China and Russia are intensifying their cyber presence in Latin America while employing cyber tools such as disinformation, cybercrime and election meddling to pursue their goals in the region, experts say.Disinformation campaigns through Spanish-language social media platforms, cyberattacks, such as those by the Russian ransomware group Conti perpetrated against government agencies in Costa Rica and Peru in recent months, and the transfer of cybersecurity knowledge and infrastructure, are some examples of its growing cyber operations.Venezuela is a case in point, says the US magazine The National Interest, describing the country as a "Chinese and Russian cyber hub at the gates of the United States."The Chinese authoritarian regime's interests in the national identification system date back to 2008, when then-socialist leader Hugo Chavez began hatching plans to emulate Chinese technology and its tracking and surveillance capabilities.In 2016, three years after Chávez's death, the Nicolás Maduro regime introduced the carnet de la patria, a Chinese-style identification card.The Chinese telecommunications company ZTE Corporation, contracted by Venezuela at a cost of some USD 70 million, sent experts to the Latin American country to develop and implement the technology.“There is increasing evidence that the [Venezuelan] regime is using the carnet de la patria to exercise control over the population.For example, numerous testimonies say that the country card was used to verify the votes of citizens in the 2017 and 2018 elections,” said the Organization of American States in a report on the Venezuelan migrant and refugee crisis in the region. .Russia also brings its cybersecurity know-how to the Maduro regime, The National Interest reports.In March 2019, a hundred Russian military troops, including cybersecurity personnel, were deployed to Venezuela, supposedly to help restore the country's power grid after massive blackouts that the regime blamed on cyberattacks, Reuters reported.However, the presence of cybersecurity personnel strongly suggests that their mission could have been to assist the regime in monitoring and protecting its cyber infrastructure.Global projection attemptIf China and Russia export their cyber knowledge to Latin America, with it comes their vision of the Internet, said the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think tank specializing in international relations, in a blog addressing ZTE's export of its technology to Venezuela. of vigilance.“Exporting surveillance technology (and know-how) to other countries is one way to reinforce the sovereign and controlled vision of the Internet,” wrote Justin Sherman, cybersecurity policy fellow at the New America think tank.Chinese and Russian cyber knowledge on Latin American soil, says the National Interest, is a threat to the United States and the region, as well as a global threat.In late 2019, for example, then-Colombian Vice President Marta Lucía Ramírez accused Russia and Venezuela of fomenting protests through social media campaigns, the New York Times reported.In 2017, it was discovered that, during the Catalan separatist crisis in Spain, a large amount of foreign content on social media aimed at increasing division was actually the result of Russian disinformation coming from Venezuela, the US website The Daily reported. Beast."There are indications that Venezuela is close not only to China, but to other countries such as Russia, Iran and Syria itself, in the last two decades, both in the field of commercial, economic and political cooperation, as well as in that of cybersecurity,” Roberto Uebel, associate professional researcher at the South American Institute of Politics and Strategy, and professor of international relations at the School of Advertising and Marketing in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul state, told Diálogo.For Uebel, the fact has to do with what he calls "cybernetic geopolitics, that is, a geopolitics of virtual space", which means that today, when there is some kind of cooperation between countries, it is quite likely that this cooperation includes the cyber field, because this is a concern of all countries, from the most developed to the least, according to the professor."The UN Secretary General himself said at the General Assembly in September 2021 that the next major international conflict will be caused by a hacker attack," concluded Uebel.For more information on security and defense issues around the world, click on the links below: