentina exhibits a lag of several levels; even against Russia and Brazil it remains a step below, lacking the limited B2G mechanisms and the digital-services taxation that those countries possess. An ascent to Level 2 would require the BCRA’s Open Finance System to enter into force or a bill to recognise data as an economic asset.

Intra-dimensional analysis. Dimension 1 reveals the Argentine paradox in its pure state: indicator 1.1, the strongest of the entire matrix on its own merit (the only framework with 2003 European adequacy), coexists with the collapse of 1.3 to Level 1 through the 2026 US adequacy, and with the total void of 1.4. The common bottleneck is that Argentina built capacity for protection without capacity for exploitation: it legislates the data point, but neither retains it territorially, nor protects it on its way out to the hegemonic jurisdiction, nor captures its economic value. The regulatory sophistication of 1.1 does not compensate for, and in fact contrasts with, the cession of sovereignty of 1.3 and the absence of economic vision of 1.4.

Dimension 2 — Digital Infrastructure Independence

Dimension 2 evaluates whether the country can operate its digital infrastructure without dependence on, or interruption by, foreign providers, across four layers: hardware, system software, application software and security. The relevant institutional landscape includes ARSAT and the national public cloud, the Tierra del Fuego regime, INTI, and INVAP on the technical plane, and CERT.ar in security. The dimension finding is notably uniform: all four indicators sit at Level 2 (average 2.00), a pattern of ‘awareness without substantive capacity’ in which Principle #4 (Dependency Penalty) — which the framework declares dominant for this dimension — operates across the board. Argentina recognises its dependencies and possesses real traces of capacity, but in each layer the structural dependence on the foreign stack caps the rating.

3.2.1 Indicator 2.1 — Basic hardware autonomy

Rating: 2 — Aware. Confidence: Medium.

There is explicit recognition of hardware dependence in national-level instruments — the Compre Argentino (Buy Argentine) regime (Law No. 27437) and the Knowledge Economy promotion regime (Law No. 27506) ⁴⁸ — and an at-scale capacity for assembling imported components under the Tierra del Fuego regime (Law No. 19640), where close to 93% of telephones, air conditioners, and televisions sold are assembled domestically ⁴⁹. But assembly is not manufacturing: by the principle ‘assembly is not autonomy’, assembling imported boards is value-added activity, not the substitution of foreign capacity. There exists no funded foundational hardware programme reaching the hinge threshold of ~USD 1,000 million over five years oriented to chip design or wafer fabrication: the RIGI attracts foreign investment in an enclave model without a technology-transfer obligation ⁵⁰, the Knowledge Economy benefits target software and services, not manufacturing ⁵¹, and the national science-and-technology strategy (CTI Guidelines 2025–2027) explicitly omits microelectronics and semiconductors ⁵². Semiconductor capacity is design-only: the INTI provides integrated-circuit design services that are synthesised in foreign foundries, and Argentina operates no wafer plant ⁵³.

The trajectory, moreover, is downward within the band: Decree 333/2025 reduces the import tariff on mobile phones from 8% to 0% by January 2026 ⁵⁴, Decree 111/2025 dilutes the Fuegian promotion fund, and the Mirgor Group suspended around 360 workers in response ⁵⁵. The indicator does not reach Level 3 because that requires a funded foundational programme in design or fabrication, or a domestic-supplier share of 10–30% in some hardware category designed in the country: Argentina meets neither. It does not descend to Level 1 because both policy recognition and an operative assembly capacity persist. In the comparative frame, Argentina sits alongside Brazil (Level 1–2, with its failed CEITEC plant) and on a par with the Russian anchor (Level 2); Level 3 in this region requires extraordinary evidence — a sustained fabrication programme with output measured in wafers. An ascent to Level 3 would require a funded foundational programme; erosion towards Level 1 would follow the complete collapse of the Fuegian assembly base.

3.2.2 Indicator 2.2 — System software autonomy

Rating: 2 — Aware. Confidence: High.

Argentina presents the canonical Level 2 pattern: policy recognition and demonstrated engineering capacity, without a funded national programme or measurable domestic share. There is explicit recognition of software sovereignty — the ONTI Public Software initiative, ONTI Disposition 2/2019 requiring code to be shared under open licences across the entire National Public Sector, and Santa Fe’s provincial law on the preferential use of free software ⁵⁶ — and a bounded implementation footprint: a state GNU/Linux distribution (Huayra, developed at EDUCAR) ⁵⁷, a national public cloud on open-source code ⁵⁸ and an ecosystem of official repositories (argob, 43 repositories) ⁵⁹. This satisfies the existence and implementation nodes, but no piece crosses the Level 3 thresholds.

Foreign dominance is overwhelming and quantified: the domestic desktop operating system is marginal (Windows 81.64%, total Linux 2.21%) ⁶⁰, the mobile market is more than 99.97% foreign ⁶¹ and the database market is dominated by Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and IBM, with effectively zero domestic share ⁶². Decisively, ARSAT’s own state cloud runs its network operations centre on Red Hat OpenShift — control software from a US provider ⁶³ — so the control plane is not domestic: the physical location of the data centre does not equate to autonomy (Principle #7). The only domestic operating-system footprint (Huayra) was confined to the education sector and was suspended and intervened in the Milei era: the Conectar Igualdad and Educ.ar platforms were left in ‘construction mode’ and Decree 963/2024 appointed an intervenor for EDUC.AR S.E. ⁶⁴, downgrading that single case to symbolic status. Linux adoption is necessary but not sufficient, because its upstream is controlled from outside the country. It does not descend to Level 1 because a documented state distribution and a nationally scoped public-software regulation persist. Argentina is directly comparable to Brazil (Level 2) and remains a step below Russia (Level 3–4, with certified Astra Linux and sanctions-accelerated substitution). An ascent to Level 3 would require critical-infrastructure systems running on a domestic operating system with audited patching independence, or more than 5% domestic share in cloud, databases, or server operating systems.

3.2.3 Indicator 2.3 — Application software autonomy

Rating: 2 — Aware. Confidence: Medium.

Argentina presents the textbook Level 2 profile for this indicator: a capable software industry and genuine domestic dominance in several vertical categories, against complete foreign control of every horizontal category. On the vertical plane the evidence is strong and verified: Mercado Libre led national app downloads in 2024 (11.7 million) ⁶⁵, Mercado Pago surpassed 50 million monthly active users in Latin America with USD 8,600 million in revenue ⁶⁶, three domestic neobanks retain 88% of digital banking ⁶⁷ and the State deploys self-authored citizen platforms at scale — Mi Argentina, with 21 million registered users ⁶⁸. On the horizontal plane, dependence is almost total and quantified: WhatsApp with 93% penetration in messaging, Instagram with 86.7% ⁶⁹, Google with 94.01% of searches ⁷⁰, and productivity, ERP, and CRM dominated by Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and Salesforce with no domestic provider of measurable share ⁷¹.

The decisive test of the indicator is horizontal share: an ascent to Level 3 requires ≥30% domestic share in at least one major horizontal category (office software, ERP, or industrial software). The Argentine shares above 30% are all in vertical categories — e-commerce, payments, digital banking — which the criterion explicitly excludes from the horizontal denominator. Policy is one of promotion, not substitution: Law No. 27506 sustains a service-export industry (USD 2,674 million in 2024, 46.9% to the United States) ⁷² rather than the substitution of horizontal products, and a domestic champion in a horizontal-adjacent category (Auth0, authentication) was acquired by the US firm Okta, reversing the sovereignty relationship (Principle #5) ⁷³. It does not descend to Level 1 because there are measurable domestic products, policy recognition, and a substantive software industry. Argentina groups with the lower band of Brazil but below it, because Brazil has, in TOTVS, a domestic ERP provider with measurable horizontal share — exactly what Argentina lacks — and remains a level below Russia (Level 3, with 1C in ERP and MyOffice in office software). An ascent to Level 3 would require a domestic provider to reach 30% share in a horizontal category or the public-procurement preference for nationally originated software to be applied with auditing.

3.2.4 Indicator 2.4 — Information security autonomy

Rating: 2 — Aware. Confidence: Low.

Argentina possesses a comparatively rich cybersecurity institutional architecture but fails the three substantive tests that separate Level 2 from Level 3. There is a national CERT in regulation (CERT.ar, Disposition 1/2021) ⁷⁴, operative on paper — it registered 438 incidents in 2024, 15% above 2023, with 61% in the state sector ⁷⁵ — and internationally recognised through FIRST membership. The scope of that figure must be made explicit: CERT.ar’s mandate is confined to the National Public Sector, within a deliberately federated incident-response architecture. Alongside it operate a second national-level team at the Ministry of Security and a network of sub-national centres — among them the BA-CSIRT of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, the CSIRT of the Province of Buenos Aires, and that of the Province of Córdoba, several of them integrated into the OAS CSIRT Americas Network — each with its own jurisdiction and sectors. These teams do not aggregate into the national score of this indicator, which measures federal-level capacity; their existence, however, means that CERT.ar’s register must not be read as an exhaustive count of the country’s incident activity, but as the activity of the federal-level team. A layered regulatory regime governs the public sector: the PNICIC critical-infrastructure programme, minimum security requirements with a duty to notify the CERT within 48 hours (Administrative Decision 641/2021) ⁷⁶, a second National Cybersecurity Strategy and the reorganisation of Decree 941/2025 that creates the National Cybersecurity Centre, and the Federal Cyberintelligence Agency ⁷⁷. But, by Principles #1 and #2, strategies, and constitutive instruments are activity, not measured effectiveness.

The triple test fails simultaneously: the CERT’s capacity (438 total incidents — not ‘major’ — reported without standardised FIRST-type operational metrics — mean time to respond, severity classification, or a trace of advisories adopted; the count is a raw aggregate that, moreover, reflects only the National Public Sector perimeter, and does not evidence the handling of major incidents with disclosed timelines) ⁷⁸; the market test (no measurable domestic share and no documented sovereign cryptographic research) ⁷⁹; and the product test (no verifiable domestic security product in critical infrastructure) ⁸⁰. Three major breaches of the period are reverse evidence that the regime does not protect: the leak of the national driver’s-licence database (~5.7–6 million records, 1.25 TB, April 2024) ⁸¹, the December 2024 defacement of Mi Argentina and SUBE — where the attackers reported the absence of two-factor authentication on central-government sites ⁸² — and the recurring RENAPER incidents ⁸³. Confidence is capped at Low because the evidence subset (14 items) falls below the sufficiency threshold and the corpus entirely lacks market-share data. It does not descend to Level 1 because CERT.ar exists in a constitutive instrument and registers incidents, and a substantive strategy is published and under active reform. Argentina sits at the lower edge of the Brazilian band (Level 2–3) and well below Russia (Level 4, with Kaspersky and the sovereign GOST cryptography). An ascent to Level 3 would require a public trace of major incidents with response times, a domestic security-product industry of measurable share, and a sovereign cryptographic regime applied in critical infrastructure.

Intra-dimensional analysis. The four indicators of Dimension 2 share a single bottleneck: the Dependency Penalty. Argentina recognises every dependence — it has Compre Argentino, Public Software, a thriving software industry, and a CERT — but in each layer the real capacity is assembly (2.1), foreign upstream (2.2), vertical strength without horizontal substitution (2.3) or architecture without effectiveness (2.4). The symptomatic tension is that the dimension’s most visible asset — the software industry — feeds service exports to foreign clients and champions that are acquired by US firms, so that engineering capacity does not translate into infrastructure autonomy. The uniformity of Level 2 is no coincidence: it is the hallmark of an economy that is a net integrator of every layer of the digital stack.

Dimension 3 — Digital Governance Independence

Dimension 3 asks whether the country governs its digital space or is governed within others’ rules, through legislative capacity, enforcement, and leadership in international rules. The institutional landscape includes the Congreso de la Nación (National Congress), the AAIP, and the competition authority (CNDC, succeeded by the National Competition Authority), IRAM in technical standards and the Cancillería (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) in multilateral fora. The dimension finding (average 2.00) combines two high-confidence profiles — legislative capacity and enforcement, both capped at Level 2 by a subtractive trajectory and symbolic enforcement — with two low-confidence profiles owing to insufficient evidence (3.3 and 3.4), both also at Level 2: international participation without leadership.

3.3.1 Indicator 3.1 — Legislative capacity in digital matters

Rating: 2 — Aware. Confidence: High.

Argentina possesses a foundational but dated digital legal corpus: a cybercrime law (Law No. 26388, 2008), electronic signature (Law No. 25506, 2001), grooming (Law No. 26904, 2013), a statute on internet-provider content (Law No. 25690, 2002) and the telecommunications framework (Law No. 27078, 2014) ⁸⁴, alongside a data-protection statute (Law No. 25326, 2000) never substantively modernised. On a static reading, this corpus sits at the high end of Level 2: the foundational statutes are pre-2015 in substance, the frontier domains (artificial intelligence, platforms, statutory cybersecurity) are governed by executive instruments or non-binding guidance ⁸⁵, and the modernisation bills remain pending without enactment ⁸⁶.

Decisively, the trajectory is subtractive. The Ministry of Deregulation accumulates 543 measures that modify or eliminate 2,519 norms across 15,144 articles — verified textually against the official source ⁸⁷ — article 15 of Law No. 27078 was repealed by decree in April 2024 ⁸⁸ and the national artificial-intelligence strategy was institutionally discontinued ⁸⁹. By the indicator’s trajectory clause, a corpus under active dismantling cannot exceed Level 2 regardless of its historical base: this is the binding constraint, and it confirms Level 2 regardless of the static result of the decision tree. The indicator does not reach Level 3 because that would require at least one enacted — not proposed — frontier statute plus a trace of legislative modernisation in the last five years, conditions that the deliberate deregulatory trajectory (Argentina articulated as a ‘low-regulation hub’ for AI) ⁹⁰ renders unattainable. It does not descend to Level 1 because a genuine digital corpus is in force and the Budapest Convention and Convention 108+ have been incorporated. Against Brazil (Level 3, with the operative LGPD and an AI bill advancing), Argentina remains a level below precisely because its frontier bills do not advance to enactment and its existing corpus is being dismantled. The convergence with the BRICS 2025 rating (also Level 2) validates the reading. An ascent to Level 3 would require the enactment of a frontier statute (AI or platforms) and the cessation of the subtractive trajectory.

3.3.2 Indicator 3.2 — Enforcement capacity

Rating: 2 — Aware. Confidence: High.

Argentina has operative digital regulators with statutory sanctioning powers — the AAIP in data protection, the CNDC (replaced by the National Competition Authority on 17 November 2025) in competition, and the BCRA in financial cybersecurity — but enforcement is symbolic rather than consequential. The AAIP’s statutory fine scale runs from ARS 1,000 to ARS 100,000 (~USD 88–100 at its maximum) ⁹¹, orders of magnitude below the GDPR’s 4%-of-revenue standard; the largest sanction against a Big Tech firm ever imposed is the one against Google, for ARS 280,000 aggregated (~USD 215, 2020), equivalent to around 0.0001% of the offender’s revenue ⁹². The competition authority issued 89 merger-control decisions and a single procedural fine for late notification in 2024, with zero anticompetitive-conduct sanctions ⁹³.

The binding fact is the closure of the flagship case: the CNDC shelved the abuse-of-dominant-position investigation against WhatsApp and Meta on 2 July 2025 without a final sanction, after four years and two rounds of precautionary measures confirmed judicially ⁹⁴. A regulator that opened, litigated, and then abandoned its emblematic case against a foreign Big Tech firm without extracting any concession exemplifies the Level 2 ceiling. The indicator does not reach Level 3 because that requires at least one concluded enforcement action that produces documented behaviour change among the regulated, together with non-testimonial sanctions proportional to the infraction: the behaviour-change test is mandatory and fails resoundingly. It does not descend to Level 1 because the AAIP has concluded real monetary sanctions — even against a Big Tech firm — and the competition authority processes merger control at volume with professional staff. Argentina remains below Brazil (Level 2–3), whose CADE demonstrated the capacity to extract compliance even from foreign platforms (the X/Twitter episode), and well below China (Level 5, with the structural decisions against Alibaba and Didi). An ascent to Level 3 would require a concluded sanction with verifiable behaviour change and the updating of the fine cap to deterrent magnitudes.

3.3.3 Indicator 3.3 — Leadership in international technical rules

Rating: 2 — Aware. Confidence: Low.

Argentina is an active participant in international technical-standards bodies, with a genuine contribution but without leadership. It maintains its level of access through the general standards ecosystem — IRAM is the sole national representative before ISO and, together with CEA/AEA, before IEC, as well as a representative in the regional bodies COPANT and AMN ⁹⁵ — and the country rejoined IEC in 2001. The strongest and verified contribution is that of Verónica Marinelli, of IRAM’s SC 27 mirror committee, as one of three editors of the adopted international standard ISO/IEC 27002:2022 ⁹⁶; alongside her, editors from a single institution (UTN’s Santa Fe Regional Faculty) act as editors of at least five Y-series Recommendation projects of the ITU-T’s Study Group 20 ⁹⁷.

But the concentration in a single institution and a single body is exactly what the criterion caps at Level 2: an isolated editor/rapporteur contribution — the lowest leadership level — does not cross the frontier to Level 3, which requires multi-body adoptions and a handful of leadership roles. The chair leadership level is verifiably absent: there is no Argentine vice-chair in the 2025–2028 leadership roster of the ITU-T’s Study Group 20 ⁹⁸, nor any Argentine organisation among the 329 members of the W3C ⁹⁹ — Argentina is a rule-taker in web protocols. The regional engagement (chair of CITEL’s Steering Committee in 2018) is real but, by Pitfall #5, regional harmonisation is categorically distinct from global rule-making and does not raise the global rating ¹⁰⁰. Confidence is capped at Low because the corpus lost around ten candidate items to verification failures and ended up at 11 items, below the sufficiency threshold. Argentina groups with the Brazilian anchor (Level 2): both are regional leaders with limited global presence. An ascent to Level 3 would require contributions adopted in multiple bodies by multiple institutions, plus leadership roles above the editor level.

