How Israel is expanding its cybersecurity footprint in
Latin America
New security agreements with right-wing governments
are opening doors for an industry whose technologies and expertise have been
developed through Israel’s occupation of Palestine
Ana
Maria Monjardino
Published date: 14 September 2026
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/how-israel-expanding-cybersecurity-latin-america
As right-wing governments across Latin America embrace
increasingly militarised and technology-driven approaches to organised crime, Israel is positioning its cybersecurity industry as a source
of expertise, surveillance capabilities and national security solutions.
The growing cooperation is opening new markets for an
industry closely connected to Israel’s military and intelligence establishment,
where technologies have been developed and tested through the occupation of
Palestine before being marketed abroad.
Colombia’s new president, Abelardo de la
Espriella, has identified
Israel’s artificial intelligence and cybersecurity expertise as a potential
weapon in his promised crackdown on organised crime.
“A collaboration with Israel would allow these
resources to be applied directly to combating criminal structures within the
national territory,” the hardline right-wing leader said.
In neighbouring Ecuador, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and his
Ecuadorian counterpart, Roberto Kury, signed agreements during a state visit on
4 August to increase cooperation on counter-terrorism and cybersecurity.
Israel and Argentina have also agreed to deepen their cooperation on
artificial intelligence, in addition to a concurrent agreement to fight
"terrorist" cyber-threats.
The agreements point to a renewed opening for Israel’s
cyber industry in Latin America as a succession of right-wing governments
embraces technologically driven responses to organised crime.
However, digital-rights advocates warn that the
distinction between defensive cybersecurity and surveillance can become blurred
when technologies developed within Israel’s military and occupation apparatus
are exported to governments with weak safeguards and records of abuse.
“One of the problems is that the main mindset from
governments in Latin America is a risk-based approach, it is not about
human-rights centred impact,” said Pepe Flores, director of programmes at R3D
Mexico, an independent, non-profit digital-rights organisation. “There is an
illusion of control with technology,” he told MEE.
The regional shift also coincides with Washington’s
growing emphasis on using cyber capabilities against transnational criminal
organisations.
On 12 August, US President Donald Trump signed a
National Security Presidential Memorandum empowering federal law-enforcement
agencies to use cyber tools “to disrupt transnational criminal organizations
(TCOs) that operate in foreign jurisdictions to attack Americans”.
“President Trump is unleashing every available tool to
stop foreign-based organized criminal organizations that exploit Americans in
cyberspace,” the memorandum read.
The push for closer cooperation with Israel comes amid
a broader political shift to the right in Latin America, where several
governments have aligned themselves more closely with Washington and adopted
hardline approaches to organised crime, migration and national security.
“New right-wing presidencies, like those of Daniel
Noboa, Antonio Kast, and now Abelardo De La Espriella, have been built with an
eye toward the United States. It’s like a pendulum swinging away from the likes
of Hugo Chavez, Gustavo Petro, and Lula da Silva,” said Juan Diego Castaneda,
co-director of Fundacion Karisma, a civil society and digital rights
organisation based in Bogota.
In this context, “choosing Israel isn't simply a
matter of picking the best supplier,” he told Middle East Eye, noting “nothing
particularly special” about the Israeli tools themselves.
“The choice of Israel is ideological, meaning that
when faced with two equal suppliers, they pick the one that aligns better with
their values, or one that reinforces their own stance.”
The doctrine of defence
Israel has increasingly presented itself to Latin
American governments as a source of expertise in defence, cybersecurity and
counter-terrorism.
But “the concept of ‘defense’ has never been about
simply defending oneself,” said Castaneda. “That is the official narrative but
clearly it also involves defending against whatever is strategic. In other
words, defending oneself can become a form of attack.”
The language of defence has long been used to justify
expanding state power, from the US-led “war on terror” to the decades-long “war
on drugs”.
In Latin America, the language and methods associated
with those campaigns are increasingly converging in the fight against what
governments call “narco-terrorism”. Rights groups warn that the result has
been greater militarisation and serious human rights violations, including in
Ecuador and El Salvador.
Israel has deployed similar rhetoric during its
genocide in Gaza, repeatedly describing it as a war of defence against Hamas,
not against the Palestinian people.
International criticism of Israel’s cyber industry has
focused on offensive technologies such as Pegasus, the notorious Israeli
spyware used by governments around the world to target journalists and
activists.
But many companies closely connected to Israel’s
military and security apparatus are marketing their products as
defensive.
“That is part of the selling point,” said Flores.
“The US has pushed a narrative about using
cyber-technologies to fight organised crime and dismantle cartels” and “there
is a pressure to provide results immediately,” he told MEE.
As a result, governments can be tempted to import
Israeli tactics, but “the reality is a complex matrix where US interests,
Israel’s interests and big-tech interests align”.
Tried and tested in Palestine
Israel’s cyber-technology industry is closely
connected to its occupation of Palestine, where surveillance and other digital
tools have been developed and deployed on a population that has little ability
to refuse or challenge their use.
"The skill being monetised is not intelligence in
the abstract - plenty of countries have that. It is knowing how to run
population-scale surveillance on people who cannot refuse,” said Lama Nazeeh,
advocacy manager at 7amleh, the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement.
