In November 2025, Mexico witnessed a violent march, allegedly organized and led by the Generation Z, echoing protests that had occurred in Nepal earlier that year. It soon became clear that the march, which left a hundred people injured, was repeating a script that had become familiar over the previous 15 years in what had come to be known as ‘hybrid wars’ or soft coups.
Behind the mobilization were eight million bots paid for by members of the PAN and private organizations, who worked intensively in preparation for the march, accounting for about 46% of all social media conversations. Behind them were thousands of dollars and, above all, old sectors of Mexican politics, removed from power since the election of Lopez Obrador and now Claudia Sheinbaum.
In retrospect, episodes like these are easily found and documented especially in Latin America, such as the massive and illegal use of WhatsApp messages in Jair Bolsonaro’s election in Brazil, the use of deep fakes in Argentine elections under Javier Milei’s government, and finally a tsunami of misinformation, conspiracy theories and fake news that followed the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. In all these cases, the absence or weakness of digital sovereignty is the gateway to other violations of sovereignty, especially political sovereignty. The ability to manipulate information flows, control narratives and destabilize governments through digital means has become a central weapon in the contemporary imperialist arsenal.
Over the last decade, digital sovereignty has emerged not only as a technical debate about network infrastructure but as the central pillar of political and economic autonomy in the 21st century. It is an issue that cuts across all dimensions of social life: from the organization of labor to national security, from public education to the very possibility of self-determination. What we see today in the Global South is the re-emergence of old structures of subjugation in a virtual environment. To understand this dynamic, it is imperative to revisit the analytical tools of Marxist Dependency Theory (MDT)—formulated by thinkers such as Ruy Mauro Marini, Theotônio dos Santos, and Vânia Bambirra—which demonstrate how digital colonialism is the historical update of our peripheral and subordinate condition in the international division of labor.
The continuing relevance of Marxist Dependence Theory
MDT remains a powerful tool for analyzing the condition of the periphery under neoliberalism and for understanding the processes of reprimarization and new forms of labor overexploitation, such as platformization and the extension of working hours. Developed in the heat of the anti-imperialist struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, this Latin American theoretical current offers analytical categories that allow us to understand the specificities of peripheral capitalism without resorting to explanations that attribute our underdevelopment to a supposed ‘backwardness’ or lack of modernization.
This article proposes to recover the analytical tools of TMD to understand how digital colonialism constitutes yet another dimension of the peripheral and subordinate condition in the international division of labor. Far from being a mere technical issue, digital dependence is organically linked to other forms of dependence—commercial, financial, technological—that characterize the subordinate insertion of the Global South into the world capitalist system.
The concept of value transfer, central to TMD, refers to the mechanisms by which part of the value produced in the periphery is appropriated by the center through unequal exchanges, profit remittances, royalty payments and other flows. Capitalism in Latin America is not a backward stage of development, but a specific form of integration subordinate to the world system, in which the lower stages of industrial production are transferred to dependent countries, while the more advanced technology-intensive stages are reserved for the imperialist centers. This is a subordinate integration, in which local bourgeoisies systematically opt to import technology at the expense of developing endogenous capacities.
These concepts are fundamental to understanding that behind contemporary debates on sovereignty and digital development lie historical updates of the mechanisms of dependence. The advanced, technology-intensive stages—the development of algorithms, the creation of artificial intelligence models and the control of platforms—are reserved for the center, while the lower stages, such as data processing, content moderation, and basic infrastructure maintenance, are left to the periphery.
New forms of value transfer
Whereas in the past value transfer occurred primarily through unequal exchanges of raw materials and manufactured goods, today it extends to data flows and the payment of technology royalties. Currently, the Global South provides the fundamental raw materials of the digital economy in two ways. On the one hand, in the material form of nature’s common goods that are essential for the functioning of this infrastructure: solar and hydroelectric energy, and minerals such as lithium, cobalt and rare earths. On the other hand, data—the new commodity of contemporary capitalism—extracted in massive quantities from peripheral populations without compensation.
While US intelligence agencies and large corporations such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft concentrate cloud infrastructure and large-scale language models, the Global South becomes a passive consumer of technologies developed according to interests and values that are foreign to it. Government meetings are held via Microsoft Teams, public college files are stored on Google Education, and sensitive citizen data resides in foreign clouds, subject to the legislation and strategic interests of foreign powers. This configuration ensures a constant flow of capital from the periphery to the center through licensing and the appropriation of locally produced surplus.
Furthermore, as TMD points out, in peripheral countries compensation for the loss of value in international trade is achieved through increased exploitation of the workforce: increased intensity, longer working hours and expropriation of workers’ consumption funds. In the digital age, this manifests in the process of ‘platformization.’ Delivery and service apps, controlled by opaque algorithms based in the Global North, extend working hours and reduce social guarantees, converting overexploitation into a fund of accumulation for international capital. App workers in Brazil, Mexico or India generate value that is appropriated by companies based in California, perpetuating the historical cycle of wealth transfer.
Evidently, these conditions have found fertile ground due to the intensification of dependency policies and, especially, the application of neoliberal policies over the last five decades, which have led to the deindustrialization of parts of the Global South and compromised any possibility of autonomy and independence for governments and societies. Neoliberalism manifested itself on three interconnected fronts: privatization of state-owned technology companies, underinvestment in research and development, and the shift of state purchasing power to ‘solution payment’ presented by large US technology corporations.
Paths to digital sovereignty
In the long term, increased investment in education in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the encouragement of local collective intelligence, and the establishment of state-owned companies capable of implementing national development strategies may be part of the solution for countries in the Global South to advance toward their digital sovereignty. The development of public data infrastructures, the training of technical staff committed to national projects, and the strengthening of universities and research centers are necessary conditions for any significant progress.
However, the analysis from the TMD indicates that there can be no sovereign development under dependent capitalism without structural change. Isolated regulatory policies or mere sectoral incentives are insufficient. A national and popular project is needed in each country, one that confronts both the submission of the local bourgeoisie—historically associated with foreign capital—and the entire imperialist chain that sustains exploitation. This is especially true when the current phase of capitalism combines financialization, militarism, and technology in a configuration that intensifies both exploitation and the system’s contradictions. These contradictions can be mobilized in the struggle against this emerging political form.
In this regard, it is strategic to establish mechanisms and tools for South-South cooperation—not only at the governmental level, but also among social movements, universities and peoples’ organizations—as a path to building independence, sovereignty and autonomous development. Cooperative efforts involving the sharing of codes, research, researchers and institutions are the only way to prevent the establishment of hegemonic and oppressive standards, as well as to build alternatives that break the chain of extraction and maintenance of dependence.
Digital sovereignty is therefore the most urgent political struggle of our time. It does not end with source code, but extends to the defense of labor, the economy and democracy itself against new forms of imperialist intervention. Without control over the tools that shape the social and economic reality, the Global South will remain trapped in a cycle of dependence and subordination. History, however, shows that peripheral peoples have always found ways to resist and build alternatives—and the struggle for digital sovereignty is yet another chapter in this trajectory.
References
Marini, R. M. (1973). Dialética da dependência. Era.