3.3.4 Indicator 3.4 — Leadership in international conduct rules

Rating: 2 — Aware. Confidence: Low.

Argentina is a recurrent and substantive participant in the main arenas of international digital governance — the UN Open-Ended Working Group on ICT security, the Ad Hoc Committee that produced the Convention on Cybercrime, the Council of Europe’s Convention 108 system and regional internet-governance fora — but the evidence shows participation without independent agenda-setting. The strongest signal, the election of Beatriz Anchorena to chair the Council of Europe’s Convention 108 Committee ¹⁰¹, is a genuine credential of treaty engagement, but it is a rotating institutional chairmanship over an instrument anchored in the European Union that advances the Council of Europe’s own work programme, not a doctrine of Argentine origin adopted by other States. The interventions in the Working Group were carried out explicitly ‘without co-sponsoring substantive thematic resolutions’ ¹⁰².

Decisively, a domestic–international coherence failure undermines any claim to independent normative leadership: a data-protection bill with extraterritorial scope and anti-CLOUD Act provisions (1948-D-2025) runs contemporaneously with the Framework Agreement that grants the United States data-adequacy status ¹⁰³ — Argentina advocates data sovereignty while conceding it. The indicator does not reach Level 3 because that requires co-sponsorship of a substantive instrument with documented impact on the final text, visible independent positioning, and domestic–international coherence, and the surviving evidence satisfies none of these. As to the Argentine withdrawal from the Pact for the Future and the Global Digital Compact, it is treated qualitatively as dissent-without-alternative — Level 2 positioning, not Level 3 leadership — without reproducing the specific date or cohort, whose evidentiary carrier was removed by the verifier. It does not descend to Level 1 because Argentina is an active participant of substance, with recurrent delegations and a treaty-committee chairmanship. Against Brazil (Level 3, with NETmundial 2014 and sustained leadership in the IGF), Argentina remains just below, at the upper edge of Level 2, for lacking a flagship convened process and for exhibiting the incoherence that Brazil does not show. An ascent to Level 3 would require a co-sponsored instrument with documented influence and the resolution of the domestic–international incoherence.

Intra-dimensional analysis. Dimension 3 exposes a coherent internal hierarchy: legislative capacity (3.1) exceeds enforcement (3.2) in its historical base, but both are capped at Level 2 for distinct reasons — a subtractive trajectory in 3.1, the absence of deterrent effect in 3.2 — satisfying the cross-cutting consistency rule that requires enforcement ≤ legislation. International leadership (3.3 and 3.4) remains at participation without influence, consistent with the rule that requires influence in international rules ≤ domestic R&D capacity. The common bottleneck is that Argentina possesses real institutions that operate within others’ rules: it legislates but dismantles, it enforces but does not deter, it participates but does not lead. The domestic–international incoherence of 3.4 — advocating data sovereignty while conceding US adequacy — is the dimension’s sharpest cross-cutting symptom.

Dimension 4 — Digital Capacity Independence

Dimension 4 analyses whether the country has the human, scientific, and industrial capacity to sustain digital sovereignty across generations, along four indicators: frontier research, university talent, industrial engineering, and strategic alignment. The institutional landscape includes CONICET, the free public university system, the MinCyT/Secretariat of Science and Technology, and the software industry. The dimension finding (average 2.25) makes it Argentina’s highest, sustained entirely by industrial engineering (4.3, the dimension’s only Level 3); the other three indicators remain at Level 2, cut across by the fiscal collapse of the period.

3.4.1 Indicator 4.1 — Frontier-technology research

Rating: 2 — Aware. Confidence: Medium.

Argentina possesses genuine institutional infrastructure for frontier digital research: CONICET, the first governmental scientific institution in Latin America, and the twentieth in the world among governmental research bodies ¹⁰⁴; a CNEA-CONICET superconducting-qubit programme (QUANTEC) ¹⁰⁵; a sovereign high-performance computing facility (Clementina XXI, 15.3 PFLOPs, ranked 82nd in the TOP500) ¹⁰⁶; and budgeted quantum-infrastructure calls ¹⁰⁷. What it does not possess is the binding condition that Level 3 requires: sustained presence in top-tier global venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR) at a non-trivial volume over a five-year window. Argentina’s aggregate output at these venues is documented as low and dependent on foreign co-authorship ¹⁰⁸.

The existing artefacts are below the ‘more than a prototype’ threshold: QUANTEC targets 4–6 qubits, with coherent manipulation still a goal for 2025 ¹⁰⁹, and Clementina XXI is an acquired Lenovo cluster, a sovereign capacity but not a domestically designed artefact. The decisive modifier is a verified downward fiscal trajectory: R&D investment fell to 0.216% of GDP in 2024, a real decline of 31.3% and 55.4% below the 0.39% mandated by Law No. 27614 for that fiscal year ¹¹⁰, with that law’s progressivity articles suspended ¹¹¹. By Pitfall #3, the rating reflects the downward trajectory, not the inherited institutional stock. It does not descend to Level 1 because CONICET operates a substantive research community and there are funded programmes and sovereign HPC. Argentina remains a level below Brazil (Level 3), whose differential is a longer trajectory of sustained investment; the 2024 fiscal collapse sharpens the gap rather than narrowing it. An ascent to Level 3 would require sustained presence in top-tier venues and a funding trajectory that is at least stable.

3.4.2 Indicator 4.2 — University talent development

Rating: 2 — Aware. Confidence: Low.

Argentina operates a free and recognised university system that produces digital-technology graduates at a measurable but modest and declining volume, has no university among the world’s top 500 in computer science, and loses its most capable graduates to foreign labour markets through a structurally selective brain drain. The production system exists; the retention system has failed. The base is real: close to 6,500 engineering graduates per year nationally, with UTN producing 42.75% ¹¹², and specialised postgraduate programmes in data science, and artificial intelligence emerging in several universities ¹¹³. A State policy for repatriating the diaspora (RAICES) and pipeline programmes (Sadosky, Numéricas) evidence recognition of talent as a strategic asset ¹¹⁴.

But the indicator does not reach Level 3 for four reasons. No Argentine university appears in the global top 500 in computer science (UBA at 555th) ¹¹⁵. The production of computer-science graduates is small and decreasing (a decline of 23.68% in the 2010–2019 decade). The brain drain is the dominant structural pattern: Argentina is among the 30 largest emitters of highly qualified talent, with close to 30,000 scientists and engineers in the United States alone, and the service-export model rents domestic talent to foreign clients via remote work ¹¹⁶. And the fiscal trajectory collapses: science-and-technology investment around 0.2% of GDP (the level of the 2002 crisis) and CONICET doctoral scholarships cut by around 30% in 2024 ¹¹⁷. Confidence is capped at Low because the emigration rate specific to computer-science doctorates cannot be substantiated with Tier-1 sources and is sealed as a gap. It does not descend to Level 1 because the pipeline is operative and measurable. Argentina remains a level below Brazil (Level 3), whose sustained investment is the multi-year differential. An ascent to Level 3 would require a university in the top 200 in a digital discipline and the control of brain drain below the operational threshold.

3.4.3 Indicator 4.3 — Industrial engineering capacity

Rating: 3 — Developing. Confidence: High.

Argentina sits firmly at Level 3 in industrial engineering capacity. The industry has substantive scale: software-industry revenue reached USD 22,221 million in 2024 (+13.1% year-on-year) with 158,179 registered jobs ¹¹⁸, and more than 140,000 formal sector employees exceed the automotive, oil, and mining industries combined ¹¹⁹. Software and IT-service exports reached a record USD 2,674 million in 2024 and the knowledge-based-services export complex was USD 8,047 million in 2022 ¹²⁰, placing Argentina second in Latin America among software exporters. At least one subsector is internationally competitive: fintech, where three domestically headquartered digital banks (Ualá, Brubank, Naranja X) retain 88% of the digital-banking market with 16.44 million clients ¹²¹, and where the 2024 venture-capital rounds were led by fintech ¹²². This comfortably exceeds Level 2: it is a real industry of products and services with domestically headquartered firms of national consequence. Argentina has produced more than a dozen unicorn-scale companies over the past decade, of which Auth0 — built by Argentine engineers and sold to the US firm Okta for some USD 6,500 million in 2021 — is the emblematic surviving case in the verified corpus ¹²³.

But the configuration falls decidedly short of Level 4 owing to five verified structural limits. First, the export base is skewed towards services with a thin product layer: in the 2022 mix, software was 33%, professional services 30%, architecture and engineering 22%, and R&D only 8% ¹²⁴, and the sector ‘tends more towards development than research’ ¹²⁵. Second, the dominant exit pattern is foreign acquisition at the growth stage, not independent scaling: the Auth0→Okta case is the canonical pattern of the migration of intellectual property and decision rights abroad ¹²⁶. Third, Argentina loses global market share — from 0.6% of world software sales in 2011 to 0.3% in 2021 ¹²⁷. Fourth, the capital base is fragile: venture capital fell from a peak of USD 1,337 million in 2021 to USD 412 million in 2024 ¹²⁸. Fifth, there is no autonomy of the foundational layer: the largest announced technology investment is the OpenAI/Sur Energy data centre under the RIGI — foreign hyperscaler capacity settled in the territory, not domestic cloud or foundational-model capacity ¹²⁹. By Principle #4, an industry built on foreign cloud, models and design tools is engineering capacity deployed on others’ rails. Argentina sits on a par with Russia and Brazil (both Level 3) and well below China (Level 5); the differential with Brazil is precisely the Argentine capital fragility. An ascent to Level 4 would require service–product parity, autonomy of the foundational layer, a domestic venture-capital ecosystem at scale, and independent scaling without foreign-acquisition pressure.

3.4.4 Indicator 4.4 — Alignment with national strategy

Rating: 2 — Aware. Confidence: Medium.

Argentina possesses an abundant and sophisticated catalogue of digital and science-and-technology strategy instruments at the highest level of government: the National Science, Technology, and Innovation Plan 2030 enacted by Law No. 27738 ¹³⁰, the Digital Agenda 2030 by decree ¹³¹, the Strategic Guidelines 2025–2027 ¹³², a National Artificial Intelligence Plan, and an inter-ministerial AI roundtable spanning ten jurisdictions ¹³³. On the axis of the strategy document, the country is comprehensive. But on each execution axis that the indicator measures — budget alignment, statutorily funded coordination, indicator tracking, and continuity across administrations — the evidence shows symbolic strategy without execution.

The AI roundtable was created ‘without its own budget allocation’ ¹³⁴ and the National AI Plan lacks a budget; the only funding dedicated to AI is an external IDB loan of USD 35 million ¹³⁵, which by Principle #4 is execution driven by an external lender, not domestic strategic alignment. The science-and-technology budget function fell 50.6% in cumulative real terms across 2024–2026 ¹³⁶, the national budget has been carried over for two consecutive years ¹³⁷, and the flagship programmes are cancelled and relaunched cyclically — Conectar Igualdad was created, suspended, relaunched, restored, and defunded across four administrations ¹³⁸; the MinCyT was created, downgraded, restored, and downgraded again ¹³⁹. The governing strategic posture is active deregulation (DNU 70/2023, which repealed or modified 366 norms, including Law No. 27078 Argentina Digital) ¹⁴⁰ framed within an ambition to be a ‘low-regulation hub’ ¹⁴¹, which Principle #7 treats as hegemonic alignment, not as a sovereignty strategy. The indicator does not reach Level 3 because that requires a budget partially aligned with the priorities, coordination operating with funded decisions and sustained execution across at least one complete administrative mandate: the budget-alignment and continuity tests both fail. It does not descend to Level 1 because statutory-level strategies and a coordination architecture exist on paper. Argentina mirrors Brazil’s Level 2 through the same mechanism (political discontinuity) but in more acute form. An ascent to Level 3 would require a budget effectively aligned with strategy and the cessation of the cyclical-cancellation pattern.

Intra-dimensional analysis. Dimension 4 shows a broken synergy: Argentina has real human and industrial capacity (4.1, 4.2, 4.3) and abundant strategy (4.4), but the period’s fiscal collapse disarticulates them. Industrial engineering (4.3) sustains the dimension at Level 3, but its own ceiling — foundational-layer dependence, capital flight and talent flight — refers directly back to the weaknesses of 4.1 and 4.2. The explicit cross-cutting contradiction is that the AI strategy depends on a stock of university and research capacity that the same budget cuts are depleting, leaving the country, in the words of the evidence itself, as a data-centre operator rather than an AI innovator ¹⁴². The consistency rule that requires capacity ≤ infrastructure is satisfied: Dimension 4’s capacity does not exceed Dimension 2’s infrastructure, both anchored in structural dependence.

Chapter 4 — Cross-cutting Findings

4.1 Synthesis by dimension

The dimension-by-dimension reading reveals a country of uneven but internally coherent digital sovereignty. Dimension 1 (1.75) is the weakest: the historical legislative asset (1.1) does not prevent the simultaneous collapse of flow protection (1.3) and value capture (1.4) to Level 1. Dimension 2 (2.00) exhibits uniform awareness without substantive capacity: all four indicators at Level 2, cut across by the Dependency Penalty that the framework declares dominant for infrastructure. Dimension 3 (2.00) combines operative institutions with the absence of deterrent effect (3.2) and of international leadership (3.3, 3.4), its legislative capacity (3.1) capped by the subtractive trajectory. Dimension 4 (2.25), the highest, rests entirely on the software industry (4.3); its other three indicators remain at Level 2 owing to the period’s fiscal collapse.

4.2 Horizontal comparison: AR against CN, RU, BR

The DSI framework anchors horizontal consistency against China, Russia, and Brazil. Across the set of sixteen indicators, Argentina groups consistently with Brazil, sits systematically below Russia, and is at a wide structural distance from China. China operates as the ceiling in every dimension — an exporting and expanding legislative corpus, a domestic hardware and software ecosystem, international agenda-setting, and global industrial champions — sitting around Level 5 in most indicators. Russia occupies a Level 3–4 band, with sanctions-forced substitution that produced domestic foundational layers (Astra Linux, Yandex, GOST cryptography) that Argentina does not possess. Brazil is the closest comparator: both countries share transplanted data-protection regimes, Level 3 software and fintech industries, hyperscaler dependence in infrastructure, and regional participation without global leadership.

The key distinction between Argentina and Brazil is instructive. Brazil surpasses Argentina in three precise indicators: it has, in TOTVS, a domestic ERP provider with horizontal share (2.3), it advances an AI bill towards enactment (3.1) and it exhibits enforcement capacity that extracts compliance from foreign platforms (3.2). Argentina, in turn, retains an asset that Brazil does not have in the same form: the 2003 European adequacy and an older data-protection regime (1.1). But the decisive divergence is direction: where Brazil builds, Argentina — in the assessment period — dismantles. That directionality is what, via the trajectory clause (3.1) and Principle #7 (1.3), separates Argentina from the Level 3 band that Brazil reaches in several indicators.

Table 4.1. Approximate comparative positioning by dimension.

4.3 The computation of the sovereignty score

The digital sovereignty score is computed as the arithmetic mean of the sixteen indicator ratings on the 1–5 scale; the total is the sum of the sixteen ratings, with a maximum of 80. Argentina totals 32 out of 80, which yields a score of 2.00 / 5.0. The computation is transparent and consistent with the dimension averages: (1.75 + 2.00 + 2.00 + 2.25) / 4 = 2.00. The dimension that drags the score down most is Dimension 1 (data ownership), owing to its two indicators at Level 1; the one that most sustains it is Dimension 4, owing to the only Level 3 of industrial merit (4.3). The cross-cutting consistency check is satisfied on all its axes: enforcement (3.2, Level 2) does not exceed legislation (3.1, Level 2); international influence (3.3–3.4, Level 2) does not exceed R&D capacity (4.1, Level 2); and capacity (Dimension 4) is aligned with infrastructure (Dimension 2). No anomalous inversions are detected. The score of 2.00 places Argentina at the threshold between awareness and development: the country systematically recognises its sovereignty deficits but, except in two indicators, has not crossed over into the effective construction of independence.

4.4 The Milei pattern: active deregulation as a ceiling factor

The most significant cross-cutting finding is that the Milei administration’s trajectory operates as a ceiling factor that manifests independently in at least four indicators, through distinct methodological mechanisms. In indicator 1.3, the adequacy commitment with the United States activates the Principle #7 override and collapses the rating to Level 1 ¹⁴³. In indicator 3.1, the trajectory clause caps legislative capacity at Level 2 owing to the Ministry of Deregulation’s quantified normative dismantling — 543 measures over 2,519 norms ¹⁴⁴. In indicators 4.1 and 4.4, the fiscal collapse — a real cut of 50.6% in the science-and-technology function and the suspension of the Law No. 27614 financing law ¹⁴⁵ — invalidates the investment trajectory that Level 3 requires. The methodological distinction is important: the framework does not penalise the Argentine macroeconomic situation (that would be context, which by Principle #6 explains but does not excuse), but the active policy of capacity subtraction. Deregulation is not a circumstance Argentina suffers; it is a government decision that the index registers as direction.

4.5 The Argentine paradox

The second cross-cutting finding is the paradox between the regulatory sophistication of the data point and the collapse of its sovereignty in the flow. Argentina possesses the most mature data-protection framework in Latin America — the only one with European Union adequacy since 2003 ¹⁴⁶, reaffirmed in 2024 ¹⁴⁷ — which earns it the only Level 3 of Dimension 1 on its own legislative merit (1.1). But that same country, in the same period, commits to the recognition of the United States as an adequate jurisdiction, bringing the protection of cross-border flows down to Level 1 (1.3). The contrast is not accidental: the Law No. 25326 regime was designed looking towards Europe — it is a transplant of the European standard — and adequacy flows towards Argentina (inbound recognition), while the new US adequacy flows from Argentina towards the hegemonic jurisdiction of platforms (outbound cession). Argentina knows how to write European-class data laws, but at the decisive moment it cedes sovereignty over the outflow of those data to where the platforms that exploit them reside. The paradox extends to 1.4: the country that best legislates the data point is also the one that least exploits it economically.

