Maricarmen Sequera Buzarquis

Maricarmen Sequera Buzarquis is the co-founder and Executive Director of TEDIC, the Paraguayan civil-society organisation working on digital rights and free culture, and the principal Paraguayan voice tracked by this corpus on biometric mass-surveillance, electoral biometrics, facial-recognition deployments by the Paraguayan state, and the long campaign for a comprehensive Paraguayan personal-data-protection law. She is in the make-AI-good corpus as the Paraguayan / Southern Cone anchor opposite the TEDIC organisational entry and as one of the few Southern Cone digital-rights leaders carrying both the long-standing Latin American privacy-and-free-culture register and the newer AI-and-human-rights register from a smaller-country vantage outside the Brazilian and Mexican anchors.

Background and entry into digital rights

Sequera holds a law degree from the National University of Asunción with specialisation in intellectual property law, postgraduate studies in Technopolitics and Cybersecurity at the University of Barcelona — the TEDIC team page records the cybersecurity certification specifically at the University of León — and is a master's candidate in intellectual property at FLACSO Argentina. Her named areas of expertise across her career are Copyright and Intellectual Property; Cybersecurity and Cybercrime; Media and Internet Regulation; and Privacy and Data Protection. Before founding TEDIC she worked at the Paraguayan Executive Office's Department of International Relations from 2009 to 2011 and undertook research stints on politics and law in Beijing in 2011 and on digital human rights in Paris, the latter framed by her Necessary and Proportionate Coalition author bio as the period in which she expanded her digital-rights work toward the international privacy-and-surveillance register that the Coalition itself anchors.

TEDIC co-founding and the Pyrawebs decade

Sequera was part of the founding team when TEDIC was registered in Asunción on 26 March 2012, became co-director two years after the organisation's creation, assumed its presidency, and has remained in the Executive Director seat since. Her first nationally decisive piece of public-interest work as a TEDIC leader was the Pyrawebs campaign of 2014-2015 against a Paraguayan Senate bill that would have compelled internet service providers to retain twelve months of communications metadata and location data on every Paraguayan internet user. The EFF Deeplinks account of the campaign names Sequera as the lead on TEDIC's technical and constitutional analysis of the bill and as the Paraguayan counterpart to EFF international rights director Katitza Rodríguez and Access Now Latin American policy lead Javier Palleros in the coordinated international response; the campaign produced the bill's unanimous rejection by the Paraguayan Chamber of Deputies in March 2015 and the Senate in June 2015, and TEDIC's tenth-anniversary retrospective treats the Pyrawebs win as the foundational case study for the organisation's subsequent posture against state expansions of communications-surveillance authority. Across the decade after Pyrawebs she carried the same posture into the 2017 presidential veto of Law No. 5883/2017 on fingerprint-based activation of pre-paid mobile services and into TEDIC's standing Coalición de Datos Personales convening, both of which she has continued to lead.

"Not With My Face", electoral biometrics, and the AI-and-human-rights register

The substantive line of work that has anchored Sequera's leadership in the make-AI-good register is TEDIC's standing campaign against Paraguayan-state facial-recognition deployment, launched as "Not With My Face" / "No con mi cara" and culminating in the organisation's April 2025 investigation publication mapping facial-recognition deployments across thirteen named Paraguayan state institutions. The investigation traced 27 CONATEL contracts awarded through the Universal Service Fund between 2011 and 2022, documented that across 2019-2023 the Paraguayan National Police facial-recognition system had issued only 137 alerts in total, and produced TEDIC's three named public demands — suspension of facial-recognition use until a robust personal-data-protection law is enacted, investigation of public-funds misuse particularly in the USF, and guaranteed public access to all contracts and procurement processes. Parallel to that campaign, she has carried TEDIC's public-interest analysis of biometric voting bills in the Paraguayan Senate, the EXLILA bilateral research project on Latin American algorithmic-accountability practice with Derechos Digitales, and TEDIC's Cyborgfeministas gender-and-technology programme. Her authored research outputs across the recent cycle include the Fairwork Paraguay report When your boss is an algorithm, the TEDIC contribution to the regional Who Has Your Back 2021 evaluation, and the judicial analysis of non-consensual image dissemination on the Paraguayan internet.

Networks and recognition

Sequera sits inside several overlapping Latin American and global civil-society networks alongside her TEDIC executive role: she is the co-investigator for Fairwork Paraguay in the Oxford Internet Institute / WZB Berlin global gig-economy fairness rating; she served on the Wikimedia Foundation's Latin America and Caribbean Regional Grants Committee from 2023 through 2025; she is a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Councils network for the 2025-2026 term; and she was a 2023 Fellow in Georgetown University's Global Competitiveness Leadership Latin America and Caribbean Studies programme. Her cross-regional recognition record includes Access Now's 2015 RightsCon Heroes Award, finalist status in the 2021 EQUALS in Tech Awards, and listing on the Tech Diplomacy Global Institute's 2026 Tech Diplomacy Global 50 — the Institute's cohort of the world's most influential leaders advancing responsible technology policy, digital governance, and international cooperation in the age of AI, cybersecurity, and digital transformation — which the Association for Progressive Communications announced in January 2026 alongside the parallel recognition of APC programmes manager Valeria Betancourt.

Posture in the movement

Sequera's distinctive contribution to the make-AI-good movement is the build-out of TEDIC's Paraguayan civil-society infrastructure across the privacy-and-free-culture register that the organisation founded on and the newer AI-and-human-rights register that its facial-recognition, electoral-biometrics, and algorithmic-accountability work has been carrying since the late 2010s. Her organising trajectory — from a Paraguayan public-administration international-relations role through a decade-plus of executive leadership at TEDIC, with continuous co-authorship of the organisation's principal research outputs and coalition convenings — sits in the corpus as the first Paraguayan-anchored career arc carrying both the Latin American digital-rights register that older Brazilian and Mexican peers helped establish and the AI-and-human-rights register that the regional Al Sur consortium has begun to centre on data protection, biometric surveillance, and algorithmic accountability as the preconditions for any responsible Paraguayan and Latin American public policy on AI.