“That is the intellectual property, and every
Palestinian is an unconsenting contributor.
“Since 2017 Israeli authorities have used predictive
policing algorithms that scrape social media to generate recommendations on who
to detain. Thousands have been arrested on that basis, and the systems are
error-prone,” Nazeeh told MEE.
The use of surveillance technology is part of a wider
system of digital repression, she said.
Furthermore, "our 2025 documentation recorded
3,452 digital rights violations against Palestinians, 538 censorship complaints
and 2,910 cases of hate speech and incitement,” she said. “The absence of
consent is not an unfortunate side effect; it is a design requirement.”
The increased use of facial-recognition technology in
the occupied Palestinian territories is part of an official move towards what
has been described as a “frictionless” occupation, supposedly reducing
interactions between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers by leaving
identification to machines.
Facial recognition systems, like Corsight AI in Gaza,
Oosto in the occupied West Bank and Mabat 2000 in occupied East Jerusalem, have
all been used as part of Israel’s extensive surveillance apparatus.
“Anywhere else deploying a biometric system at scale
involves a procurement process, a data protection authority, legal basis,
courts that enjoin you, journalists with access and a population that can
refuse. In the West Bank and East Jerusalem there is none of that,” said
Nazeeh.
Technologies and expertise associated with this system
are subsequently marketed overseas, often as defensive or civilian security
solutions.
Corsight AI’s facial-recognition software, for
example, has been deployed in hospitals in Mexico and schools in Brazil. In Gaza, the Israeli military’s Unit 8200, an elite
cyber-intelligence division, has used the company’s technology to identify and
track Palestinians.
The commercial deployments are not necessarily used
for the same purposes as Israel’s military surveillance. But rights advocates
say their common technological and institutional origins raise questions about
safeguards, oversight and how such systems could be used by governments seeking
increasingly intrusive security powers.
The Israeli company Cellebrite, meanwhile, announced in 2023 that it was supplying a
digital intelligence system to the federal forces of an unnamed Latin American
country. Cellebrite, like many Israeli technology companies, has recruited
personnel from Unit 8200.
Many prominent figures in Israel’s technology sector
have backgrounds in the unit, which has been described as a crucial training
ground for the country’s cybersecurity industry. Out of Israel’s 700
cyber-technology companies, an astounding 80 percent of founders served in Unit 8200, according to a
study cited by Haaretz.
They include Check Point founder Gil Shwed and its
chief executive, Nadav Zafrir. Check Point says it is committed to “empowering Latin America businesses and
governments with cutting-edge security solutions to combat rising cyber
threats”.
The company recently met a delegation from Honduras’s National Telecommunications Commission to discuss
the planned implementation of a national cybersecurity strategy.
Check Point has also partnered with Israel
Aerospace Industries, one
of Israel’s largest weapons manufacturers, through the Israeli Cyber Companies
Consortium, or IC3.
The consortium was established in 2016 with the
endorsement of the Israeli government to bring together cybersecurity companies
and provide national-level cyber-defence systems to governments and
international clients.
In 2017, the consortium announced that it had secured a contract worth tens of millions
of dollars to establish a national cyber centre in an unnamed Latin American
country.
The project included national-level threat monitoring,
intelligence sharing, forensic tools, cyber training and systems designed to
detect and investigate attacks.
A longstanding relationship
The expansion of Israel’s cyber industry in Latin
America follows a much longer history of military and security cooperation.
During the latter half of the 20th century, Israel
supplied weapons, training and security assistance to Latin American
governments and armed forces implicated in campaigns against Indigenous
communities and left-wing movements.
These tools and tactics were “conveniently tested on
occupied Palestinians, then marketed as ‘battle-tested’,” Antony Loewenstein
wrote in his book The Palestine Laboratory.
The significance of the Israeli arms industry did not
lie merely in the number of weapons and pieces of equipment exported.
As Bishara Bahbah wrote in his seminal 1988 book, Israel and Latin America: The Military Connection,
“the significance lies in what has become Israel's absolute imperative to
export arms.
“From this dependence on arms exports, all else is
derivative,” he wrote, pointing to Israel’s close cooperation with
authoritarian regimes and its involvement in the “global strategies” of the US.
“The history of relations [between Latin America, the
US and Israel] forms the broader context in which we find ourselves today,”
said Castaneda. “In other words, it shouldn't come as a surprise that these
threads are converging again.”
The government of former Colombian president Gustavo
Petro, which broke diplomatic relations with Israel over the war in Gaza,
represented an exception to that history.
“What we’re seeing now is [a return to] the norm,”
Castaneda told MEE.
From Mexico in the north to Argentina in the south,
digital-rights advocates warn that the combination of militarised security
policies and increasingly intrusive technologies could facilitate surveillance
and abuse.
For Castaneda, Colombia’s new administration will
provide an important test of how that combination operates in practice.
“We have to keep watching how the Abelardo de la
Espriella administration evolves and how it reconnects with Colombia’s long
history of asserting that national security requires exceptional solutions,” he
said.
“That history justified secrecy. It justified the use
of weapons, violence, killing of people and the notion that we should not
complain.”