4.6 Structural and multi-actor constraints

The multi-actor analysis confirms these patterns. The government of the period prioritises deregulation and the attraction of foreign investment (RIGI) over the construction of sovereign capacity. The large foreign platforms capture cloud growth (AWS, OpenAI/Sur Energy) ¹⁴⁸ and acquire domestic champions (Auth0→Okta) ¹⁴⁹, in a pattern that the framework reads as corporate capture and dependency penalty. Civil society and academia sustain real capacity — civic-tech, CONICET, the free university system — but without budget or retention: the most capable talent emigrates ¹⁵⁰ and scientific investment collapses ¹⁵¹. The dominant geopolitical constraint is the realignment with the United States, which materialises the sovereignty cost of Principle #7. By Principle #6, these circumstances explain the pattern but do not raise any rating.

4.7 Prospective synthesis

Should the deregulation trajectory be sustained through 2027 — fiscal cuts in science and technology, deepening of US adequacy, absence of legislative modernisation — Argentina’s average score would tend to decline from the current 2.00, driven by additional erosion in Dimensions 1 and 4 and by the downward pressure already noted in 2.1 (collapse of the Fuegian assembly base) and 4.1 (depletion of the research stock). Chapter 5 develops the scenarios and actions that could reverse this direction.

Chapter 5 — Conclusions and Recommendations

5.1 Five principal conclusions

First: Argentina is a country of mid-to-low-grade digital sovereignty (2.00 / 5.0) without a single competent indicator. The matrix records no Level 4 or 5; its two high points (1.1 and 4.3) reach Level 3, and two low points (1.3 and 1.4) fall to Level 1. The country systematically recognises its deficits — it is ‘aware’ in ten of sixteen indicators — but awareness has not translated into effective capacity ¹⁵².

Second: data ownership is the central fracture. With an average of 1.75, Dimension 1 concentrates the Argentine weakness, not for absence of a legal framework but for its paradoxical use: a sophisticated protection regime (1.1) that does not retain data territorially (1.2), cedes them to the hegemonic jurisdiction (1.3), and does not capture their value (1.4) ¹⁵³.

Third: structural dependence is cross-cutting and concentrated in infrastructure and capacity. Dimensions 2 and 4 show that Argentine engineering capacity — real and of international scale — is deployed on others’ rails: hardware assembled but not manufactured, software with foreign upstream, an industry that exports services, and exports its talent ¹⁵⁴.

Fourth: the deregulation of the period operates as a ceiling factor, not as context. US adequacy (1.3), normative dismantling (3.1), and fiscal collapse (4.1, 4.4) are active policies that the framework registers as a downward direction, not as mitigating circumstances ¹⁵⁵.

Fifth: Argentina groups with Brazil, separated by direction. The closest regional comparator surpasses Argentina in the indicators where it builds (domestic ERP, AI law, effective enforcement), while Argentina retains its historical advantage only where it inherited capacity (1.1). Directionality — construction versus dismantling — is the decisive separator ¹⁵⁶.

5.2 Five recommendations

1. To the Congreso de la Nación: enact the data-protection reform within the term of the next ordinary session. The modernising bill (successor to Message 87/2023, lost for lack of consideration) must enter into force with regulated breach notification, impact assessments, the data-protection officer, and, non-negotiably, a fine cap no lower than 2% of the offender’s annual revenue, to restore the deterrence that the USD 70–100 scale has lost ¹⁵⁷. Without updating the cap, indicators 1.1 and 3.2 will remain capped at Level 3 and Level 2 respectively.
2. To the Executive and the Cancillería: condition the Framework Agreement’s US adequacy commitment on equivalent protection guarantees. In the short term, before the operational implementation of the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade and Investment, the Executive should incorporate safeguards — redress mechanisms for data subjects and limitation of extraterritorial access — that mitigate the sovereignty cost that Principle #7 penalises ¹⁵⁸. Without it, indicator 1.3 will remain collapsed at Level 1.
3. To the Ministry of Economy and the Secretariat of Innovation, Science and Technology: align budget with strategy and restore the path of Law No. 27614. Within the term of the next national budget (ending the two-year carryover), the inter-ministerial AI roundtable, and the National AI Plan should be endowed with their own budget allocation, and the suspended progressivity articles of Law No. 27614 should be reactivated ¹⁵⁹. Indicator 4.4 will not exceed Level 2 while the strategy lacks a living budget.
4. To the private sector and the promotion agencies: orient the Knowledge Economy incentives towards horizontal substitution and the foundational layer. In the medium term, the tax benefits of Law No. 27506 should be conditioned on the generation of product — not only export services — and on the retention of intellectual property in the country, to reverse the foreign-acquisition pattern exemplified by the Auth0→Okta case ¹⁶⁰. This is a prerequisite for indicator 4.3 to move towards Level 4.
5. To academia and CONICET: institutionalise talent retention and production in frontier venues. In the medium and long term, the restoration of doctoral scholarships and the creation of retention incentives and of incentives to publish in top-tier venues — linked to the already-existing sovereign infrastructure (Clementina XXI, QUANTEC) — are a condition for moving indicators 4.1 and 4.2 ¹⁶¹.

5.3 Future trajectory: three scenarios

Favourable scenario. If Congress enacted the data reform with deterrent caps, the Executive introduced safeguards to US adequacy and the budget restored the science-and-technology path, Argentina could recover Level 4 in 1.1 and Level 3 in 1.3 and 3.2, raising the average score towards 2.3–2.5 over a horizon of three to five years.

Continuity scenario. Should current trends hold — strategy without budget, stalled legislative modernisation, US adequacy in force — the score would hold around 2.00, with the industrial strength (4.3) compensating for the gradual erosion in other areas.

Unfavourable scenario. If deregulation were to deepen — collapse of the Fuegian assembly base, depletion of the research stock, statutory codification of US adequacy — the score would decline towards 1.7–1.8, with indicator 2.1 sliding to Level 1 and downward pressure across the whole of Dimension 4.

5.4 Future research questions

This report leaves open five lines that the evidence and time limitations did not allow to resolve. First: what is the emigration rate specific to doctorates in computer science and artificial intelligence, today sealed as a gap for lack of a Tier-1 source? Second: what effective share of public software spending corresponds to providers of national origin, a figure that neither COMPR.AR nor the AGN segments? Third: what are the rates of judicial confirmation and of effective collection of the administrative fines of the AAIP and the competition authority? Fourth: what operational impact will the new architecture of Decree 941/2025 (National Cybersecurity Centre, Federal Cyberintelligence Agency) have once it produces measurable activity? Fifth: how will Argentine participation in international technical standards evolve if the URL_BLOCKED items from ITU and 3GPP documentary databases, which the verifier could not access, are recovered?

References (by Dimension)

The references are grouped by dimension and list, in ascending order, each evidence identifier actually cited in the body of the report. The complete library is kept in evidence_base_UNGS_2026.json. Corpus access date: 2026-05-29.

Dimension 1 — Data ownership

• ¹⁶² Law No. 25326 on Personal Data Protection (art. 12; 2000 fine scale). Regulation, Tier-1. Source: infoleg.gob.ar.
• ¹⁶³ Decree 1558/2001, implementing Law No. 25326 (in force, designates the enforcement authority). Regulation, Tier-1. Source: infoleg.gob.ar.
• ¹⁶⁴ Agencia de Acceso a la Información Pública (AAIP) — regulator with the National Directorate for the Protection of Personal Data. Regulation, Tier-1. Source: argentina.gob.ar/aaip.
• ¹⁶⁵ Data-protection modernisation bill (Message 87/2023), loss of parliamentary status. Policy, Tier-1. Source: HCDN.
• ¹⁶⁶ AAIP Resolution 47/2018 — security measures without geographic restriction. Regulation, Tier-1. Source: argentina.gob.ar/aaip.
• ¹⁶⁷ Official AAIP guidance on adequacy; United States absent; EU adequacy reaffirmed January 2024. Report, Tier-1. Source: argentina.gob.ar/aaip.
• ¹⁶⁸ Law No. 27699 — ratification of Convention 108+ (2022). Regulation, Tier-1. Source: infoleg.gob.ar.
• ¹⁶⁹ USTR Fact Sheet on the US–Argentina Framework Agreement (13 Nov. 2025). Policy, Tier-1. Source: ustr.gov.
• ¹⁷⁰ AAIP 2022 annual figures (491 case files, 52 sanctions, ~USD 30,621). Data, Tier-1. Source: argentina.gob.ar/aaip.
• ¹⁷¹ Gap — absence of breach notification, DPIA, DPO, and extraterritorial clause in the text in force. Gap, Tier-1.
• ¹⁷² BCRA Communication A 7724 — prudential regime for third-party control. Regulation, Tier-1. Source: bcra.gob.ar.
• ¹⁷³ ARSAT’s Tier III data centre — residual sovereign capacity. Report, Tier-1. Source: arsat.com.ar.
• ¹⁷⁴ Executive reform bill (2023) — preserves the transfer model. Policy, Tier-2.
• ¹⁷⁵ Reform bill 1948-D-2025 — continuity of the non-localising approach. Policy, Tier-1. Source: HCDN.
• ¹⁷⁶ Installed domestic IT capacity (~32 MW). Data, Tier-3.
• ¹⁷⁷ OpenAI/Sur Energy 500 MW project under the RIGI. CaseStudy, Tier-2.
• ¹⁷⁸ AWS Local Zone Buenos Aires — presence under foreign jurisdiction. Report, Tier-2.
• ¹⁷⁹ RIGI/Super RIGI — incentives for foreign-controlled infrastructure. Policy, Tier-1.
• ¹⁸⁰ Partial privatisation (49%) of ARSAT. Policy, Tier-1.
• ¹⁸¹ Cross-border personal-data regime (Law No. 25326 art. 12) based on transfers. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ¹⁸² BCRA Communication A 8401 — update of the sectoral regime. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ¹⁸³ Decree 1558/2001 — the regulator’s adequacy-assessment power. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ¹⁸⁴ Disposition 60-E/2016 — model contractual clauses. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ¹⁸⁵ AAIP Resolution 34/2019 — adequacy list; US absent. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ¹⁸⁶ AAIP Resolution 198/2023 — model transfer clauses. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ¹⁸⁷ Joint Statement of the US–Argentina Framework (13 Nov. 2025). Policy, Tier-3. Source: whitehouse.gov.
• ¹⁸⁸ Signing of the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade and Investment (5 Feb. 2026). Policy, Tier-1. Source: cancilleria.gob.ar.
• ¹⁸⁹ EU adequacy maintained since 2003, revalidated January 2024. Policy, Tier-2.
• ¹⁹⁰ Historical operation of US Big Tech via contractual clauses. Report, Tier-2.
• ¹⁹¹ Gap — absence of transfer-enforcement statistics. Gap, Tier-1.
• ¹⁹² Decree 117/2016 — open-data programme on a transparency logic. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ¹⁹³ Law No. 27275 on access to public information. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ¹⁹⁴ Decree 780/2024 — restriction of the scope of active transparency. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ¹⁹⁵gob.ar portal — 1,235 datasets from 42 agencies. Data, Tier-1.
• ¹⁹⁶ PAIS tax — consumption tax repealed in December 2024. CaseStudy, Tier-1.
• ¹⁹⁷ CNDC — digital-markets study group without sanctioning power. CaseStudy, Tier-1.
• ¹⁹⁸ CNDC — eleven concentrated markets, none a digital-native platform. CaseStudy, Tier-1.
• ¹⁹⁹ Civic-tech ecosystem reusing public data. CaseStudy, Tier-2.
• ²⁰⁰ Gap — absence of an operative B2G mandate. Gap, Tier-1.
• ²⁰¹ Gap — absence of recognition of data as a factor of production. Gap, Tier-1.
• ²⁰² Gap — OECD Pillar One and Pillar Two not implemented. Gap, Tier-1.
• ²⁰³ Gap — absence of institutional data trusts. Gap, Tier-2.

Dimension 2 — Digital infrastructure

• ²⁰⁴ Compre Argentino (Law No. 27437) — public-procurement preference. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²⁰⁵ Tierra del Fuego regime (Law No. 19640) — assembly (~93% of phones, AC, TV). Report, Tier-2.
• ²⁰⁶ Decree 333/2025 — mobile-phone tariff reduction 8%→0% by January 2026. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²⁰⁷ RIGI — enclave model without a technology-transfer obligation. Policy, Tier-1.
• ²⁰⁸ Knowledge Economy (Law No. 27506) — benefits to software/services. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²⁰⁹ Design-only semiconductor capacity (INTI/IDME), no wafer plant. Report, Tier-2.
• ²¹⁰ Mirgor Group — suspension of ~360 workers. CaseStudy, Tier-2.
• ²¹¹ CTI Guidelines 2025–2027 — omission of microelectronics/semiconductors. Policy, Tier-1.
• ²¹² Desktop OS share (Windows 81.64%; Linux 2.21%). Data, Tier-3.
• ²¹³ Mobile market >99.97% foreign. Data, Tier-3.
• ²¹⁴ State Huayra GNU/Linux distribution (EDUCAR). CaseStudy, Tier-2.
• ²¹⁵ Suspension of Conectar Igualdad / Educ.ar (‘construction mode’). CaseStudy, Tier-1.
• ²¹⁶ Decree 963/2024 — intervention of EDUC.AR S.E. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²¹⁷ National Public Cloud (ARSAT) on open-source code. Report, Tier-1.
• ²¹⁸ ARSAT runs its NOC on Red Hat OpenShift (foreign control plane). CaseStudy, Tier-2.
• ²¹⁹ ONTI Public Software initiative. Policy, Tier-1.
• ²²⁰ ONTI Disposition 2/2019 — code sharing under open licences. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²²¹ Santa Fe provincial free-software law (Law No. 12360). Regulation, Tier-2.
• ²²² Database market dominated by Oracle/SAP/Microsoft/IBM. Data, Tier-3.
• ²²³ Official argob repositories (43 repositories). Data, Tier-1.
• ²²⁴ Mi Argentina — state platform, 21 million registered users. CaseStudy, Tier-1.
• ²²⁵ Software/IT-services exports USD 2,674M (2024), 46.9% to the US. Data, Tier-3.
• ²²⁶ Law No. 27506 Knowledge Economy (promotion). Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²²⁷ Mercado Libre — national-download leader 2024 (11.7M). Data, Tier-3.
• ²²⁸ Mercado Pago — 50M+ active users LATAM, USD 8,600M revenue. Data, Tier-3.
• ²²⁹ Digital banking — 88% across three domestic neobanks. Data, Tier-3.
• ²³⁰ Foreign horizontal consumer categories (WhatsApp 93%, Instagram 86.7%, TikTok 58.4%). Data, Tier-3.
• ²³¹ Search — Google 94.01%. Data, Tier-3.
• ²³² Auth0→Okta acquisition. CaseStudy, Tier-3.
• ²³³ Gap — ERP/CRM without auditable domestic share. Gap, Tier-2.
• ²³⁴ar (Disposition 1/2021). Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²³⁵ar — 438 incidents in 2024 (61% state sector). Data, Tier-1.
• ²³⁶ Administrative Decision 641/2021 — minimum security requirements and 48h notification. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²³⁷ Decree 941/2025 — National Cybersecurity Centre and Federal Cyberintelligence Agency. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²³⁸ Leak of the national driver’s-licence database (~5.7–6M, 1.25 TB, April 2024). CaseStudy, Tier-2.
• ²³⁹ Defacement of Mi Argentina/SUBE (Dec. 2024), no 2FA on central sites. CaseStudy, Tier-2.
• ²⁴⁰ Recurring RENAPER incidents. CaseStudy, Tier-2.
• ²⁴¹ Gap — absence of sovereign cryptographic research and a security industry. Gap, Tier-1.
• ²⁴² Gap — absence of documented sovereign offensive/red-team capacity. Gap, Tier-1.

Dimension 3 — Digital governance

• ²⁴³ Law No. 26388 on cybercrime (2008). Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²⁴⁴ Law No. 25506 on electronic signature (2001). Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²⁴⁵ DNU 302/2024 — repeal of art. 15 of Law No. 27078. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²⁴⁶ AI governance — non-binding AAIP programme. Policy, Tier-1.
• ²⁴⁷ ‘Low-regulation hub’ positioning for AI. Analysis, Tier-2.
• ²⁴⁸ Ministry of Deregulation — 543 measures / 2,519 norms / 15,144 articles (verified). Data, Tier-1.
• ²⁴⁹ Absence of a platform statute; intermediary-liability bill without enactment. Policy, Tier-2.
• ²⁵⁰ Cybersecurity by DNC dispositions, without a parliamentary statute. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²⁵¹ Discontinuation of the national AI strategy. Policy, Tier-2.
• ²⁵² AAIP statutory fine scale (ARS 1,000–100,000). Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²⁵³ AAIP Resolution 126/2024 — tiering of sanctions. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²⁵⁴ Shelving of the CNDC investigation against WhatsApp/Meta (2 Jul. 2025). CaseStudy, Tier-2.
• ²⁵⁵ Largest sanction against a Big Tech firm (Google, ARS 280,000, 2020). CaseStudy, Tier-2.
• ²⁵⁶ CNDC 2024 — 89 merger decisions, one procedural fine, zero conduct sanctions. Data, Tier-1.
• ²⁵⁷ IRAM — sole representative before ISO and (with CEA/AEA) IEC; COPANT/AMN. Report, Tier-2.
• ²⁵⁸ UTN Santa Fe — editors of five Y-series Recommendations of the ITU-T’s SG20. CaseStudy, Tier-2.
• ²⁵⁹ Verified absence of an Argentine vice-chair in the ITU-T’s SG20 (2025-2028). Data, Tier-2.
• ²⁶⁰ ISO/IEC 27002:2022 — Argentine editor (IRAM SC 27). CaseStudy, Tier-2.
• ²⁶¹ CITEL — chair of the Steering Committee (2018) and rapporteurships. CaseStudy, Tier-2.
• ²⁶² Verified absence of an Argentine organisation among the 329 members of the W3C. Data, Tier-2.
• ²⁶³ US–Argentina Framework Agreement with data adequacy. Policy, Tier-2.
• ²⁶⁴ Participation in the OEWG without co-sponsorship of substantive resolutions. Report, Tier-2.
• ²⁶⁵ Election of Beatriz Anchorena to the chairmanship of the Convention 108 Committee. CaseStudy, Tier-2.
• ²⁶⁶ Data bill with extraterritorial scope / anti-CLOUD Act (1948-D-2025). Policy, Tier-1.

Dimension 4 — Digital capacity

• ²⁶⁷ R&D investment 0.216% of GDP (2024), -31.3% real, 55.4% below Law No. 27614. Data, Tier-3.
• ²⁶⁸ Suspension of the progressivity articles of Law No. 27614. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²⁶⁹ Clementina XXI — sovereign HPC, 15.3 PFLOPs, TOP500 #82. Data, Tier-2.
• ²⁷⁰ QUANTEC — CNEA-CONICET superconducting-qubit programme (4-6 qubits). Report, Tier-1.
• ²⁷¹ MinCyT quantum-infrastructure call. Policy, Tier-1.
• ²⁷² CONICET — #1 LatAm / #20 worldwide among governmental research bodies. Data, Tier-2.
• ²⁷³ Argentine output at top-tier venues: low, dependent on foreign co-authorship. Analysis, Tier-3.
• ²⁷⁴ CONICET doctoral scholarships cut ~30% (950 in 2024). Data, Tier-2.
• ²⁷⁵ S&T investment ~0.2% of GDP (2002 level). Data, Tier-2.
• ²⁷⁶ University pipeline (~6,500 engineering graduates/year; UTN 42.75%). Data, Tier-2.
• ²⁷⁷ Brain drain (top-30 emitter; ~30,000 scientists/engineers in the US). Data, Tier-2.
• ²⁷⁸ Remote-work model for foreign clients. Analysis, Tier-2.
• ²⁷⁹ RAICES — diaspora repatriation policy (Law No. 26421). Policy, Tier-1.
• ²⁸⁰ No Argentine university in the global CS top 500 (UBA #555). Data, Tier-3.
• ²⁸¹ Software industry USD 22,221M (2024), 158,179 jobs. Data, Tier-3.
• ²⁸² SBC mix 2022 (software 33%, services 30%, architecture 22%, R&D 8%); USD 8,047M. Data, Tier-2.
• ²⁸³ Global software share 0.6% (2011) → 0.3% (2021). Data, Tier-2.
• ²⁸⁴ Auth0 — acquired by Okta (~USD 6,500M, 2021). CaseStudy, Tier-3.
• ²⁸⁵ Venture capital USD 1,337M (2021) → USD 412M (2024). Data, Tier-2.
• ²⁸⁶ OpenAI/Sur Energy data centre under the RIGI. CaseStudy, Tier-2.
• ²⁸⁷ The sector tends more towards development than research. Analysis, Tier-2.
• ²⁸⁸ >140,000 formal software employees (exceeds automotive+oil+mining). Data, Tier-2.
• ²⁸⁹ Law No. 27738 — National CTI Plan 2030. Regulation, Tier-1. Source: boletinoficial.gob.ar.
• ²⁹⁰ Strategic Guidelines 2025–2027. Policy, Tier-1.
• ²⁹¹ Inter-ministerial AI roundtable ‘without its own budget allocation’. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²⁹² IDB loan of USD 35M as the only funding dedicated to AI. Policy, Tier-2.
• ²⁹³ Digital Agenda 2030 (Decree 996/2018). Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²⁹⁴ DNU 70/2023 — economic emergency, 366 norms repealed/modified. Regulation, Tier-1.
• ²⁹⁵ MinCyT — create/downgrade/restore/downgrade cycle. Report, Tier-2.
• ²⁹⁶ S&T budget function -50.6% cumulative real 2024-2026. Data, Tier-1.
• ²⁹⁷ Conectar Igualdad — cancellation/relaunch across four administrations. CaseStudy, Tier-2.
• ²⁹⁸ ‘Low-regulation hub’ positioning. Policy, Tier-2.
• ²⁹⁹ Fundar — the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of the AI strategy (university stock without investment). Analysis, Tier-2.
• ³⁰⁰ Budget carryover for two consecutive years. Report, Tier-2.

Appendix A — Inventory of Cited Evidence

This report cites 120 distinct evidence identifiers from the UNGS_2026 corpus (out of a total of 241 integrated pieces of evidence). All cited identifiers exist and are traceable in evidence_base_UNGS_2026.json. The following table summarises the composition of the cited evidence by type and source tier; the detail by identifier appears in the preceding References section.

Table A.1. Composition of cited evidence by type (approximate count).

Table A.2. Distribution by source tier.

Table A.3. Count of integrated evidence by indicator (full corpus, from evidence_index_UNGS_2026.json).

Appendix B — Documented Gaps

The UNGS_2026 corpus records 31 gaps under a strict policy (gap_policy_strict): confirmed absences of evidence after three rounds of search in Tier-1 sources, treated as evidence of a structural absence. They are enumerated by dimension.

Dimension 1 (9 gaps)

• 1 — GDPR-era modernisation absent: no regulated breach notification, mandatory DPIA, DPO figure, or extraterritorial clause in the text in force.
• 2 — No localisation-enforcement actions (2024–2026): a structural absence, there is no general mandate to enforce.
• 3 — No quantitative cross-border transfer-enforcement statistics published by the AAIP.
• 4 (×6) — Antitrust over data monopolies non-existent; open-data outcome audit pending; operative B2G mandate absent; institutional data trusts absent; OECD Pillar One/Two not implemented; recognition of data as a factor of production absent.

Dimension 2 (9 gaps)

• 1 (×2) — No Tier-1 data on domestic-vs-imported hardware share in public procurement; no active strategic hardware-stockpile programme.
• 2 (×3) — No Tier-1 quantification of public spending on foreign proprietary-provider licences; no documented event of sanctions/export controls on foundational software; no domestic capacity in kernels, hypervisors, or cryptographic libraries at scale.
• 3 (×2) — No auditable ERP/CRM/SCM breakdown by provider origin; no official metrics of the domestic-vs-foreign share in public spending on application software.
• 4 (×2) — No sustained domestic academic cryptographic publication at top-tier venues; no state red-team programme with public outputs.

Dimension 3 (9 gaps)

• 1 — No binding national framework for coordinated vulnerability disclosure.
• 2 (×2) — No systematic data on judicial confirmation/revocation or decision times; no quantification of case-to-decision time or fine-collection rate.
• 3 (×3) — No surfaceable direct Argentine authorship of an IETF RFC; no declared Argentine SEPs or participation in post-quantum standardisation; no documented official technical positions on disputed standards (‘New IP’, AI security, quantum communication).
• 4 (×3) — Argentina absent from the AI-safety declarations (Bletchley, Seoul, Paris); absent from the 65 initial signatories of the Convention on Cybercrime; no signature of the China-led Global Data Security Initiative.

Dimension 4 (4 gaps)

• 1 — No Tier-1 source with systematic annual counts of Argentine publications at top-tier AI venues.
• 2 — No disaggregated brain-drain rate in computer-science/AI subfields or directional flow of postgraduate students.
• 3 — No quantitative comparison of gross value added per worker vs. the OECD (PDF not retrievable).
• 4 — No Tier-1 dashboard of digital KPIs in the Presidency, JGM, or Economy tracking the CTI Plan 2030.

Appendix C — Authorship, Cooperation and Traceability

This Argentina assessment is a product of academic cooperation developed under the Global South Academic Forum, with the following division of roles:

• Global South Insights (GSI) — DSI Assessment Team. Design and specification of the Digital Sovereignty Index methodological framework (the 4×4 analytical structure: four dimensions, sixteen indicators, a 1–5 scale, seven evidence types, seven principles, and the decision tree), coordination of the international assessment, and compilation of the annual global index.
• National University of General Sarmiento (UNGS) — University Programme on Digital Sovereignty. Implementation of the Argentina assessment as an associate university: evidence collection from national sources, local application of the assessment pipeline in accordance with the DSI specifications, and drafting of the analysis in Argentine academic Spanish.
• Global South Academic Forum (GSAF). Institutional framework of the cooperation.
• Artificial-intelligence assistance. Evidence processing, verification, and drafting were assisted by the Claude model (Anthropic) — Co-authored-by: Claude.

The application of the specifications to the Argentina assessment — what national evidence is sufficient, what evidentiary weight corresponds to each local regulatory action, and how the analysis is written in Spanish — constitutes UNGS’s substantive contribution to the global index, in line with the methodology established by GSI.

Corpus traceability. Run: UNGS_2026. Phase-gate results: Phase 1 (collection, 373 pieces of evidence) → verification (91 removed) → integration (41 duplicates removed, 241 integrated + 31 gaps) → Phase 4 (assessment, 16 indicators) → Phase 5 (generation of this report). The evidence base (evidence_base_UNGS_2026.json) and the indexes (evidence_index_UNGS_2026.json) constitute the audit trail; each [AR-EV-NNN] citation in the report is verifiable against a corpus URL. Report generation date: 29 May 2026. The 2025 assessment is preserved as a comparative baseline.

Note

¹ AR-EV-0035: ‘En enero de 2024 la Comisión Europea publicó el primer informe de revisión de las decisiones de…’ Policy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/argentina-logro-la-nueva-adecuacion-por-parte-de-la-union-europea-para-el-flujo. Accessed 2026-05-29.

² AR-EV-0212: ‘Argentina’s software industry reached USD 22,221 million in revenue in 2024 (+13.1% interannual)…’ Data. https://www.itsitio.com/ar/software/software-argentino-bate-records/. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0101: ‘El segmento de digital banking argentino está concentrado en tres jugadores domésticos: Ualá (6…’ Data. https://fintechnews.am/fintech-argentina/52228/argentinas-top-3-digital-banks-capture-nearly-90-market-share/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

³ AR-EV-0076: ‘Huayra GNU/Linux es el sistema operativo libre desarrollado en EDUCAR Sociedad del Estado, descrito…’ CaseStudy. https://huayra.educar.gob.ar/. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0079: ‘ARSAT desplegó la etapa 1 de la Nube Pública Nacional el 1° de abril de 2021, construida sobre…’ CaseStudy. https://www.canal-ar.com.ar/29335-ARSAT-lanzo-la-Nube-Publica-Nacional-y-ofrece-infraestructura-y-servicios-a-demanda.html. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0093: ‘Mi Argentina, la plataforma de identidad digital ciudadana, supera los 21 millones de personas…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/se-renueva-mi-argentina-con-mas-y-mejores-servicios-para-la-ciudadania. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁴ AR-EV-0031: ‘El 13 de noviembre de 2025, los presidentes Donald J. Trump y Javier Milei suscribieron el Joint…’ Policy. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/11/joint-statement-on-framework-for-a-united-states-argentina-agreement-on-reciprocal-trade-and-investment/. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0032: ‘El 5 de febrero de 2026 en Washington D.C., la República Argentina y los Estados Unidos…’ Policy. https://www.cancilleria.gob.ar/es/destacados/argentina-y-estados-unidos-firmaron-un-acuerdo-sobre-comercio-e-inversiones-reciprocos. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁵ AR-EV-0054: ‘No se identifica fuente Tier-1 que documente la existencia de un mandato general operativo de…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0055: ‘No se identifica fuente Tier-1 que documente reconocimiento estatal explícito de los datos como…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0057: ‘No se identifica fuente Tier-1 que documente la implementación por parte de Argentina de mecanismos…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁶ AR-EV-0064: ‘El Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Industrial (INTI), a través de su área de Micro y…’ CaseStudy. https://www.inti.gob.ar/areas/desarrollo-tecnologico-e-innovacion/areas-de-conocimiento/micro-y-nanotecnologias. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0080: ‘ARSAT desplegó Red Hat OpenShift AI para apoyar operaciones de centro de operaciones de red (NOC)…’ CaseStudy. https://www.redhat.com/en/success-stories/arsat. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0200: ‘Argentina is in the top 30 nations with highly-skilled emigrants according to OECD data, with…’ Data. https://www.untref.edu.ar/mundountref/argentina-se-convirtio-en-un-polo-de-emigracion. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁷ AR-EV-0133: ‘The Ministerio de Desregulación y Transformación del Estado (created July 2024 under Federico…’ Data. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/desregulacion. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁸ AR-EV-0235: ‘La Función Ciencia y Tecnología del Presupuesto Nacional cayó un 11,4% adicional en el primer…’ Data. https://ciicti.org/el-2026-llego-con-mas-recortes-presupuestarios-a-la-ciencia-argentina/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁹ AR-EV-0035: ‘En enero de 2024 la Comisión Europea publicó el primer informe de revisión de las decisiones de…’ Policy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/argentina-logro-la-nueva-adecuacion-por-parte-de-la-union-europea-para-el-flujo. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁰ AR-EV-0001: ‘El artículo 12 de la Law No. 25326 prohíbe la transferencia de datos personales de cualquier tipo con…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/60000-64999/64790/texact.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹¹ AR-EV-0002: ‘El Decree 1558/2001, promulgado el 29 de noviembre de 2001 y publicado en el Boletín Oficial el 3…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/verNorma.do?id=70368. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹² AR-EV-0003: ‘La AAIP se autodefine en su sitio oficial como garante de la protección de datos personales y la…’ Regulation. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/aaip/datospersonales. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹³ AR-EV-0005: ‘La AAIP aprobó por Resolución 47/2018 (publicada 25-07-2018, vigente) las Medidas de Seguridad…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/310000-314999/312662/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0028: ‘La Resolución AAIP 198/2023, publicada el 18 de octubre de 2023 y firmada por la directora Beatriz…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/296189/20231018. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0141: ‘La Resolución AAIP 126/2024, publicada en el Boletín Oficial el 24 de mayo de 2024 y en vigor desde…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/395000-399999/399750/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁴ AR-EV-0010: ‘Según el Informe Anual 2022 de la AAIP, la autoridad inició 491 expedientes por presuntas…’ Data. https://iapp.org/news/a/la-autoridad-de-proteccion-de-datos-de-argentina-publica-su-informe-anual-2022. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁵ AR-EV-0007: ‘La AAIP publica como guía oficial vigente que los países considerados con legislación adecuada son…’ Report. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/aaip/datospersonales/transferencias-internacionales. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁶ AR-EV-0008: ‘La Law No. 27699, sancionada el 9 de noviembre de 2022 y publicada en el Boletín Oficial el 30 de…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/375000-379999/375738/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁷ AR-EV-0004: ‘El Proyecto de Ley de Protección de Datos Personales presentado por el Poder Ejecutivo Nacional en…’ Policy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/aaip/datospersonales/proyecto-ley-datos-personales. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁸ AR-EV-0011: ‘El régimen vigente de la Law No. 25326 no contempla obligaciones operativas de notificación reglada de…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁹ AR-EV-0141: ‘La Resolución AAIP 126/2024, publicada en el Boletín Oficial el 24 de mayo de 2024 y en vigor desde…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/395000-399999/399750/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁰ AR-EV-0010: ‘Según el Informe Anual 2022 de la AAIP, la autoridad inició 491 expedientes por presuntas…’ Data. https://iapp.org/news/a/la-autoridad-de-proteccion-de-datos-de-argentina-publica-su-informe-anual-2022. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²¹ AR-EV-0145: ‘El 19 de diciembre de 2025 la AAIP inició una investigación de oficio ante una presunta filtración…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/la-aaip-inicio-una-investigacion-de-oficio-ante-presunta-filtracion-masiva-de-datos. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²² AR-EV-0021: ‘El régimen argentino de transferencias internacionales de datos personales se rige por el artículo…’ Regulation. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/transferencias-internacionales. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0005: ‘La AAIP aprobó por Resolución 47/2018 (publicada 25-07-2018, vigente) las Medidas de Seguridad…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/310000-314999/312662/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²³ AR-EV-0012: ‘La Comunicación A 7724 del BCRA, vigente desde el 6 de septiembre de 2023, establece requisitos…’ Regulation. https://www.grantthornton.com.ar/en/insights/articles/2023/communication-a7724-bcra/. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0023: ‘El BCRA emitió la Comunicación A 8401 (13/02/2026) — más reciente que la A 7724 — disponible en el…’ Regulation. https://www.bcra.gob.ar/archivos/Pdfs/comytexord/A8401.pdf. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁴ AR-EV-0014: ‘El Poder Ejecutivo Nacional presentó al Congreso el 30 de junio de 2023 un proyecto de ley para…’ Policy. https://iapp.org/news/a/se-presento-ante-el-congreso-nacional-argentino-un-nuevo-proyecto-de-ley-para-reemplazar-la-actual-ley-de-proteccion-de-datos-personales. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0015: ‘El proyecto de ley 1948-D-2025, ingresado a la Cámara de Diputados en 2025, propone reemplazar la…’ Policy. https://www4.hcdn.gob.ar/dependencias/dsecretaria/Periodo2025/PDF2025/TP2025/1948-D-2025.pdf. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁵ AR-EV-0013: ‘ARSAT opera el Centro Nacional de Datos en Benavídez (Buenos Aires), única instalación del país con…’ Report. https://www.arsat.com.ar/datacenter/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁶ AR-EV-0020: ‘El gobierno anunció en octubre de 2024 un plan de privatización parcial de ARSAT (hasta el 49% del…’ Policy. https://www.infobae.com/economia/2024/10/08/el-gobierno-buscara-privatizar-el-49-de-la-estatal-arsat-que-podria-salir-a-la-bolsa-en-2025/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁷ AR-EV-0016: ‘Argentina tiene 13 data centers comerciales identificados por CABASE con capacidad superior a 1 MW…’ Data. https://www.telesemana.com/blog/2026/05/06/argentina-busca-atraer-14-data-centers-y-ampliar-su-infraestructura-digital-para-la-era-de-la-ia/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁸ AR-EV-0018: ‘AWS anunció en marzo de 2022 Local Zones en seis ciudades latinoamericanas, incluida Buenos Aires…’ Report. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/aws-announces-local-zones-latin-america/. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0017: ‘El 10 de octubre de 2025 Sur Energy (Argentina) y OpenAI (Estados Unidos) firmaron una carta de…’ CaseStudy. https://chequeado.com/investigaciones/mega-data-centers-en-la-patagonia-promesas-millonarias-y-alerta-por-la-falta-de-regulacion/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁹ AR-EV-0019: ‘El Súper RIGI (Message 181/2026 al HCDN) propone exigir inversiones mínimas de US$ 1.000 millones…’ Policy. https://www.cronista.com/economia-politica/rigi-y-super-rigi-que-cambia-que-se-amplifica-y-que-se-elimina/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

³⁰ AR-EV-0001: ‘El artículo 12 de la Law No. 25326 prohíbe la transferencia de datos personales de cualquier tipo con…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/60000-64999/64790/texact.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

³¹ AR-EV-0025: ‘El Decreto Reglamentario 1558/2001 (anexo I, art. 12) faculta a la Dirección Nacional de Protección…’ Regulation. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/normativa/nacional/decreto-1558-2001-70368. Accessed 2026-05-29.

³² AR-EV-0026: ‘La Disposición DNPDP 60-E/2016, dictada el 16 de noviembre de 2016, aprueba dos conjuntos de…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/265000-269999/267922/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

³³ AR-EV-0027: ‘La Resolución AAIP 34/2019, del 22 de febrero de 2019 y firmada por Eduardo Andrés Bertoni…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/202373/20190226. Accessed 2026-05-29.

³⁴ AR-EV-0035: ‘En enero de 2024 la Comisión Europea publicó el primer informe de revisión de las decisiones de…’ Policy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/argentina-logro-la-nueva-adecuacion-por-parte-de-la-union-europea-para-el-flujo. Accessed 2026-05-29.

³⁵ AR-EV-0041: ‘No se identificó fuente Tier-1 que documente estadísticas cuantitativas específicas del régimen de…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

³⁶ AR-EV-0031: ‘El 13 de noviembre de 2025, los presidentes Donald J. Trump y Javier Milei suscribieron el Joint…’ Policy. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/11/joint-statement-on-framework-for-a-united-states-argentina-agreement-on-reciprocal-trade-and-investment/. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0009: ‘El United States Trade Representative (USTR) publicó el 13 de noviembre de 2025 el Fact Sheet del…’ Policy. https://ustr.gov/about/policy-offices/press-office/fact-sheets/2025/november/fact-sheet-united-states-and-argentina-agree-framework-agreement-reciprocal-trade-and-investment. Accessed 2026-05-29.

³⁷ AR-EV-0032: ‘El 5 de febrero de 2026 en Washington D.C., la República Argentina y los Estados Unidos…’ Policy. https://www.cancilleria.gob.ar/es/destacados/argentina-y-estados-unidos-firmaron-un-acuerdo-sobre-comercio-e-inversiones-reciprocos. Accessed 2026-05-29.

³⁸ AR-EV-0040: ‘Microsoft, en su documentación oficial de cumplimiento publicada en learn.microsoft.com, declara…’ Report. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/regulatory/offering-pdpa-argentina. Accessed 2026-05-29.

³⁹ AR-EV-0042: ‘El Decree 117/2016, suscrito el 12 de enero de 2016, instruye a los ministerios, secretarías y…’ Regulation. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/normativa/nacional/decreto-117-2016-257755. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0043: ‘La Law No. 27275 de Derecho de Acceso a la Información Pública, sancionada el 14 de septiembre de…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/265000-269999/265949/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0045: ‘El portal nacional datos.gob.ar registra 1.235 datasets publicados por 42 organizaciones del sector…’ Data. https://datos.gob.ar/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁴⁰ AR-EV-0053: ‘Organizaciones civiles argentinas — LA NACION Data junto con ACIJ, Directorio Legislativo y Poder…’ CaseStudy. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/sociedad/periodismo-de-datos-una-iniciativa-y-un-equipo-para-agregar-valor-e-innovar-nid2312192/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁴¹ AR-EV-0055: ‘No se identifica fuente Tier-1 que documente reconocimiento estatal explícito de los datos como…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁴² AR-EV-0054: ‘No se identifica fuente Tier-1 que documente la existencia de un mandato general operativo de…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁴³ AR-EV-0047: ‘El impuesto PAIS, que añadía una alícuota del 8% sobre suscripciones a servicios digitales del…’ CaseStudy. https://chequeado.com/el-explicador/fin-del-impuesto-pais-que-impacto-tendra-en-las-compras-de-bienes-y-servicios-en-el-exterior-en-el-turismo-y-en-las-importaciones/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁴⁴ AR-EV-0057: ‘No se identifica fuente Tier-1 que documente la implementación por parte de Argentina de mecanismos…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁴⁵ AR-EV-0048: ‘La Comisión Nacional de Defensa de la Competencia (CNDC) creó un Grupo de Investigación y Trabajo…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/la-cndc-creo-el-grupo-de-investigacion-y-trabajo-sobre-mercados-digitales. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0049: ‘La CNDC investiga 11 mercados de alta concentración: aluminio, acero, petroquímica, comunicaciones…’ CaseStudy. https://www.casarosada.gob.ar/35904-once-mercados-con-altaconcentraci. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁴⁶ AR-EV-0058: ‘No se identifica fuente Tier-1 que documente la existencia operativa de data trusts, data…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁴⁷ AR-EV-0044: ‘El Decree 780/2024, firmado el 30 de agosto de 2024 (BO 02-09-2024), reglamentó modificaciones al…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gov.ar/detalleAviso/primera/313139/20240902. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁴⁸ AR-EV-0059: ‘La Law No. 27437 de Compre Argentino y Desarrollo de Proveedores, promulgada en abril de 2018 y…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/310000-314999/310020/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0063: ‘La Law No. 27506 del Régimen de Promoción de la Economía del Conocimiento (publicada en el Boletín…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/320000-324999/324101/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁴⁹ AR-EV-0060: ‘La Law No. 19640, sancionada en 1972, estableció un régimen aduanero y fiscal especial para Tierra del…’ Regulation. https://prodyambiente.tierradelfuego.gob.ar/regimen-de-promocion-economica-y-fiscal-ley-19-640-2/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁵⁰ AR-EV-0062: ‘Argentina no exhibe acuerdos bilaterales de transferencia tecnológica vigentes con jurisdicciones…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/400000-404999/403230/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁵¹ AR-EV-0063: ‘La Law No. 27506 del Régimen de Promoción de la Economía del Conocimiento (publicada en el Boletín…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/320000-324999/324101/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁵² AR-EV-0068: ‘Los Lineamientos Estratégicos de Innovación, Ciencia y Tecnología 2025-2027, aprobados por…’ Policy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/ciencia/plan-nacional-cti/plan-cti. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁵³ AR-EV-0064: ‘El Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Industrial (INTI), a través de su área de Micro y…’ CaseStudy. https://www.inti.gob.ar/areas/desarrollo-tecnologico-e-innovacion/areas-de-conocimiento/micro-y-nanotecnologias. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁵⁴ AR-EV-0061: ‘El Decree 333/2025, publicado en el Boletín Oficial el 20 de mayo de 2025, reduce a 8% el Derecho…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/325601/20250520. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁵⁵ AR-EV-0066: ‘El Grupo Mirgor adquirió en 2021 la operación de Brightstar en Tierra del Fuego, sumando a IATEC y…’ CaseStudy. https://mirgor.com/mirgor-adquiere-brightstar-tierra-del-fuego/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁵⁶ AR-EV-0081: ‘La iniciativa de Software Público de la Subsecretaría de Gobierno Digital (ONTI, dependiente de…’ Policy. https://argentina.gob.ar/jefatura/innovacion-publica/ssetic/onti/software-publico. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0082: ‘La Disposición ONTI 2/2019 aprobó el Código de Buenas Prácticas para el desarrollo de software…’ Policy. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/206660/20190430. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0083: ‘La Provincia de Santa Fe sancionó la Law No. 12360 el 15 de diciembre de 2004, reglamentada por…’ Regulation. https://www.santafe.gob.ar/index.php/web/content/view/full/3601. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁵⁷ AR-EV-0076: ‘Huayra GNU/Linux es el sistema operativo libre desarrollado en EDUCAR Sociedad del Estado, descrito…’ CaseStudy. https://huayra.educar.gob.ar/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁵⁸ AR-EV-0079: ‘ARSAT desplegó la etapa 1 de la Nube Pública Nacional el 1° de abril de 2021, construida sobre…’ CaseStudy. https://www.canal-ar.com.ar/29335-ARSAT-lanzo-la-Nube-Publica-Nacional-y-ofrece-infraestructura-y-servicios-a-demanda.html. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁵⁹ AR-EV-0086: ‘La organización oficial ‘argob’ en GitHub aloja 43 repositorios; los más populares corresponden a…’ Data. https://github.com/argob. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁶⁰ AR-EV-0074: ‘El sistema operativo de escritorio dominante en Argentina al mes de abril de 2026 es Windows con…’ Data. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/argentina. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁶¹ AR-EV-0075: ‘El mercado de sistemas operativos móviles en Argentina al mes de abril de 2026 está dominado por…’ Data. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/argentina. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁶² AR-EV-0084: ‘El mercado latinoamericano de sistemas de gestión de bases de datos está dominado por Oracle…’ Data. https://www.informesdeexpertos.com/informes/mercado-latinoamericano-de-sistemas-de-gestion-de-bases-de-datos. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁶³ AR-EV-0080: ‘ARSAT desplegó Red Hat OpenShift AI para apoyar operaciones de centro de operaciones de red (NOC)…’ CaseStudy. https://www.redhat.com/en/success-stories/arsat. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁶⁴ AR-EV-0077: ‘In January 2024 the Milei government suspended access to Conectar Igualdad and Educ.ar —…’ CaseStudy. https://www.ambito.com/politica/el-gobierno-bloqueo-las-plataformas-conectar-igualdad-y-educar-n5931668. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0078: ‘El Decree 963/2024, publicado en el Boletín Oficial el 31 de octubre de 2024, designa a Gastón…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/316281/20241031. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁶⁵ AR-EV-0098: ‘Mercado Libre lideró el ranking de aplicaciones más descargadas en Argentina en 2024 con 11,7…’ CaseStudy. https://mobiletime.la/noticias/23/01/2025/apps-mas-descargadas-2024/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁶⁶ AR-EV-0099: ‘Mercado Pago superó los 50 millones de usuarios activos mensuales en LATAM en 2024 y reportó USD…’ Data. https://investor.mercadolibre.com/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁶⁷ AR-EV-0101: ‘El segmento de digital banking argentino está concentrado en tres jugadores domésticos: Ualá (6…’ Data. https://fintechnews.am/fintech-argentina/52228/argentinas-top-3-digital-banks-capture-nearly-90-market-share/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁶⁸ AR-EV-0093: ‘Mi Argentina, la plataforma de identidad digital ciudadana, supera los 21 millones de personas…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/se-renueva-mi-argentina-con-mas-y-mejores-servicios-para-la-ciudadania. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁶⁹ AR-EV-0102: ‘WhatsApp (Meta) tiene una penetración del 93% entre usuarios mayores de 16 años en Argentina, e…’ Data. https://www.infobae.com/tecno/2025/04/04/radiografia-digital-que-hacen-los-argentinos-en-internet-y-en-que-redes-sociales-pasan-mas-tiempo/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁷⁰ AR-EV-0103: ‘Google posee el 94,01% del mercado de búsquedas en Argentina a abril de 2026 (Bing 4,13%, Yahoo…’ Data. https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/argentina. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁷¹ AR-EV-0107: ‘No se identificó fuente Tier-1 que documente cifras consolidadas y auditables de participación de…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁷² AR-EV-0096: ‘El sector argentino de software y servicios informáticos exportó USD 2.674 millones en 2024, un…’ Data. https://cessi.org.ar/2025/05/21/el-software-argentino-genero-mas-de-6-000-empleos-y-alcanzo-un-record-de-exportaciones/. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0097: ‘Argentina’s Law No. 27506 (Régimen de Promoción de la Economía del Conocimiento), in force since 1…’ Regulation. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/normativa/nacional/ley-27506-324101/actualizacion. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁷³ AR-EV-0104: ‘Auth0, empresa argentina de autenticación digital fundada en 2013, fue adquirida en 2021 por Okta…’ CaseStudy. https://www.infobae.com/economia/2021/06/23/otra-tech-argentina-se-convirtio-en-unicornio-y-es-el-sexto-local-que-hace-y-quien-es-el-millennial-autodidacta-que-la-fundo/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁷⁴ AR-EV-0108: ‘La Disposición 1/2021 de la Dirección Nacional de Ciberseguridad crea el Centro Nacional de…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/241077/20210222. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁷⁵ AR-EV-0109: ‘Durante 2024, el CERT.ar registró 438 incidentes de ciberseguridad, una cifra 15% superior a los…’ Data. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/jefatura/innovacion-ciencia-y-tecnologia/ciberseguridad/informes-de-la-direccion-nacional-de. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁷⁶ AR-EV-0112: ‘La Decisión Administrativa 641/2021 aprueba los Requisitos Mínimos de Seguridad de la Información…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/350000-354999/351345/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁷⁷ AR-EV-0114: ‘Por Decree 941/2025 del Poder Ejecutivo (publicado el 2 de enero de 2026 en el Boletín Oficial) se…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/337032/20260102. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁷⁸ AR-EV-0109: ‘Durante 2024, el CERT.ar registró 438 incidentes de ciberseguridad, una cifra 15% superior a los…’ Data. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/jefatura/innovacion-ciencia-y-tecnologia/ciberseguridad/informes-de-la-direccion-nacional-de. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁷⁹ AR-EV-0120: ‘No se identificó fuente Tier-1 que documente investigación criptográfica argentina con publicación…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁸⁰ AR-EV-0121: ‘No se identificó capacidad documentada de ciberseguridad ofensiva soberana (red team gubernamental…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁸¹ AR-EV-0116: ‘En abril de 2024 se difundió en Telegram una base con datos de aproximadamente 5,7-6 millones de…’ CaseStudy. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/seguridad/la-venden-a-us-3700-hackearon-la-base-de-datos-nacional-de-licencias-de-conducir-y-muestran-las-de-nid16042024/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁸² AR-EV-0117: ‘El 25-26 de diciembre de 2024 los sitios oficiales Mi Argentina y la plataforma de la tarjeta SUBE…’ CaseStudy. https://www.infobae.com/politica/2024/12/26/lo-hicimos-por-diversion-los-hackers-que-atacaron-los-sitios-del-gobierno-dijeron-que-no-tenian-segundo-factor-de-autenticacion/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁸³ AR-EV-0119: ‘El RENAPER detectó en 2021 el uso indebido de una clave otorgada a un organismo público (Ministerio…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/el-renaper-detecto-el-uso-indebido-de-una-clave-otorgada-un-organismo-publico-y-formalizo. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁸⁴ AR-EV-0122: ‘La Law No. 26388 de Delitos Informáticos, sancionada el 4 de junio de 2008, incorporó al Código Penal…’ Regulation. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/normativa/nacional/ley-26388-141790/texto. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0125: ‘Law No. 25506 (2001) establishes the legal validity of digital and electronic signatures in Argentina…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/70000-74999/70749/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0126: ‘Article 15 of Law No. 27078 — which had designated TIC services as ‘essential and strategic public…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/235000-239999/239771/texact.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁸⁵ AR-EV-0131: ‘Resolución AAIP 161/2023 created the ‘Programa de Transparencia y Protección de Datos Personales en…’ Policy. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/293363/20230904. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0134: ‘Argentina lacks a horizontal platform-regulation statute. The intermediary-liability bill…’ CaseStudy. https://rest.hcdn.gob.ar/web/proyectos/290487/adjuntos/104934. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0135: ‘Argentina’s cybersecurity-incident response framework rests on dispositions of the Dirección…’ Regulation. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/jefatura/innovacion-publica/direccion-nacional-ciberseguridad/normativa. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁸⁶ AR-EV-0004: ‘El Proyecto de Ley de Protección de Datos Personales presentado por el Poder Ejecutivo Nacional en…’ Policy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/aaip/datospersonales/proyecto-ley-datos-personales. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0178: ‘A Personal Data Protection bill (HCDN 1948-D-2025) introduced in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies…’ Analysis. https://iapp.org/news/a/novedades-legislativas-en-argentina-sobre-protecci-n-de-datos-personales-e-inteligencia-artificial. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁸⁷ AR-EV-0133: ‘The Ministerio de Desregulación y Transformación del Estado (created July 2024 under Federico…’ Data. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/desregulacion. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁸⁸ AR-EV-0126: ‘Article 15 of Law No. 27078 — which had designated TIC services as ‘essential and strategic public…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/235000-239999/239771/texact.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁸⁹ AR-EV-0139: ‘The Argentina national AI ecosystem framework — the Plan Nacional de Inteligencia Artificial…’ Report. https://oecd-opsi.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Argentina-National-AI-Strategy.pdf. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁹⁰ AR-EV-0132: ‘President Javier Milei has publicly positioned Argentina to compete as a ‘low-regulation AI hub’…’ CaseStudy. https://chequeado.com/el-explicador/argentina-polo-de-inteligencia-artificial-que-propone-el-gobierno-de-javier-milei-y-que-chances-hay-de-que-suceda/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁹¹ AR-EV-0140: ‘La Resolución AAIP 126/2024, en vigor desde el 1 de junio de 2024, aprueba el régimen sancionatorio…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/308122/20240524. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁹² AR-EV-0144: ‘La AAIP sancionó a Google Argentina SRL y Google LLC mediante la Resolución 69/2020 por…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/sancion-google-por-negar-el-derecho-de-acceso. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁹³ AR-EV-0148: ‘En 2024 la CNDC emitió 89 decisiones en control de concentraciones y una única multa por…’ Data. https://legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com/competition-blog/main-developments-in-competition-law-and-policy-2024-argentina/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁹⁴ AR-EV-0142: ‘La Comisión Nacional de Defensa de la Competencia (CNDC) archivó el 2 de julio de 2025 la…’ CaseStudy. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/tecnologia/la-cndc-archivo-la-investigacion-contra-whatsapp-y-meta-por-presunto-abuso-de-posicion-dominante-nid08072025/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁹⁵ AR-EV-0158: ‘IRAM (Instituto Argentino de Normalización y Certificación), founded in 1935, is Argentina’s sole…’ Report. https://www.iram.org.ar/en/who-we-are/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁹⁶ AR-EV-0162: ‘Verónica Marinelli, coordinator of IRAM’s Subcommittee on Information Security, Cybersecurity and…’ CaseStudy. https://www.iram.org.ar/novedades/novedades-en-seguridad-de-la-informacion/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁹⁷ AR-EV-0160: ‘Editors from Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (UTN, Santa Fe Regional Faculty) serve as editor or…’ CaseStudy. https://uit.frsf.utn.edu.ar/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁹⁸ AR-EV-0161: ‘The official ITU-T Study Group 20 management roster for the 2025-2028 study period (period 18)…’ Data. https://www.itu.int/net4/ITU-T/lists/mgmt.aspx?Group=20&Period=18. Accessed 2026-05-29.

⁹⁹ AR-EV-0168: ‘No organisation domiciled in Argentina appears among the 329 (as of May 2026) Member organisations…’ Gap. https://www.w3.org/membership/list/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁰⁰ AR-EV-0163: ‘Argentina was elected President of CITEL’s Steering Committee (COM/CITEL) at the VII CITEL Assembly…’ Report. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/jefatura/innovacion-publica/ssetic/citel. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁰¹ AR-EV-0171: ‘In November 2024 Beatriz Anchorena, head of Argentina’s Access to Public Information Agency (AAIP)…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/beatriz-anchorena-titular-de-la-aaip-fue-electa-presidenta-del-comite-del-convenio-108-del. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁰² AR-EV-0170: ‘Argentina participated in the second cycle of the UN Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) on Security of…’ Report. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/argentina-participo-en-naciones-unidas-de-un-grupo-de-trabajo-sobre-tic-y-seguridad. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁰³ AR-EV-0178: ‘A Personal Data Protection bill (HCDN 1948-D-2025) introduced in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies…’ Analysis. https://iapp.org/news/a/novedades-legislativas-en-argentina-sobre-protecci-n-de-datos-personales-e-inteligencia-artificial. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0169: ‘On 5 February 2026 the Argentine Foreign Ministry announced the signature of the United…’ Policy. https://www.cancilleria.gob.ar/es/actualidad/noticias/argentina-y-estados-unidos-firmaron-un-acuerdo-sobre-comercio-e-inversiones. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁰⁴ AR-EV-0191: ‘En el Ranking Scimago Institutions 2024, CONICET figura como la principal institución gubernamental…’ Report. https://www.scimagoir.com/rankings.php?country=ARG. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁰⁵ AR-EV-0187: ‘El proyecto QUANTEC del Grupo de Circuitos Cuánticos del Centro Atómico Bariloche (CNEA-CONICET)…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/cientificos-del-centro-atomico-bariloche-buscan-crear-un-procesador-cuantico-con-circuitos. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁰⁶ AR-EV-0186: ‘Clementina XXI, supercomputadora adquirida por Argentina vía Iniciativa Nacional de Supercómputo…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/argentina-pone-en-funcionamiento-la-supercomputadora-clementina-xxi. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁰⁷ AR-EV-0188: ‘La convocatoria 2023 de Proyectos de Fortalecimiento de Infraestructura Experimental en CyT…’ Policy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/ciencia/financiamiento/fort-exper-cytcuanticas-2023. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁰⁸ AR-EV-0193: ‘Existen grupos argentinos publicando trabajos de aprendizaje automático y visión por computadora…’ Analysis. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ArqlkTUAAAAJ&hl=en. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁰⁹ AR-EV-0187: ‘El proyecto QUANTEC del Grupo de Circuitos Cuánticos del Centro Atómico Bariloche (CNEA-CONICET)…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/cientificos-del-centro-atomico-bariloche-buscan-crear-un-procesador-cuantico-con-circuitos. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹¹⁰ AR-EV-0181: ‘Argentina’s R&D investment fell to 0.216% of GDP in 2024, the lowest historical figure on record…’ Data. https://periferia.com.ar/indicios/la-inversion-en-ciencia-y-tecnologia-llego-a-su-mayor-deterioro-historico-en-2024/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹¹¹ AR-EV-0182: ‘Law No. 27614 (Ley de Financiamiento del Sistema Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación…’ Regulation. https://www.iade.org.ar/noticias/ley-de-financiamiento-del-sistema-nacional-de-ciencia-tecnologia-e-innovacion-en-argentina. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹¹² AR-EV-0198: ‘Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (UTN) produces 42.75% of Argentina’s engineering graduates…’ Data. https://frba.utn.edu.ar/dia-de-la-ingenieria-la-utn-forma-mas-del-40-de-los-ingenieros-que-se-graduan-en-el-pais/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹¹³ AR-EV-0198: ‘Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (UTN) produces 42.75% of Argentina’s engineering graduates…’ Data. https://frba.utn.edu.ar/dia-de-la-ingenieria-la-utn-forma-mas-del-40-de-los-ingenieros-que-se-graduan-en-el-pais/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹¹⁴ AR-EV-0203: ‘The RAICES Programme (Red de Argentinos Investigadores y Científicos en el Exterior), created in…’ Policy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/ciencia/seppcti/raices. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹¹⁵ AR-EV-0207: ‘In the EduRank Latin America Computer Science ranking, UBA is #1 in Argentina and #555 worldwide…’ Data. https://edurank.org/cs/la/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹¹⁶ AR-EV-0200: ‘Argentina is in the top 30 nations with highly-skilled emigrants according to OECD data, with…’ Data. https://www.untref.edu.ar/mundountref/argentina-se-convirtio-en-un-polo-de-emigracion. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0202: ‘Argentine remote workers for foreign employers earn between USD 2,500 and USD 5,000 per month on…’ Data. https://www.infobae.com/economia/2024/09/15/los-argentinos-que-trabajan-para-el-exterior-ganan-entre-2500-y-5000-dolares-por-mes/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹¹⁷ AR-EV-0197: ‘Argentina’s 2025 budget projects Science and Technology investment at approximately 0.2% of GDP —…’ Data. https://periferia.com.ar/indicios/el-presupuesto-2025-deja-la-inversion-en-ciencia-y-tecnologia-al-nivel-del-2002/. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0196: ‘In 2024 CONICET cut doctoral scholarship allocations by approximately 30%, awarded 950 scholarships…’ Policy. https://www.scidev.net/america-latina/news/mas-becas-en-un-clima-incierto-para-hacer-ciencia-en-argentina/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹¹⁸ AR-EV-0212: ‘Argentina’s software industry reached USD 22,221 million in revenue in 2024 (+13.1% interannual)…’ Data. https://www.itsitio.com/ar/software/software-argentino-bate-records/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹¹⁹ AR-EV-0222: ‘Argentina’s software industry employs more than 140,000 people formally — exceeding employment in…’ Report. https://fund.ar/publicacion/introduccion-a-la-industria-del-software/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹²⁰ AR-EV-0096: ‘El sector argentino de software y servicios informáticos exportó USD 2.674 millones en 2024, un…’ Data. https://cessi.org.ar/2025/05/21/el-software-argentino-genero-mas-de-6-000-empleos-y-alcanzo-un-record-de-exportaciones/. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0214: ‘In 2022 Argentine SBC exports were USD 8,047 million, with software making up 33%, professional…’ Data. https://argendata.fund.ar/topico/servicios-basados-en-el-conocimiento/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹²¹ AR-EV-0101: ‘El segmento de digital banking argentino está concentrado en tres jugadores domésticos: Ualá (6…’ Data. https://fintechnews.am/fintech-argentina/52228/argentinas-top-3-digital-banks-capture-nearly-90-market-share/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹²² AR-EV-0218: ‘Argentine startups raised USD 412 million across 62 funding rounds in 2024 (46 seed rounds at USD…’ Data. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/economia/negocios/los-emprendedores-argentinos-levantaron-mas-de-us412-millones-en-2024-nid11062025/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹²³ AR-EV-0217: ‘Auth0 — co-founded in 2013 by Argentine engineers Eugenio Pace (ITBA) and Matías Woloski…’ CaseStudy. https://www.roadshow.com.ar/como-nacio-auth0-el-unicornio-argentino-que-se-vendio-en-us-6500-millones/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹²⁴ AR-EV-0214: ‘In 2022 Argentine SBC exports were USD 8,047 million, with software making up 33%, professional…’ Data. https://argendata.fund.ar/topico/servicios-basados-en-el-conocimiento/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹²⁵ AR-EV-0220: ‘Within Argentina’s R&D ecosystem the software industry accounts for 14% of total business R&D…’ Data. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/el-potencial-de-id-en-sectores-productivos-de-la-economia-del-conocimiento-software-y-ag-0. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹²⁶ AR-EV-0217: ‘Auth0 — co-founded in 2013 by Argentine engineers Eugenio Pace (ITBA) and Matías Woloski…’ CaseStudy. https://www.roadshow.com.ar/como-nacio-auth0-el-unicornio-argentino-que-se-vendio-en-us-6500-millones/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹²⁷ AR-EV-0215: ‘Argentina has been losing global software-export market share — from 0.6% of global sales in 2011…’ Analysis. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/economia/despertar-el-potencial-de-la-industria-del-software-una-estrategia-para-el-futuro-nid14082024/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹²⁸ AR-EV-0218: ‘Argentine startups raised USD 412 million across 62 funding rounds in 2024 (46 seed rounds at USD…’ Data. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/economia/negocios/los-emprendedores-argentinos-levantaron-mas-de-us412-millones-en-2024-nid11062025/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹²⁹ AR-EV-0219: ‘Law No. 27742 ‘Bases y Puntos de Partida para la Libertad de los Argentinos’ (sanctioned July 2024)…’ Policy. https://chequeado.com/el-explicador/openai-invertira-us-25-000-millones-en-un-data-center-para-ia-en-la-argentina-las-claves-del-anuncio/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹³⁰ AR-EV-0225: ‘La Law No. 27738, sancionada el 10 de octubre de 2023 y publicada en el Boletín Oficial el 23 de…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/296574/20231023. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹³¹ AR-EV-0230: ‘La Agenda Digital 2030 fue presentada por el gobierno de Mauricio Macri el 5 de noviembre de 2018…’ Policy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/el-gobierno-presento-la-nueva-agenda-digital-2030. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹³² AR-EV-0226: ‘La Resolución 282/2025 de la Secretaría de Innovación, Ciencia y Tecnología (Jefatura de Gabinete)…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/333751/20251031. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹³³ AR-EV-0227: ‘La Decisión Administrativa 899/2024, publicada el 24 de septiembre de 2024, crea la Mesa…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/314465/20240924. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹³⁴ AR-EV-0227: ‘La Decisión Administrativa 899/2024, publicada el 24 de septiembre de 2024, crea la Mesa…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/314465/20240924. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹³⁵ AR-EV-0229: ‘El Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo aprobó en 2023 un préstamo por USD 35 millones a Argentina…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/nuevo-programa-de-35-millones-de-dolares-para-el-desarrollo-de-la-inteligencia-artificial. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹³⁶ AR-EV-0235: ‘La Función Ciencia y Tecnología del Presupuesto Nacional cayó un 11,4% adicional en el primer…’ Data. https://ciicti.org/el-2026-llego-con-mas-recortes-presupuestarios-a-la-ciencia-argentina/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹³⁷ AR-EV-0240: ‘El Poder Legislativo no sancionó la Ley de Presupuesto Nacional 2025: el Decree 425/2025 y la…’ Data. https://chequeado.com/el-explicador/presupuesto-2025-las-5-claves-para-entender-la-prorroga-definida-por-el-gobierno-de-javier-milei/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹³⁸ AR-EV-0236: ‘El programa Conectar Igualdad —creado en 2010 por Decree 459/10, suspendido durante la…’ CaseStudy. https://palabrasdelderecho.com.ar/articulo/5007/Prorrogaron-la-vigencia-del-Programa-Conectar-Igualdad-por-dos-meses. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹³⁹ AR-EV-0234: ‘El Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación fue creado por Decree 21/2007 bajo la…’ CaseStudy. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministerio_de_Ciencia,Tecnolog%C3%ADa_e_Innovaci%C3%B3n(Argentina). Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁴⁰ AR-EV-0232: ‘El Decreto de Necesidad y Urgencia 70/2023, emitido el 20 de diciembre de 2023, declaró la…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/301122/20231221. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁴¹ AR-EV-0237: ‘El gobierno argentino articula públicamente la ambición de convertir al país en ‘uno de los cuatro…’ Policy. https://www.telesemana.com/blog/2024/12/02/argentina-trabaja-en-desregulacion-energia-y-analisis-de-marcos-normativos-para-convertirse-en-el-hub-de-la-inteligencia-artificial-de-sudamerica/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁴² AR-EV-0238: ‘La fundación Fundar argumenta que la estrategia de IA del gobierno Milei tiene un ‘talón de…’ Analysis. https://fund.ar/publicacion/la-estrategia-de-milei-en-inteligencia-artificial-tiene-un-talon-de-aquiles/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁴³ AR-EV-0031: ‘El 13 de noviembre de 2025, los presidentes Donald J. Trump y Javier Milei suscribieron el Joint…’ Policy. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/11/joint-statement-on-framework-for-a-united-states-argentina-agreement-on-reciprocal-trade-and-investment/. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0032: ‘El 5 de febrero de 2026 en Washington D.C., la República Argentina y los Estados Unidos…’ Policy. https://www.cancilleria.gob.ar/es/destacados/argentina-y-estados-unidos-firmaron-un-acuerdo-sobre-comercio-e-inversiones-reciprocos. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁴⁴ AR-EV-0133: ‘The Ministerio de Desregulación y Transformación del Estado (created July 2024 under Federico…’ Data. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/desregulacion. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁴⁵ AR-EV-0235: ‘La Función Ciencia y Tecnología del Presupuesto Nacional cayó un 11,4% adicional en el primer…’ Data. https://ciicti.org/el-2026-llego-con-mas-recortes-presupuestarios-a-la-ciencia-argentina/. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0182: ‘Law No. 27614 (Ley de Financiamiento del Sistema Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación…’ Regulation. https://www.iade.org.ar/noticias/ley-de-financiamiento-del-sistema-nacional-de-ciencia-tecnologia-e-innovacion-en-argentina. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁴⁶ AR-EV-0035: ‘En enero de 2024 la Comisión Europea publicó el primer informe de revisión de las decisiones de…’ Policy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/argentina-logro-la-nueva-adecuacion-por-parte-de-la-union-europea-para-el-flujo. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁴⁷ AR-EV-0007: ‘La AAIP publica como guía oficial vigente que los países considerados con legislación adecuada son…’ Report. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/aaip/datospersonales/transferencias-internacionales. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁴⁸ AR-EV-0018: ‘AWS anunció en marzo de 2022 Local Zones en seis ciudades latinoamericanas, incluida Buenos Aires…’ Report. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/aws-announces-local-zones-latin-america/. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0219: ‘Law No. 27742 ‘Bases y Puntos de Partida para la Libertad de los Argentinos’ (sanctioned July 2024)…’ Policy. https://chequeado.com/el-explicador/openai-invertira-us-25-000-millones-en-un-data-center-para-ia-en-la-argentina-las-claves-del-anuncio/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁴⁹ AR-EV-0104: ‘Auth0, empresa argentina de autenticación digital fundada en 2013, fue adquirida en 2021 por Okta…’ CaseStudy. https://www.infobae.com/economia/2021/06/23/otra-tech-argentina-se-convirtio-en-unicornio-y-es-el-sexto-local-que-hace-y-quien-es-el-millennial-autodidacta-que-la-fundo/. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0217: ‘Auth0 — co-founded in 2013 by Argentine engineers Eugenio Pace (ITBA) and Matías Woloski…’ CaseStudy. https://www.roadshow.com.ar/como-nacio-auth0-el-unicornio-argentino-que-se-vendio-en-us-6500-millones/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁵⁰ AR-EV-0200: ‘Argentina is in the top 30 nations with highly-skilled emigrants according to OECD data, with…’ Data. https://www.untref.edu.ar/mundountref/argentina-se-convirtio-en-un-polo-de-emigracion. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁵¹ AR-EV-0181: ‘Argentina’s R&D investment fell to 0.216% of GDP in 2024, the lowest historical figure on record…’ Data. https://periferia.com.ar/indicios/la-inversion-en-ciencia-y-tecnologia-llego-a-su-mayor-deterioro-historico-en-2024/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁵² AR-EV-0212: ‘Argentina’s software industry reached USD 22,221 million in revenue in 2024 (+13.1% interannual)…’ Data. https://www.itsitio.com/ar/software/software-argentino-bate-records/. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0001: ‘El artículo 12 de la Law No. 25326 prohíbe la transferencia de datos personales de cualquier tipo con…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/60000-64999/64790/texact.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁵³ AR-EV-0031: ‘El 13 de noviembre de 2025, los presidentes Donald J. Trump y Javier Milei suscribieron el Joint…’ Policy. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/11/joint-statement-on-framework-for-a-united-states-argentina-agreement-on-reciprocal-trade-and-investment/. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0055: ‘No se identifica fuente Tier-1 que documente reconocimiento estatal explícito de los datos como…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁵⁴ AR-EV-0064: ‘El Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Industrial (INTI), a través de su área de Micro y…’ CaseStudy. https://www.inti.gob.ar/areas/desarrollo-tecnologico-e-innovacion/areas-de-conocimiento/micro-y-nanotecnologias. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0080: ‘ARSAT desplegó Red Hat OpenShift AI para apoyar operaciones de centro de operaciones de red (NOC)…’ CaseStudy. https://www.redhat.com/en/success-stories/arsat. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0200: ‘Argentina is in the top 30 nations with highly-skilled emigrants according to OECD data, with…’ Data. https://www.untref.edu.ar/mundountref/argentina-se-convirtio-en-un-polo-de-emigracion. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁵⁵ AR-EV-0133: ‘The Ministerio de Desregulación y Transformación del Estado (created July 2024 under Federico…’ Data. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/desregulacion. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0235: ‘La Función Ciencia y Tecnología del Presupuesto Nacional cayó un 11,4% adicional en el primer…’ Data. https://ciicti.org/el-2026-llego-con-mas-recortes-presupuestarios-a-la-ciencia-argentina/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁵⁶ AR-EV-0035: ‘En enero de 2024 la Comisión Europea publicó el primer informe de revisión de las decisiones de…’ Policy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/argentina-logro-la-nueva-adecuacion-por-parte-de-la-union-europea-para-el-flujo. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁵⁷ AR-EV-0004: ‘El Proyecto de Ley de Protección de Datos Personales presentado por el Poder Ejecutivo Nacional en…’ Policy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/aaip/datospersonales/proyecto-ley-datos-personales. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0141: ‘La Resolución AAIP 126/2024, publicada en el Boletín Oficial el 24 de mayo de 2024 y en vigor desde…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/395000-399999/399750/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁵⁸ AR-EV-0032: ‘El 5 de febrero de 2026 en Washington D.C., la República Argentina y los Estados Unidos…’ Policy. https://www.cancilleria.gob.ar/es/destacados/argentina-y-estados-unidos-firmaron-un-acuerdo-sobre-comercio-e-inversiones-reciprocos. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁵⁹ AR-EV-0227: ‘La Decisión Administrativa 899/2024, publicada el 24 de septiembre de 2024, crea la Mesa…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/314465/20240924. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0182: ‘Law No. 27614 (Ley de Financiamiento del Sistema Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación…’ Regulation. https://www.iade.org.ar/noticias/ley-de-financiamiento-del-sistema-nacional-de-ciencia-tecnologia-e-innovacion-en-argentina. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0240: ‘El Poder Legislativo no sancionó la Ley de Presupuesto Nacional 2025: el Decree 425/2025 y la…’ Data. https://chequeado.com/el-explicador/presupuesto-2025-las-5-claves-para-entender-la-prorroga-definida-por-el-gobierno-de-javier-milei/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁶⁰ AR-EV-0097: ‘Argentina’s Law No. 27506 (Régimen de Promoción de la Economía del Conocimiento), in force since 1…’ Regulation. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/normativa/nacional/ley-27506-324101/actualizacion. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0217: ‘Auth0 — co-founded in 2013 by Argentine engineers Eugenio Pace (ITBA) and Matías Woloski…’ CaseStudy. https://www.roadshow.com.ar/como-nacio-auth0-el-unicornio-argentino-que-se-vendio-en-us-6500-millones/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁶¹ AR-EV-0196: ‘In 2024 CONICET cut doctoral scholarship allocations by approximately 30%, awarded 950 scholarships…’ Policy. https://www.scidev.net/america-latina/news/mas-becas-en-un-clima-incierto-para-hacer-ciencia-en-argentina/. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0186: ‘Clementina XXI, supercomputadora adquirida por Argentina vía Iniciativa Nacional de Supercómputo…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/argentina-pone-en-funcionamiento-la-supercomputadora-clementina-xxi. Accessed 2026-05-29.; AR-EV-0187: ‘El proyecto QUANTEC del Grupo de Circuitos Cuánticos del Centro Atómico Bariloche (CNEA-CONICET)…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/cientificos-del-centro-atomico-bariloche-buscan-crear-un-procesador-cuantico-con-circuitos. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁶² AR-EV-0001: ‘El artículo 12 de la Law No. 25326 prohíbe la transferencia de datos personales de cualquier tipo con…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/60000-64999/64790/texact.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁶³ AR-EV-0002: ‘El Decree 1558/2001, promulgado el 29 de noviembre de 2001 y publicado en el Boletín Oficial el 3…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/verNorma.do?id=70368. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁶⁴ AR-EV-0003: ‘La AAIP se autodefine en su sitio oficial como garante de la protección de datos personales y la…’ Regulation. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/aaip/datospersonales. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁶⁵ AR-EV-0004: ‘El Proyecto de Ley de Protección de Datos Personales presentado por el Poder Ejecutivo Nacional en…’ Policy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/aaip/datospersonales/proyecto-ley-datos-personales. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁶⁶ AR-EV-0005: ‘La AAIP aprobó por Resolución 47/2018 (publicada 25-07-2018, vigente) las Medidas de Seguridad…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/310000-314999/312662/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁶⁷ AR-EV-0007: ‘La AAIP publica como guía oficial vigente que los países considerados con legislación adecuada son…’ Report. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/aaip/datospersonales/transferencias-internacionales. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁶⁸ AR-EV-0008: ‘La Law No. 27699, sancionada el 9 de noviembre de 2022 y publicada en el Boletín Oficial el 30 de…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/375000-379999/375738/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁶⁹ AR-EV-0009: ‘El United States Trade Representative (USTR) publicó el 13 de noviembre de 2025 el Fact Sheet del…’ Policy. https://ustr.gov/about/policy-offices/press-office/fact-sheets/2025/november/fact-sheet-united-states-and-argentina-agree-framework-agreement-reciprocal-trade-and-investment. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁷⁰ AR-EV-0010: ‘Según el Informe Anual 2022 de la AAIP, la autoridad inició 491 expedientes por presuntas…’ Data. https://iapp.org/news/a/la-autoridad-de-proteccion-de-datos-de-argentina-publica-su-informe-anual-2022. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁷¹ AR-EV-0011: ‘El régimen vigente de la Law No. 25326 no contempla obligaciones operativas de notificación reglada de…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁷² AR-EV-0012: ‘La Comunicación A 7724 del BCRA, vigente desde el 6 de septiembre de 2023, establece requisitos…’ Regulation. https://www.grantthornton.com.ar/en/insights/articles/2023/communication-a7724-bcra/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁷³ AR-EV-0013: ‘ARSAT opera el Centro Nacional de Datos en Benavídez (Buenos Aires), única instalación del país con…’ Report. https://www.arsat.com.ar/datacenter/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁷⁴ AR-EV-0014: ‘El Poder Ejecutivo Nacional presentó al Congreso el 30 de junio de 2023 un proyecto de ley para…’ Policy. https://iapp.org/news/a/se-presento-ante-el-congreso-nacional-argentino-un-nuevo-proyecto-de-ley-para-reemplazar-la-actual-ley-de-proteccion-de-datos-personales. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁷⁵ AR-EV-0015: ‘El proyecto de ley 1948-D-2025, ingresado a la Cámara de Diputados en 2025, propone reemplazar la…’ Policy. https://www4.hcdn.gob.ar/dependencias/dsecretaria/Periodo2025/PDF2025/TP2025/1948-D-2025.pdf. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁷⁶ AR-EV-0016: ‘Argentina tiene 13 data centers comerciales identificados por CABASE con capacidad superior a 1 MW…’ Data. https://www.telesemana.com/blog/2026/05/06/argentina-busca-atraer-14-data-centers-y-ampliar-su-infraestructura-digital-para-la-era-de-la-ia/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁷⁷ AR-EV-0017: ‘El 10 de octubre de 2025 Sur Energy (Argentina) y OpenAI (Estados Unidos) firmaron una carta de…’ CaseStudy. https://chequeado.com/investigaciones/mega-data-centers-en-la-patagonia-promesas-millonarias-y-alerta-por-la-falta-de-regulacion/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁷⁸ AR-EV-0018: ‘AWS anunció en marzo de 2022 Local Zones en seis ciudades latinoamericanas, incluida Buenos Aires…’ Report. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/aws-announces-local-zones-latin-america/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁷⁹ AR-EV-0019: ‘El Súper RIGI (Message 181/2026 al HCDN) propone exigir inversiones mínimas de US$ 1.000 millones…’ Policy. https://www.cronista.com/economia-politica/rigi-y-super-rigi-que-cambia-que-se-amplifica-y-que-se-elimina/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁸⁰ AR-EV-0020: ‘El gobierno anunció en octubre de 2024 un plan de privatización parcial de ARSAT (hasta el 49% del…’ Policy. https://www.infobae.com/economia/2024/10/08/el-gobierno-buscara-privatizar-el-49-de-la-estatal-arsat-que-podria-salir-a-la-bolsa-en-2025/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁸¹ AR-EV-0021: ‘El régimen argentino de transferencias internacionales de datos personales se rige por el artículo…’ Regulation. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/transferencias-internacionales. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁸² AR-EV-0023: ‘El BCRA emitió la Comunicación A 8401 (13/02/2026) — más reciente que la A 7724 — disponible en el…’ Regulation. https://www.bcra.gob.ar/archivos/Pdfs/comytexord/A8401.pdf. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁸³ AR-EV-0025: ‘El Decreto Reglamentario 1558/2001 (anexo I, art. 12) faculta a la Dirección Nacional de Protección…’ Regulation. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/normativa/nacional/decreto-1558-2001-70368. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁸⁴ AR-EV-0026: ‘La Disposición DNPDP 60-E/2016, dictada el 16 de noviembre de 2016, aprueba dos conjuntos de…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/265000-269999/267922/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁸⁵ AR-EV-0027: ‘La Resolución AAIP 34/2019, del 22 de febrero de 2019 y firmada por Eduardo Andrés Bertoni…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/202373/20190226. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁸⁶ AR-EV-0028: ‘La Resolución AAIP 198/2023, publicada el 18 de octubre de 2023 y firmada por la directora Beatriz…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/296189/20231018. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁸⁷ AR-EV-0031: ‘El 13 de noviembre de 2025, los presidentes Donald J. Trump y Javier Milei suscribieron el Joint…’ Policy. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/11/joint-statement-on-framework-for-a-united-states-argentina-agreement-on-reciprocal-trade-and-investment/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁸⁸ AR-EV-0032: ‘El 5 de febrero de 2026 en Washington D.C., la República Argentina y los Estados Unidos…’ Policy. https://www.cancilleria.gob.ar/es/destacados/argentina-y-estados-unidos-firmaron-un-acuerdo-sobre-comercio-e-inversiones-reciprocos. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁸⁹ AR-EV-0035: ‘En enero de 2024 la Comisión Europea publicó el primer informe de revisión de las decisiones de…’ Policy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/argentina-logro-la-nueva-adecuacion-por-parte-de-la-union-europea-para-el-flujo. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁹⁰ AR-EV-0040: ‘Microsoft, en su documentación oficial de cumplimiento publicada en learn.microsoft.com, declara…’ Report. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/regulatory/offering-pdpa-argentina. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁹¹ AR-EV-0041: ‘No se identificó fuente Tier-1 que documente estadísticas cuantitativas específicas del régimen de…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁹² AR-EV-0042: ‘El Decree 117/2016, suscrito el 12 de enero de 2016, instruye a los ministerios, secretarías y…’ Regulation. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/normativa/nacional/decreto-117-2016-257755. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁹³ AR-EV-0043: ‘La Law No. 27275 de Derecho de Acceso a la Información Pública, sancionada el 14 de septiembre de…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/265000-269999/265949/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁹⁴ AR-EV-0044: ‘El Decree 780/2024, firmado el 30 de agosto de 2024 (BO 02-09-2024), reglamentó modificaciones al…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gov.ar/detalleAviso/primera/313139/20240902. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁹⁵ AR-EV-0045: ‘El portal nacional datos.gob.ar registra 1.235 datasets publicados por 42 organizaciones del sector…’ Data. https://datos.gob.ar/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁹⁶ AR-EV-0047: ‘El impuesto PAIS, que añadía una alícuota del 8% sobre suscripciones a servicios digitales del…’ CaseStudy. https://chequeado.com/el-explicador/fin-del-impuesto-pais-que-impacto-tendra-en-las-compras-de-bienes-y-servicios-en-el-exterior-en-el-turismo-y-en-las-importaciones/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁹⁷ AR-EV-0048: ‘La Comisión Nacional de Defensa de la Competencia (CNDC) creó un Grupo de Investigación y Trabajo…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/la-cndc-creo-el-grupo-de-investigacion-y-trabajo-sobre-mercados-digitales. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁹⁸ AR-EV-0049: ‘La CNDC investiga 11 mercados de alta concentración: aluminio, acero, petroquímica, comunicaciones…’ CaseStudy. https://www.casarosada.gob.ar/35904-once-mercados-con-altaconcentraci. Accessed 2026-05-29.

¹⁹⁹ AR-EV-0053: ‘Organizaciones civiles argentinas — LA NACION Data junto con ACIJ, Directorio Legislativo y Poder…’ CaseStudy. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/sociedad/periodismo-de-datos-una-iniciativa-y-un-equipo-para-agregar-valor-e-innovar-nid2312192/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁰⁰ AR-EV-0054: ‘No se identifica fuente Tier-1 que documente la existencia de un mandato general operativo de…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁰¹ AR-EV-0055: ‘No se identifica fuente Tier-1 que documente reconocimiento estatal explícito de los datos como…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁰² AR-EV-0057: ‘No se identifica fuente Tier-1 que documente la implementación por parte de Argentina de mecanismos…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁰³ AR-EV-0058: ‘No se identifica fuente Tier-1 que documente la existencia operativa de data trusts, data…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁰⁴ AR-EV-0059: ‘La Law No. 27437 de Compre Argentino y Desarrollo de Proveedores, promulgada en abril de 2018 y…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/310000-314999/310020/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁰⁵ AR-EV-0060: ‘La Law No. 19640, sancionada en 1972, estableció un régimen aduanero y fiscal especial para Tierra del…’ Regulation. https://prodyambiente.tierradelfuego.gob.ar/regimen-de-promocion-economica-y-fiscal-ley-19-640-2/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁰⁶ AR-EV-0061: ‘El Decree 333/2025, publicado en el Boletín Oficial el 20 de mayo de 2025, reduce a 8% el Derecho…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/325601/20250520. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁰⁷ AR-EV-0062: ‘Argentina no exhibe acuerdos bilaterales de transferencia tecnológica vigentes con jurisdicciones…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/400000-404999/403230/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁰⁸ AR-EV-0063: ‘La Law No. 27506 del Régimen de Promoción de la Economía del Conocimiento (publicada en el Boletín…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/320000-324999/324101/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁰⁹ AR-EV-0064: ‘El Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Industrial (INTI), a través de su área de Micro y…’ CaseStudy. https://www.inti.gob.ar/areas/desarrollo-tecnologico-e-innovacion/areas-de-conocimiento/micro-y-nanotecnologias. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²¹⁰ AR-EV-0066: ‘El Grupo Mirgor adquirió en 2021 la operación de Brightstar en Tierra del Fuego, sumando a IATEC y…’ CaseStudy. https://mirgor.com/mirgor-adquiere-brightstar-tierra-del-fuego/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²¹¹ AR-EV-0068: ‘Los Lineamientos Estratégicos de Innovación, Ciencia y Tecnología 2025-2027, aprobados por…’ Policy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/ciencia/plan-nacional-cti/plan-cti. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²¹² AR-EV-0074: ‘El sistema operativo de escritorio dominante en Argentina al mes de abril de 2026 es Windows con…’ Data. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/argentina. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²¹³ AR-EV-0075: ‘El mercado de sistemas operativos móviles en Argentina al mes de abril de 2026 está dominado por…’ Data. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/argentina. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²¹⁴ AR-EV-0076: ‘Huayra GNU/Linux es el sistema operativo libre desarrollado en EDUCAR Sociedad del Estado, descrito…’ CaseStudy. https://huayra.educar.gob.ar/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²¹⁵ AR-EV-0077: ‘In January 2024 the Milei government suspended access to Conectar Igualdad and Educ.ar —…’ CaseStudy. https://www.ambito.com/politica/el-gobierno-bloqueo-las-plataformas-conectar-igualdad-y-educar-n5931668. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²¹⁶ AR-EV-0078: ‘El Decree 963/2024, publicado en el Boletín Oficial el 31 de octubre de 2024, designa a Gastón…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/316281/20241031. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²¹⁷ AR-EV-0079: ‘ARSAT desplegó la etapa 1 de la Nube Pública Nacional el 1° de abril de 2021, construida sobre…’ CaseStudy. https://www.canal-ar.com.ar/29335-ARSAT-lanzo-la-Nube-Publica-Nacional-y-ofrece-infraestructura-y-servicios-a-demanda.html. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²¹⁸ AR-EV-0080: ‘ARSAT desplegó Red Hat OpenShift AI para apoyar operaciones de centro de operaciones de red (NOC)…’ CaseStudy. https://www.redhat.com/en/success-stories/arsat. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²¹⁹ AR-EV-0081: ‘La iniciativa de Software Público de la Subsecretaría de Gobierno Digital (ONTI, dependiente de…’ Policy. https://argentina.gob.ar/jefatura/innovacion-publica/ssetic/onti/software-publico. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²²⁰ AR-EV-0082: ‘La Disposición ONTI 2/2019 aprobó el Código de Buenas Prácticas para el desarrollo de software…’ Policy. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/206660/20190430. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²²¹ AR-EV-0083: ‘La Provincia de Santa Fe sancionó la Law No. 12360 el 15 de diciembre de 2004, reglamentada por…’ Regulation. https://www.santafe.gob.ar/index.php/web/content/view/full/3601. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²²² AR-EV-0084: ‘El mercado latinoamericano de sistemas de gestión de bases de datos está dominado por Oracle…’ Data. https://www.informesdeexpertos.com/informes/mercado-latinoamericano-de-sistemas-de-gestion-de-bases-de-datos. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²²³ AR-EV-0086: ‘La organización oficial argob en GitHub aloja 43 repositorios; los más populares corresponden a…’ Data. https://github.com/argob. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²²⁴ AR-EV-0093: ‘Mi Argentina, la plataforma de identidad digital ciudadana, supera los 21 millones de personas…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/se-renueva-mi-argentina-con-mas-y-mejores-servicios-para-la-ciudadania. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²²⁵ AR-EV-0096: ‘El sector argentino de software y servicios informáticos exportó USD 2.674 millones en 2024, un…’ Data. https://cessi.org.ar/2025/05/21/el-software-argentino-genero-mas-de-6-000-empleos-y-alcanzo-un-record-de-exportaciones/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²²⁶ AR-EV-0097: ‘Argentina Law No. 27506 (Régimen de Promoción de la Economía del Conocimiento), in force since 1…’ Regulation. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/normativa/nacional/ley-27506-324101/actualizacion. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²²⁷ AR-EV-0098: ‘Mercado Libre lideró el ranking de aplicaciones más descargadas en Argentina en 2024 con 11,7…’ CaseStudy. https://mobiletime.la/noticias/23/01/2025/apps-mas-descargadas-2024/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²²⁸ AR-EV-0099: ‘Mercado Pago superó los 50 millones de usuarios activos mensuales en LATAM en 2024 y reportó USD…’ Data. https://investor.mercadolibre.com/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²²⁹ AR-EV-0101: ‘El segmento de digital banking argentino está concentrado en tres jugadores domésticos: Ualá (6…’ Data. https://fintechnews.am/fintech-argentina/52228/argentinas-top-3-digital-banks-capture-nearly-90-market-share/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²³⁰ AR-EV-0102: ‘WhatsApp (Meta) tiene una penetración del 93% entre usuarios mayores de 16 años en Argentina, e…’ Data. https://www.infobae.com/tecno/2025/04/04/radiografia-digital-que-hacen-los-argentinos-en-internet-y-en-que-redes-sociales-pasan-mas-tiempo/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²³¹ AR-EV-0103: ‘Google posee el 94,01% del mercado de búsquedas en Argentina a abril de 2026 (Bing 4,13%, Yahoo…’ Data. https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/argentina. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²³² AR-EV-0104: ‘Auth0, empresa argentina de autenticación digital fundada en 2013, fue adquirida en 2021 por Okta…’ CaseStudy. https://www.infobae.com/economia/2021/06/23/otra-tech-argentina-se-convirtio-en-unicornio-y-es-el-sexto-local-que-hace-y-quien-es-el-millennial-autodidacta-que-la-fundo/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²³³ AR-EV-0107: ‘No se identificó fuente Tier-1 que documente cifras consolidadas y auditables de participación de…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²³⁴ AR-EV-0108: ‘La Disposición 1/2021 de la Dirección Nacional de Ciberseguridad crea el Centro Nacional de…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/241077/20210222. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²³⁵ AR-EV-0109: ‘Durante 2024, el CERT.ar registró 438 incidentes de ciberseguridad, una cifra 15% superior a los…’ Data. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/jefatura/innovacion-ciencia-y-tecnologia/ciberseguridad/informes-de-la-direccion-nacional-de. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²³⁶ AR-EV-0112: ‘La Decisión Administrativa 641/2021 aprueba los Requisitos Mínimos de Seguridad de la Información…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/350000-354999/351345/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²³⁷ AR-EV-0114: ‘Por Decree 941/2025 del Poder Ejecutivo (publicado el 2 de enero de 2026 en el Boletín Oficial) se…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/337032/20260102. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²³⁸ AR-EV-0116: ‘En abril de 2024 se difundió en Telegram una base con datos de aproximadamente 5,7-6 millones de…’ CaseStudy. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/seguridad/la-venden-a-us-3700-hackearon-la-base-de-datos-nacional-de-licencias-de-conducir-y-muestran-las-de-nid16042024/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²³⁹ AR-EV-0117: ‘El 25-26 de diciembre de 2024 los sitios oficiales Mi Argentina y la plataforma de la tarjeta SUBE…’ CaseStudy. https://www.infobae.com/politica/2024/12/26/lo-hicimos-por-diversion-los-hackers-que-atacaron-los-sitios-del-gobierno-dijeron-que-no-tenian-segundo-factor-de-autenticacion/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁴⁰ AR-EV-0119: ‘El RENAPER detectó en 2021 el uso indebido de una clave otorgada a un organismo público (Ministerio…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/el-renaper-detecto-el-uso-indebido-de-una-clave-otorgada-un-organismo-publico-y-formalizo. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁴¹ AR-EV-0120: ‘No se identificó fuente Tier-1 que documente investigación criptográfica argentina con publicación…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁴² AR-EV-0121: ‘No se identificó capacidad documentada de ciberseguridad ofensiva soberana (red team gubernamental…’ Gap. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁴³ AR-EV-0122: ‘La Law No. 26388 de Delitos Informáticos, sancionada el 4 de junio de 2008, incorporó al Código Penal…’ Regulation. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/normativa/nacional/ley-26388-141790/texto. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁴⁴ AR-EV-0125: ‘Law No. 25506 (2001) establishes the legal validity of digital and electronic signatures in Argentina…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/70000-74999/70749/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁴⁵ AR-EV-0126: ‘Article 15 of Law No. 27078 — which had designated TIC services as essential and strategic public…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/235000-239999/239771/texact.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁴⁶ AR-EV-0131: ‘Resolución AAIP 161/2023 created the Programa de Transparencia y Protección de Datos Personales en…’ Policy. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/293363/20230904. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁴⁷ AR-EV-0132: ‘President Javier Milei has publicly positioned Argentina to compete as a low-regulation AI hub…’ CaseStudy. https://chequeado.com/el-explicador/argentina-polo-de-inteligencia-artificial-que-propone-el-gobierno-de-javier-milei-y-que-chances-hay-de-que-suceda/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁴⁸ AR-EV-0133: ‘The Ministerio de Desregulación y Transformación del Estado (created July 2024 under Federico…’ Data. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/desregulacion. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁴⁹ AR-EV-0134: ‘Argentina lacks a horizontal platform-regulation statute. The intermediary-liability bill…’ CaseStudy. https://rest.hcdn.gob.ar/web/proyectos/290487/adjuntos/104934. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁵⁰ AR-EV-0135: ‘Argentina cybersecurity-incident response framework rests on dispositions of the Dirección…’ Regulation. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/jefatura/innovacion-publica/direccion-nacional-ciberseguridad/normativa. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁵¹ AR-EV-0139: ‘The Argentina national AI ecosystem framework — the Plan Nacional de Inteligencia Artificial…’ Report. https://oecd-opsi.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Argentina-National-AI-Strategy.pdf. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁵² AR-EV-0140: ‘La Resolución AAIP 126/2024, en vigor desde el 1 de junio de 2024, aprueba el régimen sancionatorio…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/308122/20240524. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁵³ AR-EV-0141: ‘La Resolución AAIP 126/2024, publicada en el Boletín Oficial el 24 de mayo de 2024 y en vigor desde…’ Regulation. https://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/395000-399999/399750/norma.htm. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁵⁴ AR-EV-0142: ‘La Comisión Nacional de Defensa de la Competencia (CNDC) archivó el 2 de julio de 2025 la…’ CaseStudy. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/tecnologia/la-cndc-archivo-la-investigacion-contra-whatsapp-y-meta-por-presunto-abuso-de-posicion-dominante-nid08072025/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁵⁵ AR-EV-0144: ‘La AAIP sancionó a Google Argentina SRL y Google LLC mediante la Resolución 69/2020 por…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/sancion-google-por-negar-el-derecho-de-acceso. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁵⁶ AR-EV-0148: ‘En 2024 la CNDC emitió 89 decisiones en control de concentraciones y una única multa por…’ Data. https://legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com/competition-blog/main-developments-in-competition-law-and-policy-2024-argentina/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁵⁷ AR-EV-0158: ‘IRAM (Instituto Argentino de Normalización y Certificación), founded in 1935, is Argentina sole…’ Report. https://www.iram.org.ar/en/who-we-are/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁵⁸ AR-EV-0160: ‘Editors from Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (UTN, Santa Fe Regional Faculty) serve as editor or…’ CaseStudy. https://uit.frsf.utn.edu.ar/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁵⁹ AR-EV-0161: ‘The official ITU-T Study Group 20 management roster for the 2025-2028 study period (period 18)…’ Data. https://www.itu.int/net4/ITU-T/lists/mgmt.aspx?Group=20&Period=18. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁶⁰ AR-EV-0162: ‘Verónica Marinelli, coordinator of IRAM Subcommittee on Information Security, Cybersecurity and…’ CaseStudy. https://www.iram.org.ar/novedades/novedades-en-seguridad-de-la-informacion/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁶¹ AR-EV-0163: ‘Argentina was elected President of CITEL Steering Committee (COM/CITEL) at the VII CITEL Assembly…’ Report. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/jefatura/innovacion-publica/ssetic/citel. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁶² AR-EV-0168: ‘No organisation domiciled in Argentina appears among the 329 (as of May 2026) Member organisations…’ Gap. https://www.w3.org/membership/list/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁶³ AR-EV-0169: ‘On 5 February 2026 the Argentine Foreign Ministry announced the signature of the United…’ Policy. https://www.cancilleria.gob.ar/es/actualidad/noticias/argentina-y-estados-unidos-firmaron-un-acuerdo-sobre-comercio-e-inversiones. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁶⁴ AR-EV-0170: ‘Argentina participated in the second cycle of the UN Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) on Security of…’ Report. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/argentina-participo-en-naciones-unidas-de-un-grupo-de-trabajo-sobre-tic-y-seguridad. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁶⁵ AR-EV-0171: ‘In November 2024 Beatriz Anchorena, head of Argentina Access to Public Information Agency (AAIP)…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/beatriz-anchorena-titular-de-la-aaip-fue-electa-presidenta-del-comite-del-convenio-108-del. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁶⁶ AR-EV-0178: ‘A Personal Data Protection bill (HCDN 1948-D-2025) introduced in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies…’ Analysis. https://iapp.org/news/a/novedades-legislativas-en-argentina-sobre-protecci-n-de-datos-personales-e-inteligencia-artificial. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁶⁷ AR-EV-0181: ‘Argentina R&D investment fell to 0.216% of GDP in 2024, the lowest historical figure on record…’ Data. https://periferia.com.ar/indicios/la-inversion-en-ciencia-y-tecnologia-llego-a-su-mayor-deterioro-historico-en-2024/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁶⁸ AR-EV-0182: ‘Law No. 27614 (Ley de Financiamiento del Sistema Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación…’ Regulation. https://www.iade.org.ar/noticias/ley-de-financiamiento-del-sistema-nacional-de-ciencia-tecnologia-e-innovacion-en-argentina. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁶⁹ AR-EV-0186: ‘Clementina XXI, supercomputadora adquirida por Argentina vía Iniciativa Nacional de Supercómputo…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/argentina-pone-en-funcionamiento-la-supercomputadora-clementina-xxi. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁷⁰ AR-EV-0187: ‘El proyecto QUANTEC del Grupo de Circuitos Cuánticos del Centro Atómico Bariloche (CNEA-CONICET)…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/cientificos-del-centro-atomico-bariloche-buscan-crear-un-procesador-cuantico-con-circuitos. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁷¹ AR-EV-0188: ‘La convocatoria 2023 de Proyectos de Fortalecimiento de Infraestructura Experimental en CyT…’ Policy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/ciencia/financiamiento/fort-exper-cytcuanticas-2023. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁷² AR-EV-0191: ‘En el Ranking Scimago Institutions 2024, CONICET figura como la principal institución gubernamental…’ Report. https://www.scimagoir.com/rankings.php?country=ARG. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁷³ AR-EV-0193: ‘Existen grupos argentinos publicando trabajos de aprendizaje automático y visión por computadora…’ Analysis. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ArqlkTUAAAAJ&hl=en. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁷⁴ AR-EV-0196: ‘In 2024 CONICET cut doctoral scholarship allocations by approximately 30%, awarded 950 scholarships…’ Policy. https://www.scidev.net/america-latina/news/mas-becas-en-un-clima-incierto-para-hacer-ciencia-en-argentina/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁷⁵ AR-EV-0197: ‘Argentina 2025 budget projects Science and Technology investment at approximately 0.2% of GDP —…’ Data. https://periferia.com.ar/indicios/el-presupuesto-2025-deja-la-inversion-en-ciencia-y-tecnologia-al-nivel-del-2002/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁷⁶ AR-EV-0198: ‘Universidad Tecnológica Nacional (UTN) produces 42.75% of Argentina engineering graduates…’ Data. https://frba.utn.edu.ar/dia-de-la-ingenieria-la-utn-forma-mas-del-40-de-los-ingenieros-que-se-graduan-en-el-pais/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁷⁷ AR-EV-0200: ‘Argentina is in the top 30 nations with highly-skilled emigrants according to OECD data, with…’ Data. https://www.untref.edu.ar/mundountref/argentina-se-convirtio-en-un-polo-de-emigracion. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁷⁸ AR-EV-0202: ‘Argentine remote workers for foreign employers earn between USD 2,500 and USD 5,000 per month on…’ Data. https://www.infobae.com/economia/2024/09/15/los-argentinos-que-trabajan-para-el-exterior-ganan-entre-2500-y-5000-dolares-por-mes/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁷⁹ AR-EV-0203: ‘The RAICES Programme (Red de Argentinos Investigadores y Científicos en el Exterior), created in…’ Policy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/ciencia/seppcti/raices. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁸⁰ AR-EV-0207: ‘In the EduRank Latin America Computer Science ranking, UBA is #1 in Argentina and #555 worldwide…’ Data. https://edurank.org/cs/la/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁸¹ AR-EV-0212: ‘Argentina software industry reached USD 22,221 million in revenue in 2024 (+13.1% interannual)…’ Data. https://www.itsitio.com/ar/software/software-argentino-bate-records/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁸² AR-EV-0214: ‘In 2022 Argentine SBC exports were USD 8,047 million, with software making up 33%, professional…’ Data. https://argendata.fund.ar/topico/servicios-basados-en-el-conocimiento/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁸³ AR-EV-0215: ‘Argentina has been losing global software-export market share — from 0.6% of global sales in 2011…’ Analysis. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/economia/despertar-el-potencial-de-la-industria-del-software-una-estrategia-para-el-futuro-nid14082024/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁸⁴ AR-EV-0217: ‘Auth0 — co-founded in 2013 by Argentine engineers Eugenio Pace (ITBA) and Matías Woloski…’ CaseStudy. https://www.roadshow.com.ar/como-nacio-auth0-el-unicornio-argentino-que-se-vendio-en-us-6500-millones/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁸⁵ AR-EV-0218: ‘Argentine startups raised USD 412 million across 62 funding rounds in 2024 (46 seed rounds at USD…’ Data. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/economia/negocios/los-emprendedores-argentinos-levantaron-mas-de-us412-millones-en-2024-nid11062025/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁸⁶ AR-EV-0219: ‘Law No. 27742 Bases y Puntos de Partida para la Libertad de los Argentinos (sanctioned July 2024)…’ Policy. https://chequeado.com/el-explicador/openai-invertira-us-25-000-millones-en-un-data-center-para-ia-en-la-argentina-las-claves-del-anuncio/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁸⁷ AR-EV-0220: ‘Within Argentina R&D ecosystem the software industry accounts for 14% of total business R&D…’ Data. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/el-potencial-de-id-en-sectores-productivos-de-la-economia-del-conocimiento-software-y-ag-0. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁸⁸ AR-EV-0222: ‘Argentina software industry employs more than 140,000 people formally — exceeding employment in…’ Report. https://fund.ar/publicacion/introduccion-a-la-industria-del-software/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁸⁹ AR-EV-0225: ‘La Law No. 27738, sancionada el 10 de octubre de 2023 y publicada en el Boletín Oficial el 23 de…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/296574/20231023. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁹⁰ AR-EV-0226: ‘La Resolución 282/2025 de la Secretaría de Innovación, Ciencia y Tecnología (Jefatura de Gabinete)…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/333751/20251031. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁹¹ AR-EV-0227: ‘La Decisión Administrativa 899/2024, publicada el 24 de septiembre de 2024, crea la Mesa…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/314465/20240924. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁹² AR-EV-0229: ‘El Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo aprobó en 2023 un préstamo por USD 35 millones a Argentina…’ CaseStudy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/nuevo-programa-de-35-millones-de-dolares-para-el-desarrollo-de-la-inteligencia-artificial. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁹³ AR-EV-0230: ‘La Agenda Digital 2030 fue presentada por el gobierno de Mauricio Macri el 5 de noviembre de 2018…’ Policy. https://www.argentina.gob.ar/noticias/el-gobierno-presento-la-nueva-agenda-digital-2030. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁹⁴ AR-EV-0232: ‘El Decreto de Necesidad y Urgencia 70/2023, emitido el 20 de diciembre de 2023, declaró la…’ Regulation. https://www.boletinoficial.gob.ar/detalleAviso/primera/301122/20231221. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁹⁵ AR-EV-0234: ‘El Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación fue creado por Decree 21/2007 bajo la…’ CaseStudy. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministerio_de_Ciencia,_Tecnolog%C3%ADa_e_Innovaci%C3%B3n_(Argentina). Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁹⁶ AR-EV-0235: ‘La Función Ciencia y Tecnología del Presupuesto Nacional cayó un 11,4% adicional en el primer…’ Data. https://ciicti.org/el-2026-llego-con-mas-recortes-presupuestarios-a-la-ciencia-argentina/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁹⁷ AR-EV-0236: ‘El programa Conectar Igualdad —creado en 2010 por Decree 459/10, suspendido durante la…’ CaseStudy. https://palabrasdelderecho.com.ar/articulo/5007/Prorrogaron-la-vigencia-del-Programa-Conectar-Igualdad-por-dos-meses. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁹⁸ AR-EV-0237: ‘El gobierno argentino articula públicamente la ambición de convertir al país en uno de los cuatro…’ Policy. https://www.telesemana.com/blog/2024/12/02/argentina-trabaja-en-desregulacion-energia-y-analisis-de-marcos-normativos-para-convertirse-en-el-hub-de-la-inteligencia-artificial-de-sudamerica/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

²⁹⁹ AR-EV-0238: ‘La fundación Fundar argumenta que la estrategia de IA del gobierno Milei tiene un talón de…’ Analysis. https://fund.ar/publicacion/la-estrategia-de-milei-en-inteligencia-artificial-tiene-un-talon-de-aquiles/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

³⁰⁰ AR-EV-0240: ‘El Poder Legislativo no sancionó la Ley de Presupuesto Nacional 2025: el Decree 425/2025 y la…’ Data. https://chequeado.com/el-explicador/presupuesto-2025-las-5-claves-para-entender-la-prorroga-definida-por-el-gobierno-de-javier-milei/. Accessed 2026-05-29.

Pablo Martínez Pablo Martínez serves as Coordinator of this report. He is a senior full-stack developer and the lead of the SUDOCU project at the National University of General Sarmiento (UNGS).

Germán Pinazo Germán Pinazo is the President and a professor at the National University of General Sarmiento (UNGS), whose research focuses on political economy and economic development.